There’s Charlie Watts, his drums turning into a grim militaristic death-march on that fiery, spacey bridge, or the weird wobbly bass noises that Bill Wyman brings in. There’s the way that guitar turns into slashing urgency when Jagger ramps up the intensity. There’s Keith Richards’ eerie, spidery guitar - that’s him on the intro, not Jones. George Harrison was studying sitar at the same time, and he included the instrument, and the idea of Eastern minor-key music, on the Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood” before the Stones made “Paint It Black.” Jones scoffed at the idea that he was imitating the Beatles, but it’s hard not to see this as one of the best outcomes of the mythic Beatles/Stones rivalry - one band helping push the other toward coming up with one of their best songs.īut the sitar isn’t the only thing that “Paint It Black” has going for it. Instead, the Stones left their beloved American bluesmen alone and drew from other sources.īrian Jones was getting bored with rock ‘n’ roll by the time the Stones made “Paint It Black.” He was looking elsewhere for inspiration, studying sitar under the Indian master Harihar Rao, a Ravi Shankar protegé. But it has none of that primal, elemental blues-rock swagger. “Paint It Black” has all the fuzzed-out savagery of “ (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” and “ Get Off Of My Cloud,” the Stones’ previous two chart-toppers. They had to overhaul their whole musical approach to do it. It takes a crazy level of ambition to attempt to channel a feeling like this while making a single, but the Rolling Stones did it, and they made it work. It’s a song that conjures a bleak, dark, obsessive feeling - a song about being trapped in depression that finds ways to translate that inner turmoil into something resembling pop music. But this time, the bad feelings are a lot plainer and more apparent, even if Mick Jagger is only singing of them allusively, drawing on Ulysses and fractured imagery. Like the Animals’ “ The House Of The Rising Sun” before it, it’s a proto-goth cinematic odyssey into bad feelings. “Paint It Black” remains one of the heaviest, darkest songs ever to top the Billboard Hot 100. The immediate concern is the depression that’s crushing and overwhelming Jagger. He can’t even lose himself in the comfort of sex, which is always Jagger’s default option: “I see the girls walk by dressed in their summer clothes / I have to turn my head until my darkness goes.” Vocally, he goes from blank, numb flatness to frothing rage, fading and exploding and then fading and exploding again. He looks around at the world, and he toggles back and forth between incomprehension and total disgust. He’s singing about himself - about the new chasms of emptiness that are opening up inside of him. The rub is that Jagger isn’t really singing about that dead lover.
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