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Also known as: Give Me Some Shelter ; Gimmie Shelter Written by: Jagger/Richard Recorded: Olympic Sound Studios, London, England, Feb. 9-March 31 1969 Guest musicians: Nicky Hopkins (piano), Jimmy Miller (percussion) gimme shelter alternate Data taken from Martin Elliott’s book THE ROLLING STONES COMPLETE RECORDING SESSIONS 1962-2012
Keith Richards wrote “Gimme Shelter” in autumn 1968 in the apartment of his friend Robert Fraser. That day, London was hit by a terrific storm. From the window, the Stones’ guitarist watched pedestrians scurrying in all directions for shelter, their faces whipped by torrential rain. At that time, Anita Pallenberg was in the middle of shooting Performance with Mick Jagger, directed by Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell, whom Keith Richards wholeheartedly detested as a “twister and a manipulator.… A razor-sharp mind poisoned with vitriol.” The musician did not go to watch the shoot but could not help wondering about it: “God knows what’s happening,” he would later write in his autobiography. So there was Cammell, but there was also Mick Jagger, who in one scene has to take a bath with the charming Anita. Keith Richards therefore owes his inspiration for one of the greatest songs in the history of rock ’n’ roll to a conjunction of external and internal factors: the natural forces being unleashed outside and the onset of a profound mental anguish.
A storm is threatening my very life today: not only does the first line of “Gimme Shelter” express Keith’s feelings, it also describes the situation in the world at large at the end of the sixties: the Vietnam War, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the crushing of the Prague Spring, the murder of Sharon Tate—a torrent of violence that made the lofty ideals of “flower power” seem illusory and absurd.
