Drums & Demons

Book excerpt: The blazing rock opera of the greatest drummer of all-time, Jim Gordon, from the legendary Wrecking Crew to redefining the genre on the Seventies’ biggest hits and outrageous tours, and ultimately to the most shocking crime in rock history—a story of musical genius, uncontrollable madness, and the big fill Jim Gordon was the greatest rock drummer of all-time. Just ask the world-famous musicians who played with him—John Lennon, George Harrison, Eric Clapton, Tom Petty, Frank Zappa, Steely Dan, Ringo Starr, Harry Nilsson, Joe Cocker, and many more. They knew him for his superior playing, extraordinary training and technique, preternatural intuition, perfect sense of time, and his “big fill”—the mathematically-precise clatter that exploded like detonating fireworks on his drum breaks. But as best-selling author and award-winning journalist Joel Selvin reveals in Drums & Demons, the story of Jim Gordon is the most brilliant, turbulent, and wrenching rock opera ever. This riveting narrative follows Gordon as the very chemicals in his brain that gifted him also destroyed him. His head crowded with a hellish gang of voices screaming at him, demanding obedience, Gordon descended from the absolute heights of the rock world—playing with the most famous musicians of his generation—to working with a Santa Monica dive-bar band for $30 a night. And then he committed the most shocking crime in rock history. Based on his trademark extensive, detailed research, Joel Selvin’s Drums & Demons is at once an epic journey through an artist’s monumental musical contributions, a rollicking history of rock drumming, and a terrifying downward spiral into unimaginable madness that Gordon fought a valiant but losing battle against. One of the great untold stories of rock is finally being told.