The Midnight Session That Made 'Gimme Shelter' Unforgettable

Merry Clayton was asleep at home in Los Angeles when the phone rang around midnight in October 1969. The Stones were mixing “Gimme Shelter” at Elektra Sound Recorders and wanted a female vocalist to answer Mick Jagger’s lines. Clayton, then 20 and pregnant, threw on a robe and drove to the studio in her Rolls-Royce. She cut the track in just two or three takes, her voice cracking with raw terror on the word “rape”—a sound that came from just hitting the note with no rehearsal.

The session wrapped around 2 a.m. Clayton drove home, but on the way she ran a red light and was hit broadside by a car, thrown from her vehicle and seriously injured. She lost the baby she was carrying. The freak timing of the crash—happening literally hours after she sang the most apocalyptic lyrics of the decade—turned the recording into rock folklore. Clayton’s vocal, captured in that window of adrenaline and exhaustion, became the emotional center of the song and one of the most legendary unplanned performances in rock history.