The recording session heard round the world

At 20, Merry Clayton got a late night call to sing backup with the Stones. She had no idea that fame was 'just a shot away'

BRAD WHEELER
June 20, 2008
Globe and Mail

When Merry Clayton met her moment, she was wearing a mink coat over silk pyjamas, her curler-held hair draped with a Chanel scarf. The Los Angles-based background singer had just "hunkered down" into bed on an autumn night in 1969 when she received a call from producer Jack Nitzsche, a friend of hers who apologized for the late hour but explained that an English band in town needed a young lady to sing with them. A car would be sent for her, she was told, and the session would be brief.

Shortly afterward, walking into Elektra Studio at midnight, Clayton encountered a whip-thin London longhair who asked, pleasantly enough, "You here for us?" Clayton wasn't sure, replying, "Well, who are you?" to which he answered, "I'm Keith Richards."

When Mick Jagger appeared, Clayton listened to a tape of Gimme Shelter, the song she would be contributing vocals to. According to the singer, who appears with Ronnie Spector and Darlene Love at the Toronto Jazz Festival on Saturday, the session was much like so many others. "They told me what they wanted me to sing, I sang it - I did three takes - and kissed them goodnight and I was gone," is how Clayton recalls the occasion, speaking surprisingly blithely from California.

Now hold on, girl, we're talking about Gimme Shelter, the shivery doom song that opens 1969's Let it Bleed and appears in at least three Martin Scorsese films. Surely you recognized the brilliance at hand. Please tell us you tingled at the sound of your own soul-shattered banshee distress. "I knew it was fabulous when I left," Clayton allows. "As I was walking out the door, it was playing, you could hear that echo, and I said, 'Damn, that sounds wonderful.' " That's a word, "wonderful." Others might use "stunning" or "apocalyptic masterpiece" - and Clayton's golden tonsils are all over it. On the ominous lead-in, it is Clayton's "ooos" heard over twitching noises and Richards's spidery guitar riff. On the chorus, it is she who adds lightening-high harmony, sitting tall on a stool between the standing glimmer twins Jagger and Richards. And on the iconic vocal solo - "Rape, murder, it's just a shot away" - it is Clayton's howl that breaks on a high note, adding further tension and causing Jagger to exclaim "yeah!" in the background.

Asked if she thought she had botched the take when her voice broke at "murder," the one-time Raelette says it wasn't a concern. "It didn't matter at that point," she explains, "because I was tired, and it was late." Clayton, 20 at the time, told everyone that she had given it all she had, and if they could use it, fine. She offered to come back, if need be. "No, we think we have what we need," was the undebatable reply.

The song was written mostly by Richards - he slapped it down on a cassette in 20 minutes - and has been described by Jagger as a "kind of end-of-the-world song." Later, it provided the title and closing credit music to a film by Albert and David Maysles that documented the Stones' 1969 tour - the tour that ended darkly with the killing of Meredith Hunter at Altamont.

To Clayton, the lyrics of Gimme Shelter mattered to her performance. "We were deep in the middle of a big war," the church-trained singer explains. "Vietnam was no joke at all. There were rapes going on over there, there was murder going on. We had relatives and family over there, and we were in prayer that they came back safe, and alive and well.

"I absolutely knew what I was singing about."

Clayton, who recorded her own funked-up version of the song a year later, went on to a solo career, and continued to work as a sought-after backup singer. Much in the same way as Claire Torry, whose soaring wordless vocals excited Pink Floyd's The Great Gig in the Sky, Clayton's calling card will remain Gimme Shelter. It might never have happened - first choice Bonnie Bramlett, of Delaney & Bonnie, was ill at the time, and others were also considered.

According to Clayton, however, not all singers were up to the job. "You couldn't call some girls to sing with certain artists, because they felt a little intimidated." But not Clayton, who had previously worked with Bobby Darin and Ray Charles and had grown up singing in her father's church. "It really didn't matter to me who I sang in front of or I sung with," she says. "I was never bashful."

In fact, quite to the contrary, this Merry.

Merry Clayton and the Grand Dames of R&B open for John Hammond at the Toronto Jazz Festival on Saturday at 8 p.m., at Toronto's Nathan Phillips Square, http://www.tojazz.com.*****

Gimme Merry

Born Christmas Day, 1948, which accounts for the seasonal spelling of her first name

Early Career - At 14, recorded You're the Reason I'm Living with Bobby Darin. A year later, in 1963, she recorded the first version of The Shoop Shoop Song (It's in His Kiss), although Betty Everett had the hit.

On Ray Charles - "He wasn't tough to work for. He wanted what he wanted when he wanted it," says Clayton, a Raelette in the mid-1960s. "He asked that you hit the right note, be wonderful, be charming, look good and smell good, but most of all be a lady and sing your face off."

Professional - Sang background on Lynyrd Skynyrd's Sweet Home Alabama and Neil Young's Expecting to Fly, and starred as the Acid Queen in the original 1972 London production of the Who's Tommy.

Personal - Married to bebop saxophonist Curtis Amy until his death in 2002. He toured with Ray Charles and contributed solo to the Doors' Touch Me.