last many, many conversations I’d had about him had been so utterly painful… I’d just stopped having them.
I definitely tried never to talk for him.
However. Taylor wasn’t just anyone. And her interest always seemed genuine.
“I don’t like speaking for Gabe,” I told her. “People are always asking me to do that. But… he told me that the first time he ever heard ‘Gimme Shelter,’ it gave him chills. The layered guitars and that haunting Mick Jagger falsetto at the beginning… We were fourteen and he sat me down in his basement where we always listened to music. He was all amped up about something. Said he had a song I had to hear. He did that a lot. Then he put on ‘Gimme Shelter.’” I paused, trying to remember that day. “I’d never heard it before. And we listened to it over and over, trying to deconstruct it and pick out all the instruments we were hearing. There’s this wounded harmonica on it playing, like, two notes. And the scraping ratchet sound is this Latin percussion instrument called a güiro. We didn’t know what it was at first. We just had to listen. This was right before the days when you could just look up all this shit on the internet, you know?” I glanced at Taylor and she was listening intently.
“I didn’t know any of that,” she said. “I never even thought about what instruments were in it.”
“Well, you’re not a musician, so really, why would you? It has all the elements of an incredible song, and you don’t have to be a musician to pick up on that. The catchy melody, lyrics that slip into your subconscious before you fully realize what they’re singing about. And great production, including sounds that you don’t expect to hear. But I think what Gabe liked about it the most was the emotion he got from it. Kind of like what you said about the mood of the song. It was actually raining like hell the day he first played it for me, and the song has this feeling like Armageddon raining down on you. It’s apocalyptic. There’s this aura of darkness and doom in it. Keith Richards actually said he wrote it on a stormy day, so I’m sure that had some impact.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. It ended up being the opening track on Let It Bleed, which was a pretty groundbreaking album in 1969. It was probably the most sophisticated music the Stones had recorded so far. And somewhere in the process of recording and mixing that song, someone came up with the idea to bring in a female vocalist to sing the ‘rape, murder’ lyrics. And as you know, the result was pretty powerful.”
I met Taylor’s eyes again, and she was watching me with this dreamy look. I realized I’d been lost in the memory of that day, hearing the song for the first time. With Gabe, down in his parents’ basement. I almost thought it was raining out, and when I saw the sun shining through the window beside her it was disorienting.
“It was a brilliant idea,” she agreed.
“Hard to believe they were so young. Mid-twenties. Merry Clayton was only twenty when she sang on that track.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“Nope.”
“Holy shit. How is that possible?”
“Well, she was a gospel singer and a session backing vocalist. She’d already sung with Elvis. Imagine that, as a teenager.”
“Wow,” Taylor mused. “What the hell am I doing with my life?”
I laughed.
She smiled, like she was surprised she’d made me laugh. She always looked at me like that when she made me laugh. “How do you know so much about this song?”
“I’ve pored over a lot of interviews about the ‘Gimme Shelter’ recording over the years,” I confessed. “Thanks to Gabe being obsessed with the song. It’s a pretty cool story. You wanna hear more?”
“Yes, please.”
“You sure? Sometimes peeling back the curtain ruins the magic.”
“I’ll take the risk,” she said.
“Okay. The story goes, Merry Clayton gets this call in the middle of the night from a producer friend of hers, asking her to go down to the studio and sing vocals on a song. She was pregnant at the time, and her husband convinced her to get out of bed and go do it.”
“Really?”
“Really. She’d just come off of touring with Ray Charles, and she had no fucking clue who the Stones were. And this was three years after ‘Paint It Black’ was released.”