The hollow-body electric guitar on this Stones track died on the very last note: the whole neck fell off, and you can still hear it on the original take. What song?

Gimme Shelter: the guitar that gave out and the voice called in after dark

The guitar on Gimme Shelter came with a borrowed history and, according to Keith Richards, a very definite ending. Speaking to Alan di Perna for Guitar World in October 2002, Richards described an Australian hollow-body electric-acoustic instrument with f-holes. The magazine identified the brand as Maton. He remembered it as resembling the Gibson used by Chuck Berry, and said he also played it on Midnight Rambler. Its place in the session came from availability and sound, rather than a signature instrument chosen from a catalogue.

Richards said a visitor had stayed at his home for a couple of days, left abruptly and entrusted the guitar to him. The instrument had been refinished, but he liked its sound. Asked specifically about the tremolo rhythm at the start of Gimme Shelter, he confirmed using it there. He then described the entire neck falling off at the last note and said the incident was audible on the original take. This is the guitarist's own retrospective testimony about the session.

The song's initial image had also come from something immediately at hand. In his 2010 memoir Life, quoted in The Music That Maton Made, Richards placed himself in Robert Fraser's apartment on Mount Street in London, watching a severe storm. People outside were running as the wind pulled their umbrellas away. He connected the scene to the idea of shelter, describing the threatening weather as something happening to other people beyond the window. The remembered setting gives the composition a precise vantage point: a person indoors watching others exposed.

Jagger later connected the finished music with a wider atmosphere of violence. In the 1995 interview quoted in the same book extract, he discussed the Vietnam War, the images of burning and pillage on television, and opposition to fighting it. Those recollections describe different scales of danger: Richards's visible storm and Jagger's contemporary public world. The weather image supplied a starting point that could carry more than weather. Their later explanations do not require every threatening detail in the completed song to have been present at the first strum.

Merry Clayton's addition to Gimme Shelter brought another musician's decisions into that setting. As she recalled to Classic Rock, Jack Nitzsche phoned close to midnight when she was pregnant and preparing for bed. She initially resisted going to a studio so late; her husband, saxophonist Curtis Amy, persuaded her. She arrived in pink pajamas under a fur coat, with a scarf covering her rollers. The clothes were the circumstances of an urgent call, while the vocal that followed was professional work she had agreed to undertake.

Clayton remembered challenging the violent words Jagger gave her before she sang them. She wanted confirmation that this was really the material they wanted recorded. She also said the original tape retained Jagger's excited reaction to her performance. Her recollection gives her a role beyond responding to a producer's request: she examined the part and delivered it with an intensity that elicited an audible response. The session left both the performance and another musician's reaction inside the recorded material.

The 2013 documentary Twenty Feet from Stardom preserved Clayton telling the studio episode herself. In Mandalit del Barco's report carried by KPBS, Clayton recalled receiving a call for a British group whose name had barely registered with her. The film places her experience among those of professional background singers. Director Morgan Neville said his interest was in voices for hire who could enter a session without knowing what would be required and supply the necessary performance. Clayton's late arrival became a concrete example of that work, with preparation measured in a telephone call and a journey to the studio.

Neville also described an ambition to put Black women whose singing had been honed in church at the center of the film. The documentary included Jagger among the stars praising their background singers. Clayton's solo recordings were being reissued alongside the movie, bringing her name to the front of releases as the film brought her session memories to the screen. That later presentation gave the voice on Gimme Shelter a visible speaker describing the conditions in which it had been recorded.

The Recording Academy's official record names Clayton, Darlene Love, Lisa Fischer and Judith Hill together for Twenty Feet from Stardom's Best Music Film win in 2015. Clayton's entry also preserves her 1973 nomination for Best R&B Vocal Performance, Female, for Oh, No Not My Baby. The two entries identify a solo recording and a film performance under her own name, beyond her place in the Stones' studio mix.

Gimme Shelter: the guitar that gave out and the voice called in after dark

Gimme Shelter: the guitar that gave out and the voice called in after dark

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