2000 Great Songs #1277: Gimme Shelter

Ok, here's where things get a little absurd. Because it seems beyond dispute that the Rolling Stones' 1969 masterpiece "Gimme Shelter" is one of the greatest songs ever recorded... yet here we are 1,277 songs into the list before we're landing on it. But we've already got 11 Stones tunes in this silly project, and I'm trying to be a little judicious in not glutting up the upper echelons of the list with the usual suspects. (Plus, for all my love of the track, it's still got a bit of Hot Rocks hangover, one of the hits I've heard so many times over the decades that I tend to pass it over for the less overplayed deep cuts.)

Still... what an absolute monster. The opening track on Let It Bleed [and, even better, my reimagined Gimme Shelter LP] pretty definitively signals the end of the 60s, the death rattle of psychedelia and idealism (even stripped of its context amid the late '69 Altamont musical festival shooting, a context that still feels hard to strip more than a half-century later). Merry Clayton's howls of rape & murder make it the most terrifying track in the Stones' arsenal, though Keith's scratchy guitar and that insinuating guiro percussion (played by Stones producer/collaborator Jimmy Miller) take the production way over the top. And then to bookend the LP with "You Can't Always Get What You Want," making the record a veritable sandwich of decade-ending insanity...

So, yeah, Top 10 song ever, right here at #1277.

Live 2012 with Lady Gaga:

Live 1972, the Mick Taylor years, damn...

Sisters of Mercy goth cover:

Inspiral Carpets:

Voice of the Beehive with Jimmy Somerville(!):

Patti Smith:

U2 & Mick Jagger, 2009:

See the entire Top 2000 to date in a sortable database!