Gimme Shelter Isolated Tracks

I have been fascinated by the process of creating and recording music that really gets to your guts for like 20 years (I should try doing it then; ha ha), but I don't know if I have heard anything that sheds quite this much light in a long time. Someone bootlegged the individual recorded parts of one of my favorite Rolling Stones tracks:

http://www.dangerousminds.net/comments/deconstructing_gimme_shelter_listen/

I have NEVER heard what the guts of a recording of this caliber sound like, from beginning to end. (I mean other than ours, of course!)

The individual tracks are impressive, but there are numerous mistakes and clunky bits, which they didn't fix because they didn't have Cubase back in 1969. And who cares, because you can't really detect them in the end result.

There is a lot of layering of little guitar licks that sound totally lame on their own, but are perfect in context. Not that that is a foreign concept, but it is really interesting to hear it stripped to the bone for a track I thought I knew inside and out many years ago. Until Don sent me this (courtesy of Zach Baker). Don's take is that the underlying ("rhythm") guitar part is what makes the song, but the rest fills in perfectly on top of it. But he can't wrap his brain around how they (Keith) knew to add all the weird sounding fiddly licks. Like,

KEITH: Hey Mick, while I was having some chips and beans, I thought of another guitar part for Gimme Shelter! Right in the middle of the harmonica solo, it will go: dip-dee-dip deeeee.


MICK: Great, that will be really superb, Keith. Let's go round to Olympic and put it down on tape.

I personally find this dissection encouraging and inspiring. I am also kind of amazed at the amount of reverb when you hear the tracks in isolation. I guess I have been too much of a reverb scrooge on High Desert Mystery.