55 years since the Rolling Stones released Gimme Shelter
Gimme Shelter was the first track on the Rolling Stones record Let It Bleed released 55 years ago on 5th December 1969
It was a different era and coming after the events of May 1968 in France, the Vietnam War was becoming an all pervading issue in the same way Gaza and Palestine are now.
The song was a Jagger/Richards composition and Jagger told Rolling Stone magazine (14th December 1995)
Well, it’s a very rough, very violent era. The Vietnam War. Violence on the screens, pillage and burning. And Vietnam was not war as we knew it in the conventional sense. The thing about Vietnam was that it wasn’t like World War II, and it wasn’t like Korea, and it wasn’t like the Gulf War. It was a real nasty war, and people didn’t like it. People objected, and people didn’t want to fight it … That’s a kind of end-of-the-world song, really. It’s apocalypse; the whole record’s like that
However Richards original idea had been motivated by watching a London rain storm which 55 years on gives the song an unintended climate change context as well
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