Album: Let It Bleed
Year: 1969
. . .
Objectively the greatest rock ‘n’ roll song ever recorded, “Gimme Shelter” is an apocalyptic maelstrom never ever gets old, no matter how many times you listen to it. And while it had roots in a rather mundane situation, it also somehow ended up symbolizing one of the greatest apocalyptic maelstroms in rock history, Altamont.
As part of my research for these posts, I read Joel Selvin’s Altamont: The Rolling Stones, the Hells Angels, and the Inside Story of Rock’s Darkest Day , and because sometimes I read in the middle of the night after having slept for a few hours, I happened to start Selvin’s account of the actual day, and I was struck by two things as I stayed awake for the next three hours reading it 1) all of the stories of what happened that day were worse than I imagined 2) it was only a fraction of all of the shit that actually went down. I’m sure somebody had a good time at Altamont, having avoided the bad drugs and the Hells Angels and cold weather and weird atmosphere, but that person has never come forward.
“Gimme Shelter” has the most amazing opening: it slinks in from the netherworld, Keith already stacking a couple of guitars on top of each other, weaving a hypnotic guitar against faint licks, as Charlie refuses to play a beat, Jimmy Miller tries to make fire with a guiro and backup singer Merry Clayton announces her presence like Chekov’s gun with a drawn out menacing “ooooooh.” And then after nearly a minute of tension, Charlie whacks the beat into order and Mick starts singing.
Ooh, a storm is threat’ning
My very life today
If I don’t get some shelter
Ooh yeah, I’m gonna fade away
Keith Richards wrote “Gimme Shelter,” inspired both by an actual storm and the fact that he was sure that Mick Jagger was fucking Anita Pallenberg on the notorious set of the even more notorious Performance, as Anita had replaced a pregnant Marianne Faithfull. Given that one of the scenes in Performance had Mick, Anita and another actress, Michelle Breton, menage a troising in a bathtub, his fears would seem to be well-founded, though whether or not it actually happened seems to depend on the level of salaciousness of the book I’m reading at the time.
In any event, it doesn’t even matter, because the point is that Keith was not in a good mood when he wrote “Gimme Shelter,” as is evident by the chorus:
War, children
It’s just a shot away, it’s just a shot away
War, children
It’s just a shot away, it’s just a shot away
That chorus is sung by Mick and a pregnant Merry Clayton, who famously didn’t even know who the Rolling Stones were when she got the call to do the backing vocals, but convinced by her husband to do it, went down with her hair still in curlers and fucking killed it, sticking around for the second verse.
Ooh, see the fire is sweeping
Our very street today
Burns like a red coal carpet
Mad bull lost your way
My god, I haven’t even mentioned Charlie Watts, who every few bars drives “Gimme Shelter” harder and harder not by doing regular fills, but rather hitting his snare and toms like “thwhacka-thwacka-twhacka-thwacka” and smashing his cymbal — bisssshhhh! — like a whirlwind, breaking it all up and sewing it together at the same time.
Meanwhile, Keith is playing up his own storm, slithering lead guitar lines every which way in the middle of the verses, through the chorus, and — after Mick blows some levee-destroying harp — one of his utterly greatest solos, taking about a million years in between each line, bobbing and ducking in and out of the his rhythm guitar, Nicky Hopkins’ piano, Bill Wyman’s bass and, of course “thwhacka-thwacka-twhacka-thwacka-bisssshh!” coming back in at the last possible second. It’s fucking amazing, and somehow “Gimme Shelter” was just getting going.
Anytime we ever drove up to the Bay Area from Fresno, we would pass the turnoff for the Altamont Motor Speedway and it always freaked me out just how far from San Francisco it really was, which, of course was indicative of what kind of clusterfuck the whole situation was: a concert originally planned for Golden Gate Park ended up 60 miles away. You’d think they’d read the signs and say “maybe another time,” but of course there was a lethal combination of arrogance and naivete involved, as exemplified by Keith’s comment that Altamont was a thing that “could only happen to The Rolling Stones,” that “to” doing an inhuman amount of load bearing.
Also doing an inhuman amount of load bearing: Merry Clayton, who was about to accidentally sing herself into music history, taking a post-solo extended variation on the chorus that gets more and more deranged as she progresses.
Rape! Murder!
It’s just a shot away, it’s just a shot away
Pretty fucking intense, especially the way she elongates “murrrrdeerr.” Also: Charlie still chugging along with the “thwhacka-thwacka-twhacka-thwacka-bisssshh!” on the second “it’s just a shot away.”
Rape! Murder! Yeah!!
It’s just a shot away, it’s just a shot away
She’s getting into it now, adding the extra “yeah-haaah,” and her voice breaking just a skosh on the second “shot,”
Rape! Murdeeeee-errrrr!
It’s just a shot away, it’s just a shot away
Yeahh, yeahh-hey
Clayton’s voice is fully shredded on “murder,” prompting Mick to spontaneously exclaim “wooo” off-mic. It’s beyond intense, the vocal equivalent of Keith’s initial guitar attack on “Sympathy For The Devil,” except, of course, that was at least somewhat planned, and this just happened because Merry Clayton heard something in the swirling chaos of the backing track that caused her to push herself past her limits for the band that she’d never even heard of a couple of hours before.
Her vocal break became so iconic, it kinda ruined “Gimme Shelter” as a future live song: in future years as people got to know and love it, obviously any attempt to recreate the exact moment Merry Clayton’s voice broke would be seen as false, and yet the song never quite reached the heights without it. Though ironically, when the Stones played “Gimme Shelter” at Altamont, there was no such pressure as Let It Bleed came out the day before, and nobody had really heard it.
But, of course, there was a whole other kind of pressure. Every time I watch Gimme Shelter, the film I’m utterly amazed at how great they are, as if they were playing for their very lives, which, of course they kinda were: despite all of the riots and insanity that characterized their mid-60s tours, Altamont was clearly the worst situation they’d ever been in, so bad that they didn’t even know how bad it was until Mick & Charlie watched Meredith Hunter get stabbed to death in the middle of an utterly brutal version of “Under My Thumb.”
In Joel Selvin’s book, he describes how the Rolling Stone critic Greil Marcus decided to get the fuck out of Altamont before the Stones even finished their set, but in the literal darkness stepped in a hole he couldn’t see and faceplanted just as the Stones started “Gimme Shelter,” which he thought was so powerful that he didn’t even bother to get up until it was over.
Mmm, the floods is threat’ning
My very life today
Gimme, gimme shelter
Or I’m going to fade away
The storm at the beginning of the song had now become a flood, and Mick Jagger & Merry Clayton were singing not just for their lives — though her harmony on “my very life away” is oddly lifesaving in and of itself — but also their souls, singing apart and together, now reduced to screaming “it’s just a shot away” over and over again, looking for any kind of redemption, any kind of hope before the flood takes them.
Which, amazingly, they find.
I tell you love, sister
It’s just a kiss away, it’s just a kiss away
It’s just a kiss away, it’s just a kiss away
It’s just a kiss away, (kiss away kiss away)
One could argue that this is a little bit of hippie-dippie incongruity that detracts from the Sauron-like darkness the rest of the song, but I tend to think of it as just a glimmer of light — the single star that Sam sees in the middle of the darkness, to extend the Lord of The Rings analogy (and sorry about that) — a tiny bit of hope. But only a tiny bit. If love is just a kiss away, after all, you still have to find someone who wants to kiss you.
As “Gimme Shelter” fades, Mick pulls out the end-of-time harmonica for a few more blasts, Keith still throwing out serpentine licks, Charlie still “thwhacka-thwacka-twhacka-thwacka-bisssshh!” “Gimme Shelter” doesn’t much fade away but recede over the horizon like a tornado having devastated everything in its wake.
“Gimme Shelter” wasn’t ever a single but it was still instantly iconic, and has appeared in many films — and one notorious Red Cross commercial — because of its instant ability to evoke a mood and set a scene.
“Gimme Shelter” Offical Lyric Video
“Gimme Shelter” performed on the Ed Sullivan Show, 1969
“Gimme Shelter” live in 2006
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