What a song only six years younger than Johnny Depp betokens or ought to betoken to consumers born decades later beats me. For the sake of argument, let's assume today's young folk can even distinguish this once unmistakably Stonesy mix of sinuosity and wallop from generic oldies smegma—and doubtless to my own mom's chagrin, I couldn't hum "I'm Through With Love" for you, either. Does hearing a young, almost-earnest Mick Jagger yowl "Rape, murder/It's just a shot away" just tell them Dad's hitting the Scotch again? If so, great—at least the damn thing's still useful, impinging on people's circumstances in a modest but practical way.
This side of the Beatles, it's all but impossible to disentangle any vintage rock song's merits from the context of its creation/reception—the bygone moment it once spoke to and was galvanized by, from society in flames to a VW's sticky back seat. The key distinction between pop culture and your average Beethoven devotee's idea of Great Art is that its genius only manifests in relationship to an audience, whether that means Madonna's World Cup legions at her 1980s zenith or a cluster of basement initiates carrying a torch for Pere Ubu. While the artistic virtues left over when the dust settles can be considerable, they're never the whole story. They're also mitigated by later developments, like the 30 years of hackdom that undermine whatever appreciation we might have of the circa-1969 Rolling Stones.
One reason the Sixties are such a Marcusean grail to pop-culture romantics is that bands almost as intransigent as Pere Ubu seemed briefly able to capture a Madonna-sized following. No question, "Gimme Shelter" was one of the Stones' late-Sixties peaks: chops-wise, capturing-the-Zeitgeist-wise, you-name-it-wise. That's just why, unlike "Help!" but like "Material Girl," whether it qualifies as music for the ages depends on the ages, not the music. What "Gimme Shelter" meant to listeners in 1969 was all it ever needed to mean. If the Stones' own version doesn't sound like the same song today —and I do mean not as good—that's just the nature of the game.
For boomers, this is the basic aesthetic confusion of their—okay, our—notoriously pop-cluttered lives. I've always marveled at so many of my near contemporaries' apparent assumption that whatever was talismanic then must be Great Art now by osmosis, fiat, droit de seigneur or something. If they really wanted to brag, they'd say the sensation is irrecoverable, which it is. The problem is that my generation wants its touchstones to be irrecoverable (the popcult halo) and immortal (the Great Art one) at once.
Just so you'll know, I was a 13-year-old bookworm in 1969, about as likely to be into the Stones as I was to play third base for the Washington Senators. (Yep, they were still around.) So whenever I fell in love with "Gimme Shelter," it was a couple of years after it came out. But I do remember exactly when I got fed up with the company I had to keep if I wanted to go on loving it. Not Mick 'n' Keith, though they were well on their way by then to reducing their salad days to concert lettuce: Oliver Stone and Bruce Wagner. As soon as "Gimme Shelter" cranked up in Stone and Wagner's bombastic 1993 TV miniseries, Wild Palms, I figured I had their number. I also knew I didn't want it to be mine.
Starring Jim Belushi, never my idea of a strong argument in favor of humanity's preservation—and set, incidentally, in 2007—Wild Palms was both a trendy Twin Peaks wannabe and a classic paranoid liberal fantasy, with the malignant forces of corporate America hounding a few brave souls stubborn enough to believe in free will. Of course, with "government" substituted for "business," this is also a classic right-wing fantasy, but that's life in these United States. Anyhow, what I remember despising about hearing "Gimme Shelter" in that context was Stone and Wagner's all but orgasmic nostalgia. They were fantasizing that awful days were here again so they could valorize themselves as the insurrection's generals.
Part of Reaganism's perniciousness was the way it left impotent progressives sniffing the socks of yesteryear's vanished glories, an addiction the left hadn't shaken by '93 and still hasn't as much as I could wish. Now that awful days are here again, I'm more suspicious than ever of seeing current events through a Sixties prism. Iraq = Vietnam is one thing, and George W. Bush = Nixon an unkindness to Nixon. But summoning ye olde counterculture's ghosts to do battle with them isn't just chimerical. It's also, you know, counterproductive—playing right into Bill O'Reilly's sweaty mitts, and so on.
If anyone can overcome my prejudices, though, it's 61-year-old Patti Smith, whose new all-covers CD, Twelve, features her version of "Gimme Shelter." Always the most Sixties-soaked of Seventies punk heroes, and no wonder—she does have 10 years on John Lydon/Rotten—she's never parted faith with ye olde counterculture's shibboleths, its more dubious or unworkable ones included: communal ecstasy, rock-as-revolution, apocalypse-soon if not apocalypse-good. But from her, I dote on it, and why? Filtered through her personality, nobody's ever going to call it corny, that's why. She's spent 30-plus years turning claptrap my brain tells me I should reject into defiant, incomparable idiosyncrasy. One reason I love her "Gimme Shelter" is that she sounds like she's just heard Pink's "Dear Mr. President" and decided to out herself as Pink's forgotten Appalachian grandma—which she almost could be.
Smith's version parches the melody—no soul-sister backup to provide release, the way Merry Clayton's keening did 38 years ago—but approximates the original arrangement, always "Gimme Shelter's" most undeniable element. (To hear how little impact the song has without it, check Angelique Kidjo's recent world-music version.) That descent-into-the-maelstrom intro is the most cinematic music of the Stones' career, explaining why Martin Scorsese has milked it in, count 'em, three movies—most recently The Departed, to which it had all the relevance of a singing telegram. But since Smith's longtime guitarist, Lenny Kaye, doesn't share Keith Richards's genius for disguising his basic bag of tricks, one odd bonus once the riff kicks in is that, like me, you may never have noticed the family resemblance between "Gimme Shelter" and "Brown Sugar" before. Live and learn.
Since this is Patti Smith, though, instrumental chops aren't the point. Vocal presence is. When you're as incapable as she is of emulating African-American phrasing—and similarly ill-equipped for divalike guided tours of the pipe factory, even today the only other available pop model for most white chantoozys—sooner or later you're going to be forced back on folk as your strength: Not the Joan Baez pablumization, but the bizarro stuff of Harry Smith's Anthology. If anyone ever compiles an update, Patti belongs.
The beauty of her singing here is that she sounds like one thing she is in real life, namely old. Think Mother Courage, not Sister Morphine; she isn't performing, she's falteringly remembering something that might be of use. Croaking, pained, impatient, she sings "Gimme Shelter" as if a visiting musicologist has just found out she's the last person still alive who knows how it went. While she's trying to oblige the nice man, what he doesn't understand is that she's got to get back to the assembly line. She'll make jokes about him over beers tonight; she'll have forgotten him by the weekend. But she won't have forgotten how "Gimme Shelter" sounded in 1969. She just can't sing it the way Mick Jagger did, but that's not our loss; it's hers.
She makes the song sound old, too. Not old as in oldies, but old as in ancient, making for a different kind of resonance than it's had until now. It answers the news by seeming not timely but ageless—something Jagger himself couldn't bring off on a bet, not that he's ever shown any interest in trying. So maybe the conundrum that so bedevils my peers—irrecoverable pop magic vs. Great Art's imprimatur—just got it all wrong, which wouldn't be the first time that happened. Goodbye, classic rock; hello, electronic folklore. Can't wait for Patti's haggard circa-2017 cover of "Material Girl," myself.