When the Voices Took Over

Delaney and Bonnie were getting set to tour England in 1969 and had a drummer, Jim Keltner, but Gordon wanted to go. “He traded me some studio gigs for a chance with Delaney and Bonnie,” recalls Keltner, who worked with John Lennon, George Harrison, Bob Dylan and Randy Newman. “He became the main guy because he was better.”

Shortly before Jim left for England, Jim and Jill were divorced. Their marriage had lasted five years and produced one child, a daughter. True to his paternal roots, Gordon made sure he was paid more than any of the sidemen. But Delaney and Bonnie could afford to pay him a little extra. The tour was almost guaranteed to be a success. The duo was far more popular in England than in the States, and with the addition of a couple of unemployed guitarists named Eric Clapton and George Harrison, the tour took on superstar trappings.

“He was gentle,” says Bonnie Bramlett about Gordon, “sincere, considerate, brutally handsome, charming as a snake, and could he play! He was right on the money. I could do whatever I wanted. I was really enjoying myself. We all were. And it showed.”

Audiences everywhere caught the spirit. The tour sold out, and a live album was a critical and financial success. Delaney and Bonnie thought they had the makings of a long and fruitful collaboration, but they were wrong.

Nearly everyone from the Delaney and Bonnie ensemble left to join Leon Russell for Joe Cocker’s soon-to-be infamous Mad Dogs and Englishmen Tour. “When they left,” says Bramlett in a bittersweet voice, “we were the last to know, and it broke out hearts.”

The tour had been Leon Russell’s idea, with a little help from a canine friend named Canina. The show had everything: not only Canina but booze and drugs, a ménage of groupies, wives and children, a live-record contract and a film crew taking it all in for a feature-length movie. Sheer genius, total decadence, utter madness and knockout showmanship mixed in equal measure. Cocker led by example. Alternating between performing brilliantly and forgetting the words to his songs, he could be an inspiration on the tour one day, then throw up in public the next. All the while, drink and drugs were the red and green lights directing the action onstage and off: heroin, mescaline, speed, MDA, cocaine, acid.

“The real decrepit things went on,” says Keltner, who came along to play double drums with Gordon. “Sharing girls. Screwing every chick in sight. Most were there for that purpose. The drugs were just as easy to get. I wasn’t a stranger to them myself. Now I feel like I’m just lucky to have survived them.”

Gordon seemed to more than survive drugs then. He was a superman. For a young man who had never before done anything stronger than grass, Gordon did drugs prodigiously. Before one concert in Seattle, Gordon got Keltner to drop acid with him. During a rendition of “Bird on the Wire,” Keltner was unable to continue. Gordon tried to coach him, to no avail. Keltner left in tears, while Gordon powered on.

It went that way the whole tour: Gordon playing at the top of his stroke while he swallowed, smoked and snorted anything he could get his hands on. He was trying to keep the demons at bay.

“I had a feeling I was being watched,” he says, “but it was all in the background.”

The voices were pattering — they did not like the drug business — but they were mere murmurs then, perhaps no more than childhood memories or his conscience. Gordon ignored them. Everything was going along so smoothly. He avoided the groupie scene in favor of a steady relationship with Rita Coolidge. They spent nearly all their spare time together. He bought her a fox-fur coat. They collaborated in writing music and laughed over who was the poorer piano player. But it all came to an abrupt end one afternoon in a room at the Warwick Hotel, in New York, where the band was hanging out.

“He asked me to step out into the hall,” Coolidge says. “I thought he wanted to talk; instead he hit me.”

The blow sent her sprawling and left her with a black eye for the rest of the tour. It was then, as now, inexplicable. It appeared simply to be the first chapter of paranoid madness. Gordon is sheepish about it now. He was apologetic then. He left books of poetry for Coolidge, but she would no longer have anything to do with him. In a madmen’s tour, the incident was quickly buried by others, and Gordon continued on a roll.

When the tour ended, Gordon got a call from George Harrison in London. He wanted Gordon to join him as well as Clapton and Phil Spector in making his first solo album, the landmark All Things Must Pass. After they finished, Clapton asked Gordon if he wanted to form a band. Gordon said yes, settled in a Chelsea flat and bought a Ferrari. Together with Bobby Withlock, Carl Radle and Duane Allman, he and Clapton formed Derek and the Dominos.

It was an unparalleled combination of creativity and star-crossed lives. Clapton was the Mozart of rock, a man of seemingly limitless talent nearing ruin. He was not alone: heroin was a favorite drug in the group. Still, the music fell into place. Gordon and Clapton wrote the classic “Layla,” the title cut of the group’s only studio album. Clapton wrote the driving first half, and Gordon added the inspired piano melody on the haunting second half, one of the products of his work with Coolidge.