“That song resonates”: John Mayall’s favourite song by The Rolling Stones
It could be said that John Mayall taught the British invasion how to play. The late bandleader assembled the finest musicians on the London blues scene and ushered them towards a forward-thinking blend of blues and pop that would later define the sound that swept over the world, changing its constitution on its merry journey.
One band inspired by John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers would’ve undoubtedly been The Rolling Stones, and it wasn’t lost on them just how much change was afoot. From the get-go, more so than basically all their peers, there was a realisation among Brian Jones and his cronies that the times were a-changing fast. They quickly looked to reconcile this in their work.
However, it takes time and maturity to truly purify what’s happening in the world into a rock ‘n’ roll song. They achieved this with totality in 1969 with their anthemic masterpiece, ‘Gimme Shelter’. It’s a track that Mayall picked out as his favourite by the Stones when asked by Louder Sound. “That song resonates with me because it’s current to what was going on in the 1960s,” he said. “The Stones were very focused on the social troubles of that era, and, sadly, the world hasn’t changed too much since then.”
Eternally cinematic, it’s the perfect rock anthem that reflects the stormy day on which it was written, in every sense. Housed as the adrenalising opener on Let it Bleed, the thunderous effort became part of the wider backdrop to the dark days of the Vietnam War. Thus, within its melodic maelstrom and the iconic sound modelled on Chuck Berry’s old electric-acoustic sound is a sense of prescient vitality. Much like that electro-acoustic collision, there is something primal yet mystic about the track.
When appraising the apocalyptic masterpiece, Mick Jagger himself recalled: “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’. We randomly phoned up this poor lady [Merry Clayton] 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.”
Citing the song as his own personal favourite, he continued: “She came in and knocked off this rather odd lyric. It’s not the sort of lyric you give everyone — ‘Rape, murder / It’s just a shot away’ — but she really got into it, as you can hear on the record. She joins the chorus. It’s been a great live song ever since.”
“It was a very moody piece about the world closing in on you a bit,” Jagger said of the track that now sadly has a remaining pertinence. “When it was recorded, early ’69 or something, it was a time of war and tension, so that’s reflected in this tune”. There is a sense of ordered chaos that perfectly tapped into the social unrest of the era, but in the biblical incantation there is also a sense of hope; no wonder it is also Martin Scorsese’s favourite Stones anthem.
For Mayall, perhaps the appeal also lay in the fact it was both firmly grounded in the blues but decidedly futurist. Although it arose shortly after he was fired and was released a matter of months after his death, the song seems to capture Brian Jones’ defiant vision for the band. It’s young fellows simply saying, ‘there is something happening here, and that much is very clear’.
Even now, the song is spookily apocalyptic and filled with the frenzied air of rock ‘n’ roll at its most fierce. No song has made a simple C♯ Minor progression stretch further.
