This is completely a shocker to me... some of you may know that in the beginning when GL started to use a drummer, prior to having Barry Keane as the permanent drummer a fellow by the name of Jim Gordon played on the Sundown LP and he played on the song " The House You Live In"...
Just reading an article in Modern Drummer I was shocked to hear of the tragic fate that would await Jim Gordon...
" How about Jim Gordon?
Hal: Of course Jim turned out to be a very sad case. [Gordon was convicted for the murder of his mother.] He was a young guy who I started hiring when I was contracting a lot. He was a fine player, really good reader. I hired him a lot. I have some great pictures of him and I somewhere around the studios in Hollywood. I started writing him letters five or six years ago, and he wrote back. He had the tiniest writing you ever saw. He was at the Atascadero State Prison For The Mentally Insane. I wrote him that I was going to be up near him and I’d like to see him. I got a letter back and he said you’re going to have to get permission from the prison people. So I wrote a letter to the prison people, they sent me these applications, and I sent it to them. It took some weeks, and then I got a letter saying I’d been approved to visit between Monday and Wednesday. I wrote back to Jim and told him I expect to be up there in about a week, so hopefully I’d see him the following Tuesday. I got a letter right back saying, "No, don’t come." So then I wrote him back again, asking, "What’s the problem?" He said, "You’re liable to hurt your reputation." So I wrote him back again and said, "Jim, don’t worry about my reputation. I would like to see you." Unfortunately it never panned out.
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