Eric Clapton, Beach Boys session drummer Jim Gordon dies at 77

Gordon died Monday at the California Health-related Facility in Vacaville, the point out Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation confirmed Thursday. It’s considered he died of pure results in, but the formal cause will be decided by the Solano County coroner.

Gordon was the drummer in the blues-rock supergroup Derek and the Dominos, led by Clapton. He performed on their 1970 double album “Layla and Other Assorted Adore Songs” and toured with them.

Gordon was credited with contributing the elegiac piano coda for “Layla.” The group’s keyboardist Bobby Whitlock afterwards claimed Gordon took the piano melody from his then-girlfriend, singer Rita Coolidge, and didn’t give her credit history.

Coolidge wrote in her 2016 memoir “Delta Lady” that the tune was called “Time” when she and Gordon wrote it. They played it for Clapton when they went to England to report with him.

“I was infuriated,” Coolidge wrote. “What they’d evidently carried out was consider the song Jim and I had composed, jettisoned the lyrics, and tacked it on to the conclude of Eric’s music. It was virtually the exact arrangement.”

Coolidge claimed she took solace in the reality that Gordon’s tune royalties went to his daughter, Amy.

Gordon can be heard on George Harrison’s first post-Beatles album “All Things Should Move,” The Seashore Boys’ “Pet Sounds” album, and Steely Dan’s 1974 song “Rikki Don’t Reduce That Amount.”

He also labored with Joan Baez, Jackson Browne, The Byrds, Judy Collins, Alice Cooper, Crosby Stills & Nash, Delaney & Bonnie, Neil Diamond, Art Garfunkel, Merle Haggard, Corridor & Oates, Carole King, Harry Nilsson, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and Barbra Streisand, amongst many others.

Gordon’s mental overall health ultimately declined.

In 1970, Gordon was aspect of Joe Cocker’s famed “Mad Canines & Englishmen” tour, alongside with Coolidge, then a backup singer just before likely on to a productive solo job.

She wrote in her memoir that a single night in a lodge hallway, Gordon hit her in the eye “so challenging that I was lifted off the flooring and slammed against the wall on the other facet of the hallway.” She was briefly knocked unconscious.

With two weeks remaining of the tour, Coolidge done with a black eye. She did not file battery fees towards Gordon but did sign a restraining purchase, and their connection ended.

In June 1983, he attacked his 71-12 months-old mother, Osa Gordon, with a hammer and then fatally stabbed her with a butcher knife. He claimed that a voice instructed him to do it.

It was not until finally after his arrest for next-diploma murder that Gordon was diagnosed with schizophrenia.

Gordon was sentenced to 16 a long time to life in prison with the probability of parole. Nevertheless, he was denied parole numerous periods after not attending any of the hearings and remained in prison until finally his death.

Born James Beck Gordon on July 14, 1945, in the Sherman Oaks segment of Los Angeles, he began his specialist vocation at age 17, backing The Everly Brothers.

Gordon was a member of The Wrecking Crew, a famed team of Los Angeles-primarily based session musicians who performed on hundreds of hits in the 1960s and ’70s.

He was a protégé of drum legend Hal Blaine.

“When I did not have the time, I encouraged Jim,” Blaine told Rolling Stone in 1985. “He was one hell of a drummer. I assumed he was a single of the serious comers.”