‘Gimme Shelter’: The Rolling Stones’ dark anthem for the end of an optimistic era
“I remembered all of the day’s misinformation very clearly, and I also remember this, and wish I did not: I remember that no one was surprised.” That was Joan Didion’s reflection on the Manson murders of 1969. When the Cult of the Manson family murdered Sharon Tate along with six other innocent people on August 5th, 1969, historians marked it as the end of an era that had been spiralling down for some time. To Didion, it was an inevitability. Times were changing, and the air of hippie optimism could not hold out against the brewing darkness. Or, as The Rolling Stones put it, “a storm is threatening my very life today”.
It could be argued that it’s merely the law of physics; what goes up must come down. The 1960s that is still romanticised today was a mighty up. The world remembers it as the era of flower power, free love, fun acid trips and bountiful creativity. It’s remembered as the Woodstock era, where the most commonly recalled images of the festival are of couples hugging and crowds dancing. But behind the tie-dye veil, the truth was always a lot darker.
The ‘turn-on, tune-in, drop-out’ generation was also one of serious danger as hoards of teenagers went missing, getting swept up in the hippie scene and leaving distraught parents to never see their child again as they were lost to misadventure.
The liberation of the free love moment was also rife with abuse as conversations of consent were lost in the chaos. Even Woodstock wasn’t quite the utopia it’s made out to be as the forces had to deliver vital supplies to the mass overcrowded fields. At the same time, serious issues of racism and war were bubbling away in the background, and no amount of cheerful spirit could hold it off for long.
Everything eventually has to come to an end. But for Didion, the end of the 1960s was something else entirely. It was like a reckoning where the hedonism of the decade was hit, suddenly, with consequence. “This mystical flirtation with the idea of ‘sin’—this sense that it was possible to go ‘too far,’ and that many people were doing it—was very much with us in Los Angeles in 1968 and 1969,” she wrote in The White Album. As she put it, “The jitters were setting in.”
As the era drew to a close, this sense that something bad was looming took over like a mass anxiety. So when the Manson family attacked, lives were lost at the Altamont free concert, and the Vietnam War draft all hit, the premonition of dread came true.
Throughout the 1960s, The Rolling Stones were establishing themselves as the ultimate rock and roll band. They were right there in every vibrant scene, from the early 1960s London crowd through to the British invasion and then Los Angeles’ thriving music world where the best and the brightest gathered. They were the ultimate group who seemed to meld all the sounds of the era into their own, whether that be the country twang of the booming folk crowd or the more hazy experimental rock of the psychedelic scene. They also captured the air of the era with lyrics about sex and drugs, fully capitalising on the glorified image of the rock star with Mick Jagger at the helm.
But then, when it all came crashing down, they were right there in the eye of the storm. The deaths at the Altamont show began when a drugged-up audience member pulled a gun on the band, leading to bloody, violent chaos as the Hell’s Angels members hired to be security stepped in to protect the group but in a way that escalated the situation, leading to an ongoing feud between the gang and the rockers. Having witnessed the dark side of the 1960s music scene, the Stones saw that terrifying underbelly at the end of the era more than anyone.
It found its way into the music as the band’s opening track to the first album they released at the turn of the decade is a dark and bubbling cry of war, violence and fear. “War”, “Rape”, “Murder”; it’s all “just a shot away” the Stones warned their listeners on ‘Gimme Shelter’. With the help of Merry Clayton’s booming gospel voice, the track feels like half a rallying anti-war cry and half an air raid siren, screaming out that it’s too late and imploring people to take cover.
With images of fire sweeping through the streets, the Stones paint an image of the kind of hell that Didion and the rest of her crowd had been predicting as the consequences of frivolity came to fiery, terrifying life both in song and in reality.
