I don’t know what to watch, or read, or where to click. I can’t keep watching the war endlessly, keep doom scrolling through every headline and hot take as Russia senselessly invades Ukraine. I can’t even play chess—too warlike. I also have a hard time turning away for too long. It feels disrespectful. But I can put on music.
Now I want music to feed back to me how I feel, the helplessness, the heartbreak, the disorienting sense of crisis. American music of the Vietnam era feels so immensely relevant: All Along the Watchtower, What’s Going On, Ball of Confusion. But there’s one particular song from that time that rings out like a bell these days in my ears. Of course you’ve heard it. Finding the right song that’s in tune with what’s going on inside you can be extremely affecting. Maybe this one works on you too.
It’s 1968. Keith Richards is sitting by the window in a flat on Mount Street, one of London’s premier luxury shopping streets. The flat belongs to Robert Fraser, an influential art dealer. Keith’s insides are churning. His girlfriend Anita Pallenberg and bandmate Mick Jagger are close by, filming a movie called Performance together, but no way is Keith going to set. He can smell an affair between them and it’s eating him up. Acoustic guitar in hand, Keith looks out onto the street. Then,
“Suddenly the sky went completely black and an incredible monsoon came down. It was just people running about looking for shelter.”
This moment, the psychic turmoil within, the violent burst of rain on the streets, becomes Gimme Shelter’s opening lines:
Ooh, a storm is threatening
My very life today
If I don't get some shelter
Ooh yeah I'm gonna fade away
There’s a sense of crisis. The world is on edge. The danger and the thrill—because war is also thrilling. Everything hangs by a thread. A single act—like a shot—can end it all. or begin something new.
That title, that phrase—Gimme shelter. Let that sink in.
The song is one of the Rolling Stones’ most iconic, and has come to embody the many-pronged tumults and shockwaves of the late sixties/early seventies. The documentarian Maysles brothers nicked it for the title of their 1970 film about the Stones. You know, the one where the Stones play a free concert at Altamont speedway in California, 1969, and a Black man named Meredith Hunter is stabbed to death in the middle of the show by Hells Angels. The Stones had hired the Angels to handle security. Along with the murders carried out by the Manson family that same year, Hunter’s murder during that concert has long become a retroactive omen that the dreamy utopianism of the sixties was over, and something more chaotic, uncertain and dangerous was on the rise.
Gimme Shelter is unique in the Stones’ output partly because of the female background vocal—not a chorus, but a single additional singer duetting with Mick. The inclusion of Merry Clayton was the producer Jack Nitzsche’s idea. He called Clayton up out of nowhere, in the middle of the night, asking her to come down to the studio, which she did, four months pregnant, in pajamas and curlers.
Listen Merry’s vocals, here on an isolated track. Listen to her voice break, she’s pushing the sound out so hard. Listen to Mick woo with enthusiasm in the background. Rape….murder…it’s just a shot away. Merry suffered a miscarriage the next day. She attributes it to the strain of her singing that night.
Ooh, a storm is threatening
My very life today
If I don't get some shelter
Ooh yeah I'm gonna fade away
War, children
It's just a shot away
It's just a shot away
War, children
It's just a shot away
It's just a shot away
Ooh, see the fire is sweepin'
Our streets today
Burns like a red coal carpet
Mad bull lost its way
War, children
It's just a shot away
It's just a shot away
War, children
It's just a shot away
It's just a shot away
Rape, murder, it's just a shot away
It's just a shot away
Rape, murder, yeah, it's just a shot away
It's just a shot away
Rape, murder, it's just a shot away
It's just a shot away
Mmm, a flood is threatening
My very life today
Gimme, gimme shelter
Or I'm gonna fade away
War, children
It's just a shot away
It's just a shot away
It's just a shot away
It's just a shot away
It's just a shot away
I tell you love, sister
It's just a kiss away
It's just a kiss away
It's just a kiss away
It's just a kiss away
It's just a kiss away
Kiss away, kiss away
If we are lucky, we watch the war from a safe distance, beyond, we assume, the scope of violence. But even with the war on our screens we aren’t really safe—because war is radioactive, its trauma seeps unseen into everything.
Sometimes art’s catharsis comes from how it can block out the unpleasant feelings we’re having and offer escape. Other times it’s because art represents those feelings directly— because art is somehow both smaller and larger than life. Smaller: because we take our feelings of the world and transform them into puny small things, like words, sounds, or pictures, in a kind of magical act that can lessen the burden of living. Larger: because art also unfetters those feelings from their earthly condition, and lets them roam free in our souls.
The Rolling Stones — Gimme Shelter
The people of Ukraine need our help. Here are links to where you can donate, pitch in, and support.
How to help Ukraine amid Russian Attacks (ABC News)
Want to support the people in Ukraine? Here’s how you can help (NPR)
Here’s how Americans can donate to help people in Ukraine (Washington Post)