In 1970, Eric Clapton’s drummer, Jim Gordon, composed a gorgeous progression on the piano, and played it for a woman he was dating, singer Rita Coolidge.
Coolidge composed a second part to the progression, a “counter-melody” to the tension of the original’s chords that “built to a dramatic crescendo.” Coolidge wrote lyrics to their new song, which they called “Time (Don’t Let The World Get In Our Way),” and they recorded a demo.
They played the song for Clapton and left him the tape, but nothing came of it — or so she thought. A year later, in the middle of a photo shoot, she heard a familiar progression on the radio.
It was her song. Except, it wasn’t.
As detailed in her new memoir, “Delta Lady,” Coolidge collaborated with and inspired some of the greatest musicians and songwriters of the time — but was treated poorly by almost all of them.
In the case of the song “Time,” Coolidge claims, it had been re-purposed without permission — as the infamous piano coda to Derek and the Dominos’ “Layla,” a legendary song that would generate massive royalties for decades to come.
And that wasn’t even the worst thing Jim Gordon did to her.
Eric Clapton and Jim Gordon
Raised in Kentucky and Tennessee, Coolidge could “sing before she could talk,” and nurtured her talent in church at her Baptist minister father’s services. She had a keen sense of pride in her Cherokee heritage: Her father was Cherokee and her mother Cherokee-Scottish, and, she writes, her ancestors were forced to walk the Trail of Tears in the 1830s.
She moved to Memphis in 1967 and enmeshed herself in the city’s vibrant music scene. One friend was Booker T. Jones, of Booker T. & the M.G.’s fame, who wound up marrying her sister, Priscilla.
It was in Memphis that she met singers Delaney and Bonnie Bramlett, and musician Leon Russell. Russell persuaded her to move to Los Angeles.
Russell wrote both Joe co*cker’s 1969 hit, “Delta Lady,” and his own “A Song For You,” about Coolidge.
She soured on the relationship fairly quickly, though, due to his reticence to be social, and his asking her to have a threesome with him and co*cker’s bassist, Carl Radle.
Through this group of musicians, she met Gordon, “the most in-demand session drummer in the world at that moment,” a charismatic and enchanting 6-foot-4 man who had “curly blond hair, blue eyes and a smile that would light up the world.”
The two began dating and toured with the group Delaney & Bonnie and Friends, which had what Coolidge considered a dream team of musicians. Clapton would soon abandon his own band, Blind Faith, to make the Delaney & Bonnie band — including Coolidge, Radle and Gordon — his backing band.
Coolidge and the gang would record with Clapton — the gospely backing vocals on his hit “After Midnight” come from Coolidge, Bramlett and singer Bobby Whitlock — and she had the time of her life.
That is, until cocaine took hold of many of the crew and she learned the ugly truth about Gordon.
One night during co*cker’s tour, several of them were hanging out in Radle’s hotel room when Gordon, whom Coolidge had “never felt closer to or more in love [with],” quietly asked to speak to her alone.
They walked into the hallway, and something in Coolidge’s mind told her this might be when Gordon would propose.
As they got to the hallway, Coolidge was slightly nervous in anticipatory delight, but Gordon “hit me so hard that I was lifted off the floor and slammed against the wall on the other side of the hallway.”
As his fist met her eye, she “literally went flying” and was knocked unconscious. Then Gordon walked back into the room — alone — as if nothing had happened.
The relationship was over, although Gordon was not removed from the tour — everyone worked to make sure she and Gordon were separated, she writes, and that she was safe.
She assumed that cocaine was what changed her loving man into a monster, but she later learned that Gordon was an undiagnosed paranoid schizophrenic who heard voices, likely exacerbated by the drugs.
In 1983, Gordon murdered his mother with a hammer and a carving knife. He’s currently serving what will likely wind up being a life sentence at a psychiatric prison in California.
Crosby, Stills & Nash
When Coolidge sang background vocals on the 1970 Stephen Stills hit “Love the One You’re With,” Stills’ bandmate, Graham Nash, was also in the studio. Coolidge and Nash would talk between breaks, and Nash invited her to see Crosby, Stills & Nash, hot on the heels of their hit debut album, the following night.
Coolidge was unsure if it was a date or just a friendly invite and “was too shy to clarify.” She accepted, and Nash, then staying in Stills’ home, told her to call the next day to make plans.
But when she did, Stills answered, and the plans had supposedly changed.
He told her that Nash wouldn’t be able to accompany her because “he made other arrangements,” adding, “I’m going to pick you up.”
She went with Stills that night, and they began dating. Still, there was much about him that made her uncomfortable.
On the way to that first concert, Stills asked her what her birthday was. When she answered that it was May 1, he pulled the car over. Stills had just gotten out of a long, intense relationship with singer Judy Collins. Her birthday, it turned out, was May 1.
Stills, with the car stopped on the shoulder, “looked at me as if I should have an opinion about this.”
She saw Nash at the show that night, but he wouldn’t speak to her. Since he now seemed “disinterested,” she went out with Stills a bit longer, but still “had my eye on Graham.”
Stills, meanwhile, began writing songs about her, including “Cherokee,” but she found that “this would probably be really cool if I cared about him as much as he does about me.”
Soon after, thinking Stills “extremely unsatisfying,” she called Nash. She was “astounded” when Nash told her that what Stills had said about Nash canceling plans with her that first night wasn’t true. Instead, Stills had told Nash that Coolidge called to cancel on him. “I put this all together and realized what a sneaky little bugger Stephen was,” she writes, “and that I really didn’t want to see him anymore.”
She began dating Nash, and soon after, Stills scrawled “Love Rita” on the bathroom mirror of a motel he was staying at and took a handful of pills, winding up in the hospital.
“When I heard about it, the story didn’t surprise me,” she writes, “because Stephen was always about drama.”
As she and Nash, whom she considers “as sweet as any human being I’ve ever met,” fell into a relationship, Nash thought they should clear the air with Stills.
Nash and Coolidge approached Stills’ home, and Stills was standing outside. Nash said, “Stephen, Rita and I want to talk to you about something.” After seeming in thought for a moment, Stills “just came at Graham.”
“It was a complete surprise to both of us; he just came out swinging. And Graham, of course, is not a fighter; somebody separated them and pulled Stephen off.”
She and Nash dated for over a year, but the fight caused a long-term rift within the band.
Oddly, Coolidge had a strange negative connection with the band’s third member, David Crosby.
“He actually thought I was the devil,” Coolidge writes about Crosby. “One night at Stephen’s I made a pot of beans and some corn bread. David rolled in — he’d been up for a few days, I think — had some beans and immediately passed out. When he woke up a few hours later he said to me, in perfect seriousness, ‘You put Quaaludes in the beans, I know you did — you’re the devil woman.’”
When she saw him just a few years ago, she writes, his belief on this had not changed — and he blamed her for more.
“David maintains to this day that I’m the reason Crosby, Stills & Nash eventually broke up,” she writes. “But the problems in that group existed long before I came into the scene.”
Kris Kristofferson
Within less than 24 hours of meeting, just before boarding a flight from LA to Memphis on Nov. 9, 1971, Coolidge and singer/actor Kris Kristofferson had named their first child.
Such was the immediacy of their attraction.
“I felt a connection with Kris the first time I looked into those blue eyes, and it wasn’t just because he was one of the most beautiful men on the planet,” she writes. “It was a connection that went so much deeper.”
The two were one of the great celebrity couples of the time, and a Grammy-winning singing duo. They also sang background vocals on the Bob Dylan classic “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.”
But here, too, she eventually found herself in the clutches of a controlling partner.
“He questioned me about everything,” she writes, recalling the time she chatted with a girlfriend while shopping and had Kristofferson “accuse me of hooking up with her” because he felt she took too long.
Kristofferson, she writes, was a “heavy drinker,” and “could not be counted upon to be faithful,” a situation that worsened as his movie-star status grew.
(She later learned, in a painful way, just how unfaithful he’d been. Years after they divorced, women would approach her and say, “Now that you and Kris are divorced, you probably don’t care. But he and I were together — could you tell him I say hi.” “You have no idea,” she writes, “how many women are so insensitive to their participation in the demise of a couple.”)
Between the drinking and the philandering, the marriage couldn’t last. Kristofferson, while blackout drunk one night, punched Coolidge hard in the eye. He had no memory of it the next day, and Coolidge writes that he was “devastated” and “apologetic.”
By the late ’70s, she writes, Kristofferson was downing a quart of vodka per day. He was getting so drunk that he’d ramble during their shows and offer crowds their money back from the stage for his inebriated, subpar performances.
Kristofferson quit drinking after filming his 1976 hit “A Star is Born,” but the damage had been done. Unable to recapture their initial spark, Coolidge left him in 1979.
