LOS ANGELES — Jim Gordon, the famed session drummer who backed Eric Clapton and The Beach Boys before being diagnosed with schizophrenia and going to prison for killing his mother, has died. He was 77.
Gordon died Monday at the California Medical Facility in Vacaville, the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation confirmed Thursday. It’s believed he died of natural causes, but the official cause will be determined by the Solano County coroner.
Gordon was the drummer in the blues-rock supergroup Derek and the Dominos, led by Clapton. He played on their 1970 double album “Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs” and toured with them.
Gordon was credited with contributing the elegiac piano coda for “Layla.” The group’s keyboardist Bobby Whitlock later claimed Gordon took the piano melody from his then-girlfriend, singer Rita Coolidge, and didn’t give her credit.
Coolidge wrote in her 2016 memoir “Delta Lady” that the song was called “Time” when she and Gordon wrote it. They played it for Clapton when they went to England to record with him.
“I was infuriated,” Coolidge wrote. “What they’d clearly done was take the song Jim and I had written, jettisoned the lyrics, and tacked it on to the end of Eric’s song. It was almost the same arrangement.”
Coolidge said she took solace in the fact that Gordon’s song royalties went to his daughter, Amy.
Gordon can be heard on George Harrison’s first post-Beatles album “All Things Must Pass,” The Beach Boys’ “Pet Sounds” album, and Steely Dan’s 1974 song “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number.”
He also worked with Joan Baez, Jackson Browne, The Byrds, Judy Collins, Alice Cooper, Crosby Stills & Nash, Delaney & Bonnie, Neil Diamond, Art Garfunkel, Merle Haggard, Hall & Oates, Carole King, Harry Nilsson, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and Barbra Streisand, among others.
Gordon’s mental health eventually declined.
In 1970, Gordon was part of Joe Cocker’s famed “Mad Dogs &…
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