#954: Gimmie Shelter by The Rolling Stones

Peak Month: July 1970
6 weeks on Vancouver’s CKVN chart
Peak Position #6
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ did not chart
YouTube.com: “Gimmie Shelter”
Lyrics: “Gimmie Shelter”

Michael Philip Jagger was born in Dartford, Kent, England, in 1943, some 18 miles east of London. Though his father and grandfather were both teachers by profession, and he was encouraged to be a teacher, the boy had different aspirations. “I always sang as a child. I was one of those kids who just liked to sing. Some kids sing in choirs; others like to show off in front of the mirror. I was in the church choir and I also loved listening to singers on the radio–the BBC or Radio Luxembourg –or watching them on TV and in the movies.” In 1950 Mick Jagger met Keith Richards while attending primary school. They became good friends until the summer of 1954 when the Jagger family moved to the village of Wilmington, a mile south of Dartford. The pair bumped into each other at a train station in 1961 and resumed their friendship.

Keith Richards was also born in Dartford, Kent, England, in 1943. From the age of two Keith sang along with his mother to songs on the radio in perfect pitch. Richards maternal grandfather, Augustus Theodore “Gus” Dupree, led a jazz band named Gus Dupree and His Boys. Dupree played saxophone, fiddle and guitar. It was his maternal grandfather who gave young Keith his first guitar. He also introduced Keith to the British Music Hall genre, a cousin of American Vaudeville. Keith took an interest in music while attending Dartford Technical High School for Boys from 1955 to 1959. He was recruited to be part of a trio of boy sopranos who performed at Westminster Abbey as part of a special concert for Queen Elizabeth II. Keith became interested in rock ‘n roll, skiffle and rhythm and blues. Richards remembers playing tunes by Johnny Cash and “Blue Moon Of Kentucky”.

When Richards and Jagger met each other one spring morning in 1961 at the Dartford Train Station, Jagger was at the London School of Economics. Mick was studying to become a journalist or a diplomat. But Richards noticed what Jagger was carrying with him on his way to school, two record albums. One was The Best of Muddy Waters, and the other Rockin’ At The Hops by Chuck Berry. Keith was impressed and invited Mick to his home for tea that afternoon. Richards and Jagger were part of a cohort of young men who were not being drafted into the British Army. In 1957 the British Government decided that men born after October 1, 1939, would not be drafted into the National Service. And by November 1960 the last men were called up for service. Dave Clark of the Dave Clark Five would comment “We were the first generation that wasn’t drafted. The thing about getting drafted when you were eighteen was that’s the most important time of your life for freedom of expression. For so many, that period was cut short, and you were told what to do, where to go, what to be. Then you got out of the service, got married, and worked a job in a factory. That was it. Had the government not stopped the draft there would have been no Dave Clark Five, no Beatles, no Stones.”

In addition to studying at the London School of Economics, Mick Jagger was part of a band called Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys. Richards was soon invited to join them. Another member of the band was Brian Jones. Lewis Brian Hopkins Jones was born in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, England, in 1942. From the age of four he suffered from asthma. When he was fifteen his parents bought him a saxophone. And for his seventeenth birthday they gave him an acoustic guitar. Author Bill Wyman recounts how in the summer of ’59, Jones’ 14-year-old girlfriend, Valerie Corbett, got pregnant. Jones is said to have encouraged her to have an abortion. But she rejected his suggestion and wanted nothing more to do with him. Valerie carried the child to term and placed the baby up for adoption. Jones left school as a result of the scandal of getting a teenage girl pregnant. He left home, and travelled the rest of the summer across northern Europe. During this period, he lived a bohemian lifestyle, busked with his guitar on the streets to earn some cash, and lived off others charity. In November 1959, Brian Jones met a young married woman named Angeline. The pair had a one-night stand and Angeline got pregnant. Angeline and her husband chose to raise the baby, Belinda, born on August 4, 1960. Jones never learned about her birth.

The Rolling Stones first gig was at the Marquee Club in London on July 12, 1962. At that first show, the group was billed as the Rollin’ Stones and, of what would become the band’s original lineup, only Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Brian Jones and keyboardist Ian Stewart performed. Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts would formally join in January of 1963, and Stewart officially left the band in May. Though Stewart continued on as the Stones’ road manager and occasionally played with them both on stage and in the studio until his death in 1985. When the Rolling Stones began playing gigs around London in 1962, the notion that a rock & roll band would last five years, let alone fifty, was an absurdity. After all, what could possibly be more elusive than rock & roll, the latest teenage fad? Besides, other factors made it unlikely that such a momentous occasion would ever come to pass. “I didn’t expect to last until fifty myself, let alone with the Stones,” Keith Richards says with a laugh. “It’s incredible, really. In that sense we’re still living on borrowed time.”

“You have to put yourself back into that time,” Mick Jagger says about those early days when he and Keith and guitarist Brian Jones roomed together and were hustling gigs wherever they could find one. “Popular music wasn’t talked about on any kind of intellectual level. There was no such term as ‘popular culture.’ None of those things existed. But suddenly popular music became bigger than it had ever been before. It became an important, perhaps the most important, art form of the period, after not at all being regarded as an art form before.”

The Rolling Stones’ first US tour in June 1964 was, in Bill Wyman’s words, “a disaster.” “When we arrived, we didn’t have a hit record [in the USA] or anything going for us.” Their #3 single in February ’64 in the UK, “Not Fade Away”, only climbed to #48 on the Billboard Hot 100 and stalled for two weeks at #13 in Vancouver in May of that year. But in November 1964 “Time Is On My Side” climbed to #6 in the USA and #1 in Vancouver for two weeks. In April 1965 “The Last Time” climbed to #2 in Vancouver and #9 on the Billboard charts. The Rolling Stones were finally establishing a following in North America.

Their next two singles, “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” and “Get Off My Cloud”, were both #1 hits here in Vancouver and in the ‘States. On December 1, 1965, the Rolling Stones gave their first concert in Vancouver at the PNE Agrodome. They returned seven months later on July 19, 1966, the Rolling Stones appeared in concert at the PNE Forum in Vancouver.

The hits kept coming through 1966-69 with #1 songs in Vancouver including “Paint It Black”, “Ruby Tuesday”, “Jumping Jack Flash” and “Honky Tonk Women”.

In the period between “Honky Tonk Women” in the summer of 1969 and “Brown Sugar” in April 1971, The Rolling Stones had just one song played on AM pop radio in Vancouver. That song, “Gimmie Shelter”, was not released as a 45 RPM, but still got airplay in Vancouver and a few other radio markets.

The Rolling Stones “Gimmie Shelter” placed at #38 on Rolling Stone Magazine’s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. It is the first track on their album Let It Bleed from 1969. The first word was spelled “Gimmie” on the Let It Bleed album jacket and vinyl record. However, subsequent recordings by the band and other musicians have made “Gimme” the typical spelling. The Rolling Stones first played “Gimmie Shelter” live at Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO on 7 November 1969. Greil Marcus, writing in Rolling Stone has asserted, “The Stones have never done anything better.”

“Gimme Shelter” was written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. Richards began working at the song’s opening riff in London while Jagger was starring in his debut acting role on the set for the crime drama film Performance. “Gimmie Shelter” leads off with Richards performing a sulking instrumental guitar. He is next accompanied by Jagger’s shrieking harmonica and lead vocal. On Let It Bleed’s bleak world view, Jagger said in a interview with NPR in 2012:

“It was a very moody piece about the world closing in on you a bit … When it was recorded, early ’69 or something, it was a time of war and tension, so that’s reflected in this tune. It’s still wheeled out when big storms happen, as they did the other week (during Hurricane Sandy). It’s been used a lot to evoke natural disaster.”

After the first verse, a second vocal joins Jagger. This is guest vocalist Merry Clayton. In the 2003 book According to the Rolling Stones, Jagger stated, “The use of the female voice was the producer’s idea. It would be one of those moments along the lines of ‘I hear a girl on this track – get one on the phone.'” Clayton gives her solo performance, and one of the song’s most famous pieces, after a solo performed by Richards, repeatedly singing “Rape, murder; It’s just a shot away, It’s just a shot away,” and finally screaming the final stanza. She and Jagger finish the song with the line, “Love, sister, it’s just a kiss away.” The song is arguably the most memorable of the few recordings of a female vocalist to join the Rolling Stones in studio or in a live concert.

In the song’s opening line, a storm is approaching threatening the singers very life. This can be understood both literally and figuratively. In addition to actual thunderstorms, hurricanes and tornadoes, people sometimes have what is referred to as “a perfect storm.” A perfect storm is a constellation of a particularly bad or critical state of affairs, arising from a number of negative and unpredictable factors. Bigger events in people’s lives, like the Wall Street subprime mortgage and international banking crisis of 2007-2008 can have a negative impact on an individual who suddenly looses their home or life savings when their financial institution goes bankrupt. Or a war is declared: a member of one family is off on a tour of duty, and returns with PTSD or in a casket, while another family is devastated when bombs are dropped on their village that destroy their home and  kill a sleeping infant their bedroom. Similarly, a perfect storm can gather when, at a party a woman meets a guy who later rapes her on a date. Or, while walking with friends and family a robber compounds their crime by fatally shooting the person they steal from. The 2016 film, Manchester-By-the-Sea, depicts a perfect storm when an father and husband, intoxicated from a late evening of drinking with his buddies at his home, lights a fire in a fireplace in the room where his young children are sleeping. A fire consumes the house and the children die in the fire. War, rape, murder, fire. They’re all just a shot away, The Rolling Stones tell us. The song is a warning to keep our wits about us and to pay attention. It is also a reminder that good times don’t last forever. Threat and danger also walk the same streets we tread.

While on their 1969 tour, documentary film makers Albert and David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin shot footage of The Rolling Stones at Madison Square Garden, the Hell’s Angels violence at the Altamont Free Concert and photo shoots for the cover of the album Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out The Rolling Stones in Concert. A live version of “Gimmie Shelter” played over the credits of the film titled Gimme Shelter. Martin Scorsese has used “Gimmie Shelter” as a signature theme in his crime films Goodfellas (1990), Casino (1995) and The Departed (2006). “Gimmie Shelter” peaked on the Vancouver pop charts at #6. Elsewhere in North America the song was only played as a track on FM stations. However, under the artist credit of Merry Clayton, “Gimmie Shelter” made it to #2 in Columbus, Ohio, the Top 20 in San Francisco and Waterloo, Iowa, and the Top 30 in Seattle, Washington, and San Bernardino, California.

On June 3, 1972, the Rolling Stones performed in concert in Vancouver at the Pacific Coliseum. A mob of over 2,000 rioted outside.

The band kept charting Top Ten hits through to 1989. These have included “Brown Sugar”, “Angie”, “Miss You”, “Start Me Up” and “Emotional Rescue”. On November 1 & 2, 1989, December 18, 1994, January 28, 1998, and again on November 25, 2006, the Rolling Stones gave concerts in Vancouver at the BC Place Stadium. In 2019 the Rolling Stones scheduled their No Filter Tour, with 17 concerts on their itinerary. Mick Jagger had to have heart surgery, and so the tour was postponed.

January 8, 2018
Ray McGinnis

References:
Albert and David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin, Gimme Shelter, Maysles Films, 1970
Marc Meyers, “The Rolling Stones at the Altamont Speedway,” Wall Street Journal, November 16, 2010
Manchester-by-the-Sea ~ Fire scene
Daniel Kreps, “The Rolling Stones Bio,” Rolling Stone.
“Mick Jagger On The Apocalyptic ‘Gimme Shelter’,” NPR, November 16, 2012
Victor Bockris, Keith Richards: The Biography, (Da Capo Press, 2003).
David Fricke, “100 Greatest Guitarists: Keith Richards #10,” Rolling Stone, December 3, 2010.
Bill Wyman, Rolling With The Stones, (Dorling Kindersley, 2002) 19.
“Two hundred and eighty-five Vancouver police officers faced a barrage of rocks, bottles and even Molotov cocktails as a mob of 2,000 rioted outside a Rolling Stones concert,” Vancouver Sun, June 4, 1972.
“Rolling Stones Concert Dates – Canada,” setlist.fm.
“Your Average Rock & Roll Radio Survey,” CKVN 1410 AM, Vancouver, BC, July 10, 1970.

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