Although it was the lead track on the Stones’s eighth studio LP, Let it Bleed, the song “Gimmie Shelter” was not released as a single. Indeed, the single “from” that album was the countrified non-LP track, “HonkyTonk Women” backed with the corny chorale sluice of “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” It was as though the Stones, knowing they would soon be pilloried on the cross of Altamont, wanted to have a way to try and dodge those nails by being able to claim they weren’t even a rock band. Well, fuck them.

55 long years after the Stones’s shameful retreat from their true identity, Jackie O Motherfucker has decided to try them in the court of public opinion, both for their jaundiced world view as well as the sheer cowardice of their presentation of facts.

The simplest way for JOMF to proceed would have been to illuminate the ridiculous musical and philosophical inconsistencies inside their trademark song of 1968/9, “Sympathy for the Devil,” but they chose to leave child’s play to children.

Instead, they took the four minutes and thirty seconds of “Shelter,” divided it into thirds and created a set of music that explores the mathematical relationships between those segments and the three parts of a song which it reportedly inspired, The Stooges’s “Gimme Danger.”

I’ve had the Calculus of the equation explained to me a couple of times by Tom Greenwood, the founding member of JOMF, but I get sorta lost in most number stuff more evolved than Trigonometry. My sense is that three improvised pieces on this album are musical meditations about the possible existence of a tripartite equivalent of Aristotle’s Golden Mean. And while I totally believe in his as a concept, it doesn’t really help to explain what the music sounds like, y’know?

The three tracks are drawn from two live shows and one studio session, using a line-up resembling that on 2023’s Manual of the Bayonet (FTR 640), the music here is largely-instrumental, reed-laced, and filled with the same glowing sense of direction this listener gets when I’m several acid sheets to the wind.

Some parts collect themselves and repeat like small bursts of energy trapped inside a pyramid. When vocals do pop up, they sound like out-takes from the soundtrack to Kenneth Anger’s Invocation of My Demon Brother, and submerge themselves in a murk of Egyptian dust. Some might compare JOMF’s sound to the more abstruse out-takes from the Dead’s Gizan shows of ’78. But its commentary on the nature of musical forms reaches back further than that.

I mean, remember — the Dead pulled out of playing Altamont. I’m not sure JOMF would have done the same, but I’m sure they would have done something if they found themselves in the same situation. And it might well have sounded like this. As Bear always said, “A trip in time saves nine.” Good thought, and as diggable today as it was back then.

Hop on. This shelter is rolling.

-Byron Coley, 2025

JOMF

Releases

Give Me Shelter