Lee Geiger

Oh, a storm is threat’ning
My very life today
If I don’t get some shelter
Oh yeah, I’m gonna fade away

Gimme Shelter (1969), The Rolling Stones

I’ve recently become obsessed with the gospel rock anthem Gimme Shelter by the Rolling Stones, a four-minute, thirty-seven second apocalyptic extolment of doom and despair.

For reasons I haven’t been quite able to fathom, I lately can’t listen to it enough. It could be related to the toxicity of our current political environment, or the fact that I’ve lost patience dealing with personalities and situations I no longer have interest in. I prefer listening to the song in my car, either on my way to work or to a gathering with friends at a local watering hole. In any case, I listen to Gimme Shelterthe same way, every time, over and over and over again until my ears beg to bleed: LOUD. It’s weird, I know. But so am I.

Recorded in the world-coming-unglued days of 1969, Gimme Shelter, famous for its maleficent introductory guitar solo by Keith Richards, is the opening track to the Rolling Stones legendary album Let it Bleed (although the first word was spelled “Gimmie” on that album, subsequent recordings by the Stones and others have made “Gimme” the customary spelling). Conventional wisdom suggests the lyrics bemoan the damnation of the Vietnam War, and all the societal and cultural baggage that came with it. “Well, it’s a very rough, very violent era,” said lead singer Mick Jagger in 1995. “The Vietnam War. Violence on the streets, pillage and burning…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.”

But like many stories you hear, it’s not quite the truth. I learned this after recently readingLife, Keith Richard’s masterful memoir about the madness that was life as a Rolling Stone.Turns out Keith’s girlfriend in the autumn of 1968—Anita Pallenberg, whom he had stolen from bandmate Brian Jones the year before—was filming sex scenes with Mick Jagger for his movie debut in an ultimately forgettable film titled “Performance.” Keith’s mind was all doom and gloom as he sat on a couch snorting cocaine and heroin at gallery owner Robert Fraser’s Mayfair apartment one stormy day. Lounging with his guitar in a room decorated with Tibetan skulls, tantric art and Moroccan tapestries, chain-smoking and depressed at the thought of Anita being with Mick, Keith began to strum as lightning flashed across the London sky.

“It was just a terrible f-ing day,” recalls Richards, “and what with this incredible storm over London. So, I got into that mode – looking at all these people… running like hell.” Leaning on the same open chords that had become his signature, he crooned, ‘Oh, a storm is threatening, my very life today.’ Sounded good, he thought. Richards continued to strum, and then added another line: ‘If I don’t get some shelter, oh yeah, I’m gonna fade away…’

Six months later, when the Stones reconvened in Los Angeles to begin work on Let It Bleed(the album also included the bluesy rock gospel “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” a seven-minute, twenty-eight second classic memorialized at the beginning of the movie, “The Big Chill”), the song of ultimate annihilation Keith Richards had begun writing that stormy day took another interesting twist in the form of the woman who provides Gimme Shelter’s powerful, glass-shattering background vocals—Merry Clayton.

Man, does she have a story.

Mick Jagger best describes Clayton’s role in a 1995 interview:

“When we got to Los Angeles and we were mixing it, we thought, ‘Well, it’d be great to have a woman come and do the rape/murder verse,’ or chorus or whatever you want to call it. We randomly phoned up this poor lady in the middle of the night, and she arrived in her curlers and proceeded to do that in one or two takes, which is pretty amazing. She came in and knocked off this rather odd lyric. It’s not the sort of lyric you give anyone–‘Rape, Murder/It’s just a shot away’–but she really got into it, as you can hear on the record.”

The daughter of a Baptist minister, Merry Clayton grew up singing in her father’s church in New Orleans. She made her professional debut at age 14, recording a duet with Bobby Darin. She went on to work with The Supremes, Elvis Presley and many others, and was a member of Ray Charles’s group of backing singers. In other words, Merry Clayton rocked, but she was no rock star. In a 2005 interview, Clayton talked about the night she was asked to add even more firepower to Gimme Shelter:

“Well, I’m at home at about midnight–I’d say about 11:30, almost 12 o’clock at night. And I’m hunkered down in my bed with my husband, very pregnant, and we got a call from a dear friend of mine and producer named Jack Nitzsche. Jack said, you know, Merry, are you busy? I said No, I’m in bed. He says, well, you know, there are some guys in town from England. And they need someone to come and sing a duet with them, but I can’t get anybody to do it. Could you come? He said I really think this would be something good for you”

At that point, Clayton recalled, her husband took the phone out of her hand and said, “Man, what is going on? This time of night you’re calling Merry to do a session? You know she’s pregnant.” Nitzsche explained the situation, and just as Clayton was drifting back to sleep her husband nudged her and said, “Honey, you know, you really should go and do this date.”

Clayton had no idea who the Rolling Stones were. When she arrived at the studio, Keith Richards was there and explained what he wanted her to do. Merry picks up the story:

“I said, ‘Well, play the track. It’s late. I’d love to get back home.’  So, they play the track and tell me that I’m going to sing–this is what you’re going to sing: “Oh, children, it’s just a shot away.” It had the lyrics for me. I said, ‘Well, that’s cool.’  So, I did the first part, and we got down to the rape, murder part. And I said, ‘Why am I singing rape, murder?’ …So, they told me the gist of what the lyrics were, and I said ‘Oh, okay, that’s cool.’  So, then I had to sit on a stool because I was a little heavy in my belly. I mean, it was a sight to behold. And we got through it. And then we went in the booth to listen, and I saw them hooting and hollering while I was singing, but I didn’t know what they were hooting and hollering about. And when I got back in the booth and listened, I said, ‘Ooh, that’s really nice.’ They said, well, you want to do another?  I said, ‘Well, I’ll do one more, and then I’m going to have to say thank you and good night”. I did one more, and then I did one more. So, it was three times I did it, and then I was gone. The next thing I know, that’s history.”

Clayton sang with such emotional force that her voice cracked at about 2:59 into the song, once during the second refrain on the word “shot,” and then on the word “murder” during the third refrain. “I was just grateful that the crack was in tune,” she later said.

Despite giving what would become the most famous performance of her career, it turned out to be a tragic night for Clayton. Shortly after leaving the studio, she lost her baby in a miscarriage. It has generally been assumed that the stress from the emotional intensity of her performance and the lateness of the hour caused the miscarriage. For many years Clayton found the song too painful to hear, let alone sing. “That was a dark, dark period for me,” she told the Los Angeles Times in 1986, “but God gave me the strength to overcome it. I turned it around. I took it as life, love and energy and directed it in another direction, so it doesn’t really bother me to sing ‘Gimme Shelter’ now. Life is short as it is, and I can’t live on yesterday.”

But that’s not the end of Merry’s story. On June 16, 2014, she was severely injured in a car accident. Shortly thereafter, both of Clayton’s legs were later amputated at the knees due to her suffering “profound trauma to her lower extremities” as a result of the accident.

Gimme Shelter. It’s just a shot away.