Gimme Shelter

Gimme Shelter
Rolling Stones nailed the zeitgeist of America back in the Seventies with this song just after the shocking violence at Altamont. The real high point of the song is Mary Clayton’s vocal performance. She put her whole heart and soul into her call and response blending the urgency of a street fight with a Gospel witnessing. It is stuck in my JukeBox Brain for a number of current cultural reasons. Mary reminds us what is good even in adversity. I first witnessed The Stones on their first American tour in the mid Sixties in Clearwater’s Jack Russell stadium. Seems their music gave permission for bad behavior from the get go. The good ol’ boys back then stormed onto the baseball field during only their third song; “Little Red Rooster” giving the CPD cue to shut the concert down. They were whisked off in a limo to their hotel in downtown Clearwater , the Jack Tarr Harrison, which later became headquarters for a science fiction religion. Next day in Clearwater high school the only artifacts were polaroids of Bill Wyman and Brian Jones asleep in their respective hotel room beds taken by our local girl fans who snuck into the Stone’s inner sanctum. The after thought is significant though. Keith later remarked that he woke up in the middle of that night to record a snippet of a song, a distorted guitar lick, then he returned to slumber land only to discover the next day that he had set the groundwork for their biggest hit; “Can’t get no Satisfaction” which could be construed as a critical observation of life in America, or in Clearwater, Florida or right now.