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	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
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Music

DRUMS AND DEMONS

Joel Selvin

The Tragic Journey of Jim Gordon

Jim Gordon was the greatest rock drummer of all-time. Just ask the world-famous musicians who played with himJohn 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. And as best-selling author and award-winning journalist Joel Selvin reveals in DRUMS AND DEMONS the story of Jim Gordon is the most brilliant, turbulent, and wrenching rock opera ever.
DRUMS AND DEMONS 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 worldplaying with the most famous musicians of his generationto 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 AND 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.

Joel Selvin a San Franciscobased music critic and author known for his weekly column in the San Francisco Chronicle, which ran from 1972 to 2009. Selvin has written more than 20 books covering various aspects of pop musicincluding the No. 1 New York Times bestseller Red: My Uncensored Life in Rock with Sammy Hagarand published articles in Rolling Stone, the Los Angeles Times, Billboard, and Melody Maker. He has written liner notes for dozens of recorded albums and appeared in countless documentaries. His most recent books are Sly and the Family Stone: An Oral History and Hollywood Eden: Electric Guitars, Fast Cars and the Myth of the California Paradise.

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Book Published by Diversion Books
Book Published 2024-02-27 by Diversion Books

Comments

"When you could get Jim Gordon on your album you were really something. I mean he played with EVERYBODY...We were able to get Jim to play on the Alice Cooper Goes to Hell album when he was the most sought-after drummer in rock 'n' roll. We really, really liked Jim very much except he got to a point where he was talking to himself a lot during takes, we could hear him muttering to himself.

I loved Jim Gordon like a brother and am grateful for Joel Selvin's unstinting notice of Gordon's luminescence, which adds great leavening to this heartbreaking work of staggering genius.

Selvin delivers a sensitive account of the life and legacy of Derek and the Dominos drummer Jim Gordon, who suffered from schizophrenia and murdered his mother... [but was] once deemed the 'greatest drummer' in rock and roll by Eric Clapton and Ringo Starr... Without downplaying the gruesome details of Gordon's crime, Selvin gracefully portrays the musician as 'more than his disease'... This affecting account sheds new light on one of rock's most complicated figures.

Based upon my interactions with Jim Gordon, author Joel Selvin accurately portrays Jim's genius as well as his development into the living hell he gradually occupied. Jim was always soft-spoken, and the first one to arrive at a session. His drums spoke for him, and he had a subtle but commanding presence. Years later, when he was scheduled for a session where I was producing a commercial, he arrived forty-five minutes late, was surly, and uninvolved. Someone else had taken over the Jim we knew and loved, and that was the last time I saw him.

Joel Selvin is one of the Big Beasts of American music writing. He presents Jim Gordon's complex, tragic story fully in the round, as only he can. Biography of the Year!

Jim was one of the rare players who danced on the edge and knew the secrets... Yes, Jim was healing himself when he drummed, but when he stopped the voices started again... I finished this book slack-jawed, trying to come to grips with this amazing, tragic story.

Jim Gordon is one of the most important drummers in American rock history--he kept the beat for everyone from Buffalo Springfield to the Beach Boys to Jackson Browne to John Denver to Randy Newman. He is also a man whose mental illness and substance abuse sent him spiraling into tragedy. Joel Selvin's Drums & Demons, both painstaking and painful, brings Gordon's darkness into the light.

When people say that Jim Gordon is the greatest rock 'n' roll drummer who ever lived, I think it's true, beyond anybody.