"Gimme Shelter" by the Rolling Stones (1969)

My favorite protest songs from the 60s and early 70s

This is the fifth in a series about my favorite protest songs from the sixties and early seventies.

We’ve already listened to four songs, in case you missed them:

• “Blowin’ in the Wind” by Bob Dylan (1963)

• “Masters of War” by Judy Collins (1963)

• “Eve of Destruction” by Barry McGuire (1965)

• “For What It’s Worth (Stop, Hey What’s That Sound)” by Buffalo Springfield (1966)

I’ve also shared NickS’s post asking “What makes a good protest song?” in which he gives his own list of favorites, and Jackie R’s post sharing a song that makes fun of protest songs.

Today we delve into the story behind one of the Rolling Stones’ sixties masterpieces.

Advance warning: Some difficult topics come up in this post. I normally try to keep things upbeat and a celebration of the music, but that’s not going to be possible today. So if you’d prefer, skip over the backstory and go straight to the videos. But, in my opinion, it’s a mistake to look away from what happened in that era and ignore the happenings and lessons of our recent past. We cannot afford to forget.

Protest song of the day

“Gimme Shelter” is Keith Richards’ song, with Mick Jagger pitching in on the lyrics. It captures the chaotic energy behind the political, professional, and personal anxieties that Keith was feeling in the summer of 1968 and that he channeled into the one certain haven he had, his music.

As Keith explains in his autobiography, Life (2010) (above), “It’s difficult to put those middle and late ‘60s together, because nobody quite knew what was happening. A different kind of fog descended and much energy was around and nobody knew quite what to do with it… It was getting political in 1968, no way to avoid that. It was getting nasty too. Heads were getting beaten. The Vietnam War had a lot to do with turning it around, because when I first went to America, they started drafting the kids [as soldiers]. Between ‘64 and ‘66 and then ‘67, the attitude of American youth was taking drastic turns.”

It wasn’t just what was happening with the kids, however. The Rolling Stones themselves, and other rock musicians, were being deliberately targeted by the authorities for recreational drug use. Mick and Keith were charged with possession of illegal drugs after a raid at Keith’s country house in West Sussex, Redlands, in February 1967.

“Then it became a ‘them against us’ sort of thing,” he continues. “I could never believe that the British Empire would want to pick on a few musicians. Where’s the threat? You’ve got navies and armies, and you’re unleashing your evil little troops on a few troubadours? To me it was the first demonstration of how insecure establishments and governments really are. And how sensitive they can get to something that is trivial, really. But once they perceive a threat, they keep looking for the enemy within, without realizing that half the time, they’re it! It was an assault upon society.”

In the U.S., Keith found that things were even more dire. Musicians were not only being targeted by authorities, but were also disappearing, literally, as a result of the Vietnam War. “I watched all these guys grow up; I watched a lot of them die. When I first got to the States, I met a lot of great guys, young guys, and I had their phone numbers, and then when I got back two or three years later, I’d call them up, and he’s in a body bag from [Viet]Nam. A whole lot of them feathered out, we all know. That’s when the shit hit home with me. Hey, that great little blondie, great guitar player, real fun, we had a real good time, and the next time, gone… A lot of kids that came to see us the first time never got back. Still, they heard the Stones up the Mekong Delta.”

That was one of the professional shocks for the group, that their songs were being played in Vietnam. The other, as he revealed in a 1971 Rolling Stone interview, “blew our minds”:

“We found out, and it wasn’t years till we did, that all the bread [money] we made for Decca [their record company, part of a big conglomerate] was going into making little black boxes that go into American Air Force bombers to bomb fucking North Vietnam. They took the bread we made for them and put it into the radar section of their business. When we found that out, it blew our minds. That was it. Goddamn, you find out you’ve helped to kill God knows how many thousands of people without even knowing it. I’d rather the Mafia than Decca… What they’re really into now is growing tomatoes… [the Mafia] have the whole tomato business sewn up.” (Note that the Stones would soon separate from Decca.)

Beyond these political and professional woes, Keith was facing a personal crisis. He suspected (correctly) that his girlfriend, Anita Pallenberg, was ‘getting it on’ with Mick Jagger while the two were together making a film called Performance.

One night Anita didn’t come home, so Keith decided to go round to Mick and Marianne Faithfull’s place and get it on with Marianne (below, with Keith), only to hear Mick’s car drive up as he’s lying in her arms. “I did one out the window, got my shoes, out the window through the garden, and I realized I’d left my socks… Marianne and I still have this joke. She sends me messages: ‘I still can’t find your socks.’”

Keith spent a lot of time in his autobiography rationalizing why everything was fine and why he didn’t confront either his bandmate or his girlfriend about their betrayal. But, according to Marianne, “It upset him terribly.” Rolling Stones friend Stash Klossowski observed that “Keith found himself on the outside looking in at the most important people in his life. It was very difficult for him. How Keith responds is he writes ‘Gimme Shelter.’”¹

The immediate inspiration for the song at the time he composed it was not what was happening in his relationships, but something he observed happening outside a window one day. Only later did he divine its significance.

“I wrote ‘Gimme Shelter’ on a stormy day, sitting in [art dealer] Robert Fraser’s apartment in Mount Street [in Mayfair]… there was this incredible storm over London, 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…

“At the time I wasn’t thinking about, oh my God, there’s my old lady shooting a movie in a bath with Mick Jagger. My thought was storms on other people’s minds, not mine. It just happened to hit the moment. Only later did I realize, this will have more meaning than I thought at the time. ‘Threatening my very life today.’ It’s got menace, all right. It’s scary stuff.

“And those chords are Jimmy Reed inspired — the same haunting trick, sliding up the fret board against the drone of the E note. I’m just working my way up A major, B major, and I go, hello, where are we ending up? C-sharp minor, OK. It’s a very unlikely guitar key. But you’ve just got to recognize the setups when you hear them. A lot of them, like this one, are accidents.”

He later worked on the lyrics of the song with Mick. “We went further into it until it became, you know, rape and murder are ‘just a shot away.’”

Mick Jagger gave his take on the menacing lyrics in his 1995 interview with Rolling Stone. “Well, it's a very rough, very violent era. The Vietnam War. Violence on the screens, pillage and burning. And Vietnam was not war as we knew it in the conventional sense. The thing about Vietnam was that it wasn't like World War II, and it wasn't like Korea, and it wasn't like the Gulf War. It was a real nasty war, and people didn't like it. People objected, and people didn't want to fight it... That's a kind of end-of-the-world song, really. It's apocalypse; the whole record's like that.”²

Here are those simple and yet remarkably powerful lyrics.

“Gimme Shelter” was one of the first tracks the band recorded in 1969 for what became the Let It Bleed album. In my view, it’s an extraordinary song on so many levels and I can’t even begin to do it justice. Fortunately, Robert Cassard does a brilliant job in the following video, isolating each individual part and showing how the parts work together. I really really really think this is worth the 18 minutes spent watching it:

I agree with Robert that it is Merry Clayton’s vocals that send this song into another dimension, as does the recording engineer for the session and the album, Glyn Johns: “She was absolutely amazing. None of us had ever heard anything quite like what she produced that night. I practically had to stand her in another room, her voice was so powerful. She did three amazing takes, standing there with her hair in curlers, and went home.”

Merry’s duet with Mick provoked a label competition to sign her, and she chose to go with Lou Adlers’ Ode. Although her career as a solo recording artist didn’t flourish (including recording her own version of “Gimme Shelter”), she went on to sing backup for many other artists, including Ringo Starr and Lynyrd Skynyrd, and did soundtrack, stage, and film work. She was also surrounded by music in her personal life, her brother being Little Feat percussionist Sam Clayton, her husband jazz saxophonist Curtis Amy, and her son, Kevin Amy, also a musician.

What’s so ironic about her participation in “Gimme Shelter” — especially considering the fact that the Stones approached Bonnie Bramlett of Delaney & Bonnie first — is that Merry also contributed vocals to the film Performance, where the betrayal that inspired “Gimme Shelter” occurred.

It was a song forged in and surrounded by personal tragedy, as Merry lost her baby right after the recording session, the Stones fired Brian Jones and learned of his death by drowning less than a month later, and Keith and Anita began their rapid descent into heroin addiction, not to mention the violence and deaths at the Altamont Free Concert in December of that year, captured in the documentary Gimme Shelter.

But, perhaps, it was also a song whose creation in some way redeemed all that tragedy, and whose words were (and are) prophetic in promising us that love is “just a kiss away.” I’m suggesting this because of the astonishing fact that the song was not released as a single, and yet it is ranked as one of the Stones’ best, if not the best, out of all their songs, and one of the greatest rock songs of all time. The album, Let It Bleed, which opens with “Gimme Shelter” and closes with “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” is also considered a rock ’n’ roll classic.

I leave you to draw your own conclusions. Did this song have a date with destiny? Herewith “Gimme Shelter”:

Song credits

Songwriters - Keith Richards and Mick Jagger

Producer - Jimmy Miller

The Rolling Stones:

• Mick Jagger – lead vocals, harmonica

• Keith Richards – backing vocals, lead and rhythm guitars

• Bill Wyman – bass

• Charlie Watts – drums

Additional personnel:

• Merry Clayton – lead and backing vocals

• Nicky Hopkins – piano

• Jimmy Miller – güiro, maracas, tambourine

Technical:

• Glyn Johns - engineer, mixing

1. Both Marianne’s and Stash’s quotes are from the 2024 documentary about Anita’s life, Catching Fire.

2. Wenner, Jann (14 December 1995). "Jagger Remembers". Rolling Stone. (Quote retrieved from Wikipedia, September 2, 2024.)