My Top 100, No. 16: "Gimme Shelter" by the Rolling Stones

I love "Gimme Shelter" for kind of a weird reason: It prefigures the intro to New Radicals' "You Get What You Give."

Which I realize is a really dumb-sounding thing to say about a hugely influential rock classic and the highest-ranked song on this list by any sort of consensus classic rock band, to say nothing of it being a weird reason to rank any song in a personal top 100, let alone top 20. Wait, no, hear me out. Seriously, don't call the cops...

The first time you hear "Gimme Shelter"--well, "notice" might be a better word for it, because if you were born after 1969 the first time you heard it was probably in utero, or at any rate before you could understand the significance of the Rolling Stones. The first time you notice "Gimme Shelter" what sticks with you in the chorus: Mick Jagger and Merry Clayton singing the indelible "War, children, it's just a shot away / It's just a shot away."

It's a great line, and poignant for the place in history the song inhabits, which I will not get into because I can't talk about nostalgia for the 1960s without having a fucking stroke about the brazen hypocrisy of old people waxing rhapsodic about their time of war and social turmoil, then turning around and taking a 20-year-long dump when their grandchildren do the same thing, except we're not as smug and pretentious about it. I WILL NOT.

So leaving aside the importance of "Gimme Shelter" as a protest song--which, I'll grant, is a big thing to leave aside--what stands out on subsequent times through is the intro, which is how the New Radicals got involved.

It just builds layer on layer right off the bat, starting with one of the coolest guitar parts in the Western canon, which is so cool I lack any more complex words to describe it. What I can describe is the ratchet. I love a good ratcheting in a rock and roll song, and "Gimme Shelter" has a top-notch, grade-A ratchet part. It's just "CHTTTT, chuck-a CHTTT, chuck-a CHTTT" behind the awesome rhythm guitar and bitchin' guitar solo and the iconic line, all of which is a church built on the ratchet, and brother, I am here for some goddamn ratchet. 

And that's, succinctly, why I'm a Stones guy. Not just because I prefer songs that are about how much they love sex to songs about how much they love drugs (like certain other iconic British Invasion bands), but once you tear away the historical importance and Boomer shittiness, there's an iconic vocal line, and below that is a bitchin' guitar solo, and below that is a mind-bending rhythm guitar part.

And below that is the ratchet, which holds everything together.