News ‘Gimme Shelter’ and the poetic death of Keith Richards’ guitar
The Rolling Stones aren’t necessarily known for the intensity of their music, but ‘Gimme Shelter’ is by far the most profound creation they have ever committed to record. It is a strong candidate for Mick Jagger and Keith Richards’ ultimate work.
The song captures the political and social unrest of the late 1960s, with the Vietnam War, race riots and the dark descent of hippiedom embodied by the Manson Murders raging in the background. A complete distillation of the turmoil of the time; in it, frontman Jagger sings about finding shelter from the threatening storm circling above, a brilliantly simple but effective metaphor.
Augmented by the power of Merry Clayton’s vocals – which she delivered pregnant late one night in Los Angeles still wearing curlers and pyjamas – it makes for a fitting embodiment of the adversity people were up against. Highlighting this point, when she’s signing the line “Rape, murder, it’s just a shot away” at 2:59, her voice cracks. For the performance, she dug deep into her being to blow the band and producer Jimmy Miller away, which also accidentally captured the hell life had become in more forensic detail than she first set out to. It was such a triumph that Jagger can even be heard exclaiming, “Woo!” in the background.
Much poetry was at play during the songwriting process, with life imitating art. According to guitarist Keith Richards, he wrote it one stormy day when he sat in art dealer Robert Fraser’s Mount Street apartment in London. A moment where pathetic fallacy occurred, Richards was on his own, watching the people and “incredible storm” outside, as his girlfriend, Anita Pallenberg, was off shooting Nicolas Roeg’s cult movie Performance, which also starred Jagger. He had nothing to do but write a masterpiece.
In his memoir Life, the guitarist recalled: “So I got into that mode, just looking out of Robert’s window and looking at all these people with their umbrellas being blown out of their grasp and running like hell. And the idea came to me… My thought was storms on other people’s minds, not mine. It just happened to hit the moment.”
It was an instant where the music wrote itself, with ample inspiration outside the window. This is the central reason why ‘Gimme Shelter’ has continued to resonate years after its written era. It offers insight into the mindset of everyday people who were unsure of the future back then, as destruction seemed imminent.
It also supplies a strange parallel with the contemporary sentiment, with social upheaval everywhere, bloody conflicts raging on, and an environmental collapse on the horizon. While it might even be easy to get bogged down in such a trail of thought, things would eventually improve after ‘Gimme Shelter’ came out – although it was years later – and they might well do further down the line from today. What is clear, though, is that art remains a valid and vital outlet for emotion, as well as a sanctuary from the black storm clouds raging ahead.
Although Clayton’s voice splintering under pressure is the highlight of the 1969 anthem, the heat of Richards’ potent lead line would also cause his creative conduit to eviscerate, in another reflection of the song’s immense power and the sheer emotion coursing through it.
Richards doesn’t know whose guitar he was playing when recording the track, but once recalled: “Some guy crashed out at my pad for a couple of days, then suddenly split in a hurry and left that guitar behind, like, ‘take care of this for me’ I certainly did.”
The model in question was an Australian Maton SE777. This sizeable hollow body guitar also features on the Let It Bleed album track, ‘Midnight Rambler’, that he recorded before ‘Gimme Shelter’. However, appropriately, the guitar would meet its end while conjuring the album’s era-defining opener, and on the original take, the whole neck fell off.
Richards told Guitar World: “At the very last note of the take, the whole neck fell off. You can hear it on the original track. That guitar had just that one little quality for that specific thing. In a way, it was quite poetic that it died at the end of the track.”
Sometimes, truth is stranger than fiction. In a career where this notion has come to pass on many occasions, Richards’ guitar falling apart when summoning such an elemental song stands out.
Listen to ‘Gimme Shelter’ below.
