Jim Gordon, rock drummer, is 76 years old today.
One of the top session drummers in the late 1960s and 1970s, recording with many well-known musicians of the time, Gordon was the drummer in Derek and the Dominos, Little Richard and Delaney & Bonnie.
Gordon played drums on George Harrison's 1970 triple album, All Things Must Pass. He was also part of Joe Cocker's Mad Dogs and Englishmen tour and played on Dave Mason's album, Alone Together.
Gordon developed schizophrenia and began to hear voices, including those of his mother, which forced him to starve himself and prevented him from sleeping, relaxing or playing drums. His physicians misdiagnosed the problems and instead treated him for alcohol abuse.
In 1983, he attacked his 72-year-old mother, Osa Marie Gordon, with a hammer before fatally stabbing her with a butcher knife, after claiming the voice told him to kill her.
It was after he was arrested for murdering his mother that he was properly diagnosed with schizophrenia and, although at the trial the court accepted that Gordon had acute schizophrenia, he was not allowed to use an insanity defense because of changes to California law due to the Insanity Defense Reform Act., dismissed by Lawrence Z. Freedman as "ineffective.”
On July 10, 1984, Gordon was sentenced to 16 years to life in prison. While first eligible for parole in 1992, he was denied several times. At a 2005 hearing, he claimed his mother was still alive. In 2014, he declined to attend his hearing, and was denied parole until at least 2018.
On March 7, 2018, Gordon was denied parole for the tenth time. He is still serving his sentence at the California Medical Facility, a medical and psychiatric prison in Vacaville, California.