gimme shelter
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I go through phases with music... Obsessive ones... a song... an album. Sometimes a whole artist. I'll get hooked for a stretch, anywhere from a month to three months, and play that one thing on repeat. Ten,.. maybe twenty times a day some days. It's a little nuts... I know. Then the era ends. I move on. A new one shows up. And here's the thing... the songs find me... I don't pick them. They show up at moments in my life when something is shifting, when I need something I don't have words for, and I play them on loop until I figure out what they're trying to tell me. Almost like something is trying to get my attention... There've been a couple recently. Around the time I was building ReadSowell.com, it was a French pop song called J'en ai marre by an artist named Alizée. I can't even explain why... it just hit. Something whimsical. Innocent. Fun. That era was about rebuilding... Getting in shape. Taking my health seriously... becoming Christian... reconnecting with old friends. The kind of stretch where you decide you've had enough of how things have been going and you start actually putting the work in. The era worked... Life got better. Then a new one took over. Crash, by an artist named Rico Nasty. Another whimsical song... Fun. Almost playful. This is the song I've been writing to. Some of the most serious pieces I've written. Charlie Kirk. The assassination attempts. Predator and prey. Heavy topics, all of them. All while a whimsical pop song plays in the background. Strange, right? The soundtrack was light. The work was heavy. That era is ending now. I still love Crash. But it's not quite landing the way it used to. A new song is taking over... a new era is coming... And this one... isn't whimsical. It's from 1969. Before I name it, I want you to do something. If you have a few minutes, pull it up. Put it on. Let it play before you read the rest of this. The words won't fully land if you don't. The song is Gimme Shelter, by the Rolling Stones. Released December 1969. The world it was written into was coming apart. Vietnam at peak... body counts on the news every night. The Manson murders four months earlier...riots... assassinations. The whole 'peace-and-love' era visibly cracking on television... Keith Richards wrote the opening riff during a storm in London... said it felt apocalyptic. Mick Jagger called the song "a kind of end-of-the-world song, really." The vocalist on the chorus is named Merry Clayton... she was pregnant. They called her in the middle of the night... she showed up to the studio in pajamas with a fur coat thrown over hair curlers and they put her in front of the mic. Rape, murder, it's just a shot away. It's just a shot away. She sang it three times. Sang isn't the right word... she screamed it... On the second one, you can hear her voice crack on the word MURDER. They kept that take... it's the take you hear today. She miscarried later that night... The album came out. Days later, the Stones played a free concert at Altamont... Hells Angels, hired as security, stabbed a young man named Meredith Hunter to death in front of the stage while the band played... The peace-and-love dream cracked that night, on stage, with the world watching. The song was the warning shot. This is the song that is defining my life for the time being... and I think I know why... Charlie Kirk... One shot... On a college campus... At midday... In front of cameras. This entire project. This writing. This email. ReadSowell. The book I'm working on... None of it would exist if Charlie were still alive. That one shot changed my entire life, my entire world... It rewrote what I do with my time. It rewrote my priorities. It rewrote how I see the world. Something in me broke and something in me started, both at the same time. I went from a computer programmer who posts Sowell quotes in his spare time, to a guy who can't stop writing about what he sees, because I see it now and I can't unsee it. One shot did that... To one person. Me. Now ask yourself something... How many other lives got rewritten that day? How many priorities. How many worldviews?... How many people are walking around in a world that looks completely different than the one they were in the morning Charlie was killed? I don't know the number. But I don't think I'm the only one... are you one, too? And then there’s Trump… Butler, Pennsylvania. July 2024. The shooter on the rooftop fired eight rounds… killed a firefighter who shielded his wife and daughter with his own body… wounded two others critically. One of those rounds hit Trump in the ear… not near… not close. It hit him. The bullet drew blood. The only reason it hit his ear and not his skull is that he turned his head a quarter inch at the exact millisecond the shooter pulled the trigger. Now ask yourself. Was that luck the shot missed?… And Butler wasn’t the only one. He keeps surviving. But it’s not just Trump. Cole Allen at the Correspondents’ Dinner. James Hodgkinson at a Republican baseball practice. Ryan Routh in the bushes at Trump’s golf course. Tyler Robinson on Charlie’s campus. Different days. Different shooters. Same drumbeat in their ears. Trump is Hitler. MAGA is fascist. By any means necessary. Delivered daily, for a decade. By a thousand voices. One tweet, one cable hit, one campaign speech, one Jimmy Kimmel monologue at a time. None of them needed to write a manifesto... the manifesto was already written... These are just the ones who acted on it… so far… How many more Cole Allens are out there? It’s just a shot away. Now... here's the part I really don't want to write... but we have to talk about it... What if next time they don't miss... What if it's JD... Stephen Miller... What if it's one of the senators... one of the governors... one of the podcasters... one of the writers... one of our people. Someone you watch every week. Someone you don't even know yet, but will be mourning before the year is out. Somebody is going down... These people aren't playing... a pattern is emerging... A new era is here. You can feel it the same way Mick and Keith felt it in 1969. Brace yourself. This is the game. Predators and prey. It's just a shot away. There's one more line in the song we need to talk about... comes near the end... same melody... same cadence... different word. Love, sister... it's just a kiss away. It's just a kiss away. A shot away from horror... A kiss away from connection... Same proximity. Different direction. So while the shot is on the news... look up. Who's actually in the room with you right now? Your wife. Your kids. Your brother. Your parents. Your friends. Me, even. The people you don't have to pretend around. The shot is loud and far... the kiss is quiet and close. That's where the shelter is. Reach for it. You're going to need it. Now play the song... put it on repeat. Reply back and tell me what you felt... do you feel what I feel? I want to know if you hear it the way I do. stay close, ~ Clay P.S. Merry Clayton's voice cracking on the second MURDER is the take they kept. She gave it to them with the cost of her body. The song is sacred for that reason alone, before you even get to what it was warning about. |
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