Posts Tagged ‘Merry Clayton’

The ROLLING STONES – ” Gimmie Shelter “

Posted: November 6, 2016 in MUSIC
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gimmeshelter

Written by Keef as he brooded over Anita’s dalliance with Mick, “Gimme Shelter” represented something darker and more universal: rape, murder and the death of the 1960s spirit.
“You get lucky sometimes,” Keith Richards says of “Gimme Shelter”, the greatest song he ever wrote. “It was a shitty day. I had nothing better to do.”

The tone is lightweight, almost laughable. Yet the song was wrought from the heaviest of materials. The Rolling Stones were still trying to climb out of the career-grave that their critically derided 1967 album Their Satanic Majesties Request had left them in, their plans persistently thwarted by the rapidly disintegrating physical and emotional state of their other founder-member guitarist, Brian Jones.

Their 1968 follow-up, Beggars Banquet, recorded largely with just Keith on guitar, had been a classic, but their final hit with Jones, Jumpin’ Jack Flash, had been their only chart single in the UK for 18 months. Now with Keith’s old lady – Anita Pallenberg, stolen from Jones the year before – filming sex scenes with Mick Jagger for his movie debut in Performance, Keith’s mind was all doom and gloom as he sat snorting coke and heroin at gallery owner Robert Fraser’s Mayfair apartment one stormy day that autumn.

Lounging with his guitar in a room decorated with Tibetan skulls, tantric art and Moroccan tapestries, chain-smoking and depressed at the thought of Anita being with Mick, Keith began to strum as lightning flashed across the London sky.

“It was just a terrible fucking day,” he recalls in his memoir, Life, “this incredible storm over London. So I got into that mode – looking at all these people… running like hell.”

Leaning on the same open chords that had become his signature, he crooned, ‘Oh, a storm is threatening, my very life today.’ Sounded good. He continued to strum, added another line: ‘If I don’t get some shelter, oh yeah, I’m gonna fade away…’

Six months later, when the Stones reconvened to begin work on their next album, Let It Bleed, the song of ultimate doom Keith had begun that stormy day, now titled Gimme Shelter, was among the first he and Jagger began working on with producer Jimmy Miller.

There were other monumental moments on the album to come, not least Jagger’s You Can’t Always Get What You Want. But everything the Stones would become, everything they would be glorified as – the greatest, most legendary, most daring and sophisticated and dark and evil and sexy and cool rock’n’roll band in the world – would be summed up by the apocalyptic Gimme Shelter, the album’s opening track.

It would be another six months, though, before they’d finished with it. In the meantime the Rolling Stones went through the most turbulent period – artistically, personally, commercially – of their career.

After Jones, who had officially been ousted from the group in June ’69, was found dead in his swimming pool just three weeks later, the Stones went ahead with their planned free concert in Hyde Park, with new guitarist Mick Taylor.

https://vimeo.com/33886638

They also announced their first US tour for three years, due to start in November. First though, they had to complete the album. Miller argued there was something missing from Gimme Shelter, something that would turn good into great. They found what they were looking for in 20-year-old Merry Clayton. Suggested by producer and long-time Stones acolyte Jack Nitzsche, Clayton had made her name through duets and backing vocals for Ray Charles, Burt Bacharach and Elvis Presley, among many others.

She laughingly recalls how she was about to go to bed when she got Nitzsche’s call: “It was almost midnight. I was pregnant at the time and I thought, there’s no way in the world I’m getting out of bed to go down to some studio in the middle of the night.”

But her husband, jazz saxophonist Curtis Amy, talked her into it.

“I’m wearing these beautiful pink pyjamas, my hair was up in rollers. But I took this Chanel scarf, wrapped it round the rollers so it looked really cute, went to the bathroom and put on a little lip blush – ’cos there’s no way I’m going to the studio other than beautiful!” Throwing a fur coat around her shoulders, she turned up at the studio “ready to work”. She admits to being somewhat nonplussed when she read the lyrics Jagger handed to her.

“I’m like, ‘Rape, murder…’? You sure that’s what you want me to sing, honey? He’s just laughing. Him and Keith.”

They began the session, and the effect was instant. “You listen to the original tape you can hear Mick whooping and hollering in the background,” Merry says.

Of course, there would be a grim postscript to the story of Gimme Shelter. While it became the most praised album-only track in the Stones canon – “The cleverest amalgam of powerful sounds the Stones have yet created,” reckoned International Times; “Ecstatic, ironic, all-powerful, an erotic exorcism for a doomed decade,” claimed Newsweek – it also became the emblem of the moment when the 60s dream flared into the 70s nightmare.

Released on the same day in December 1969 as the Stones’ ill-starred, bad-acid-and-cheap-wine appearance at Altamont Speedway in northern California, at which teenager Meredith Hunter was stabbed to death by Hells Angels, Gimme Shelter would also become the all-too appropriate title of the Maysles brothers’ documentary film of that debacle: the moment when the Stones’ music seemed to become a mythic force unto itself. Or as Albert Goldman put it: “An obsessively lovely specimen of tribal rock… rainmaking music [repeating] over an endless drone until it has soaked its way through your soul.”

“They hand me the lyrics, and I’m looking, thinking, ‘Rape? Murder? I’m working with a bunch of fools!’”

Less a backing singer on Gimme Shelter, she was virtually a co-singer with Jagger.

“I remember saying to the boys [Jagger and Richards]: ‘I hope this don’t take all night, ’cos I gotta get my beauty sleep,’” she chuckles now. “But that song became the start of a whole new thing for me.”

Indeed, the 70s found Merry supplying vocals for Lynyrd Skynyrd (Sweet Home Alabama), The Who (as the Acid Queen in the original 1972 stage production of Tommy), Neil Young and countless others. But Gimme Shelter became Merry’s signature tune and the title of her 1970 debut solo album.

Currently, Merry Clayton can be seen telling – and singing – her story in the documentary movie 20 Feet From Stardom, in which she and several other noted backing singers reveal the stories behind a lifetime of classic songs. “Honey, we saw it all,” she purrs. “Only we were never supposed to tell about it – until now!”

Release Date,December 6th, 1969, on the album Let It Bleed

PERSONNEL

Mick Jagger Vocals, harmonica

Keith Richards Guitars, backing vocals

Bill Wyman Bass

Charlie Watts Drums

Nicky Hopkins Piano

Jimmy Miller Percussion

Merry Clayton Vocals

WRITTEN BY

Mick Jagger/Keith Richards

PRODUCER

Jimmy Miller

 

KEITH RICHARDS – ” Live at The Apollo ” Tribute to Merry Clayton

Posted: December 19, 2015 in MUSIC
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720x405 17. Keith Richards Crosseyed Heart

Keith Richards took time out from promoting his new Crosseyed Heart LP to help support a good cause last night, appearing onstage at the Apollo Theater to play at this year’s A Great Night in Harlem benefit concert and pay tribute to vocalist Merry Clayton with a performance of the Rolling Stones classic “Gimme Shelter.”

Richards’ appearance, which starts with the guitarist strolling out onstage after a standing ovation for Clayton, who recently revealed she underwent a double amputation after sustaining serious injuries in a car accident in 2014. “Now you know how many friends you got, honey,” said Richards, telling the audience he wanted to “kick it off with the one we worked together on.”

Clayton’s vocals on “Gimme Shelter” — which she recorded after being awoken in the middle of the night and then added a crucial component to the song, and also remains a highlight of a distinguished career that she’s vowed to continue in spite of her injury. Although not present at the event, Clayton appeared on video to accept the first annual Clark and Gwen Terry Courage Award from the Jazz Foundation of America.

Richards, who went on to play the Rolling Stones song “Happy”  was just one member of a bill assembled to also honor jazz pioneer Sonny Rollins, who received a lifetime achievement award at the show, and was on hand to witness performances from Steely Dan‘s Donald Fagen and a host of jazz greats who paid tribute to Rollins’ classic discography while helping raise funds for medical care and other forms of assistance going to jazz and blues musicians in need. Richards closed out the evening with a tribute to Clayton,  A standing ovation for Clayton preceded Richards’ appearance. “Now you know how many friends you got, honey,” the guitarist said as he took the stage. Backing Richards was his trusty longtime band, the X-Pensive Winos, featuring guitarist Waddy Wachtel, keyboardist Ivan Neville, bassist Willie Weeks and drummer Steve Jordan (also the night’s musical director), along with vocalists Sarah Dash (of LaBelle), and longtime Stones backup singers Lisa Fischer and Bernard Fowler.

Keith Richard has been a tear lately, turning up all over the place in support of his new solo album, “Crosseyed Heart“.

The ROLLING STONES – ” Gimme Shelter ” The Movie and Merry Clayton’s Vocal

Posted: November 5, 2015 in MUSIC
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Gimme Shelter from 1970. Borrowing its title from one of the greatest tunes of all time, this is one of the essential music documentaries.
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. 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, Mick Jagger talked about those lyrics, and the making of the song:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqXyjbgs5rU

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 documentary film, “20 Feet From Stardom”. In an interview 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 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.” check out the film, “Twenty Feet From Stardom.” Merry talks about her experience recording this.