Twists & Turns & Sadness

 by whiteray

Wandering around on the ’Net and in my reference library can bring me to some odd destinations. I was looking at my old blog posts the other day when I came across a post from 2012 that referenced a record by a group called the California Earthquake. 

The post noted that the group’s one charting record, a 1969 release titled “What A Beautiful Feeling,” was a rarity in that it had been listed for one week and one week only in the Billboard Hot 100. The record didn’t actually make the Hot 100; it was listed as one of the records “bubbling under” in the chart from December 20, 1969. It was bubbling at No. 133 and was never listed again. 

I also noted in that post that I had never heard the record, and that it wasn’t available anywhere as far as I could tell, not even at YouTube. (The site in 2012 was just beginning to be the place where folks posted audio of rare records.) Reading that the other day sent me to YouTube, where I now found a video of the single. I linked to it on Facebook, commenting that the California Earthquake sounded a lot like early Chicago or Blood, Sweat & Tears. 

Then, today, even more curious, I took a look at one of my main reference book, Top Pop Singles, a work by the recently deceased Joel Whitburn that catalogs every record listed on the main Billboard pop chart from 1955 through 2008. (More recent editions offer charts up through 2020, I think, but those additional years aren’t of much interest to me.) 

The listing in Top Pop Singles made me wonder a couple of things. First, only three musicians were listed as members of the California Earthquake: singer Roy Smith, organist Brian Griffin and drummer Jim Gordon. My first thought was that the group had a lot of studio musicians working for them to get that Chicago/BST sound. I thought that a little strange for a group that had only one charting single (and one recorded album that threw of another single that went nowhere, according to the info at discogs.com). But that stuff happens, or at least happened in the late 1960s. 

And second, I recognized the name of the drummer: Jim Gordon. If it’s the same Jim Gordon – and I cannot verify that today – then the drummer for the California Earthquake is the guy who was one of the great session drummers of the late 1960s and early 1970s, working with a lot of my favorites, like Delaney & Bonnie & Friends, Derek & The Dominos (better known, of course, as Eric Clapton and some of his pals), George Harrison (on his epic album All Things Must Pass) and with many, many others. 

And the mention of Jim Gordon brings up sadness as well, because in 1983, suffering with schizophrenia, he killed his mother and he’s been imprisoned ever since. And having hit that blank wall of sadness, I guess all we can do is listen to the California Earthquake. If it’s the same Jim Gordon (and I tend to think it is), then we’ll hear his work from a time when he was sane and one of the best drummers in the world.