In the fall of 1969 the Rolling Stones were in a Los Ange­les record­ing stu­dio, putting the final touch­es on their album Let it Bleed. It was a tumul­tuous time for the Stones. They had been strug­gling with the album for the bet­ter part of a year as they dealt with the per­son­al dis­in­te­gra­tion of their founder and mul­ti-instru­men­tal­ist Bri­an Jones, whose drug addic­tion and per­son­al­i­ty prob­lems had reached a crit­i­cal stage. Jones was fired from the band in June of that year. He died less than a month lat­er. And although the Stones could­n’t have known it at the time, the year would end on anoth­er cat­a­stroph­ic note, as vio­lence broke out at the noto­ri­ous Alta­mont Free Con­cert just a day after Let it Bleed was released.

It was also a grim time around the world. The assas­si­na­tions of Mar­tin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, the Tet Offen­sive, the bru­tal sup­pres­sion of the Prague Spring–all of these were recent mem­o­ries. Not sur­pris­ing­ly, Let it Bleed was not the most cheer­ful of albums. As Stephen Davis writes in his book Old Gods Almost Dead: The 40-Year Odyssey of the Rolling Stones, “No rock record, before or since, has ever so com­plete­ly cap­tured the sense of pal­pa­ble dread that hung over its era.”

And no song on Let it Bleed artic­u­lates this dread with greater force than the apoc­a­lyp­tic “Gimme Shel­ter,” in which Mick Jag­ger sings of a fire “sweepin’ our very street today,” like a “Mad bull lost his way.”

Rape, mur­der!
It’s just a shot away
It’s just a shot away

In an inter­view last Novem­ber with Melis­sa Block for the NPR pro­gram All Things Con­sid­ered, Jag­ger talked about those lyrics, and the mak­ing of the song:

One of the most strik­ing moments in the inter­view is when Jag­ger describes the cir­cum­stances sur­round­ing soul singer Mer­ry Clay­ton’s pow­er­ful back­ground vocals. “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,” said Jag­ger. “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, The Raelettes. She is one of the singers fea­tured in the new doc­u­men­tary film, 20 Feet From Star­dom. In an inter­view last week with Ter­ry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air, Clay­ton talked about the night she was asked to sing on “Gimme Shel­ter”:

Well, I’m at home at about 12–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 Nitzsche called and 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.

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, I said 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. (“I was just grate­ful that the crack was in tune,” she told Gross.) In the iso­lat­ed vocal track above, you can hear the oth­ers in the stu­dio shout­ing in amaze­ment. 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.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Kurt Cobain’s Iso­lat­ed Vocal Track From ‘Smells Like Teen Spir­it,’ 1991

Lis­ten to Fred­die Mer­cury and David Bowie on the Iso­lat­ed Vocal Track for the Queen Hit ‘Under Pres­sure,’ 1981

The Rolling Stones Live in Hyde Park, 1969: The Com­plete Film