Brian Jones's Sitar on 'Paint It Black' (1966)

The sitar on “Paint It Black” wasn’t just a gimmick—it was Brian Jones responding to George Harrison’s sitar on “Norwegian Wood” a year earlier, but he took it darker. Jones had already been diving into Moroccan and Eastern sounds, and he brought the sitar to the session after picking one up at a London Indian music shop. The song was originally a standard R&B number until Jones’s droning, bent-note riff gave it that hypnotic, percussive edge.

What really sells it is how the sitar interacts with the track’s other weird elements—Bill Wyman’s organ, the galloping tempo, and Mick Jagger’s frantic vocal. Jones tuned the sitar to match the guitar, then played a descending line that mirrors the lyrics’ spiral into grief. It’s less about authenticity and more about mood: that sitar turns a pop song into a funeral march from another continent. Brian didn’t live to see it, but he essentially invented the psychedelic rock s