Brian Jones’ Sitar and the Stones’ Originality: Inside the ‘Paint It Black’ Sessions

The thing that jumps out about “Paint It Black” is how Brian Jones essentially taught himself the sitar in a single afternoon, determined to match the exotic sound George Harrison had just dropped on “Norwegian Wood.” The band was at RCA’s Hollywood studios in March 1966, cutting the Aftermath album, and Jones just grabbed a sitar someone had lying around and started messing with it until he got that droning, hypnotic riff that defines the whole track. It’s one of those moments where a musician’s restless curiosity changed the course of a song entirely — and the sitar wasn’t even listed on the original session notes as a planned instrument.

Those Aftermath sessions at RCA were a turning point because they marked the first Stones album made up entirely of original Jagger/Richards songs. After years of leaning on covers — blues reworkings, Chuck Berry tunes, girl-group hits — the band finally had enough material and confidence to fill a full LP without a single borrowed track. The Hollywood studio gave them a cleaner, more layered sound than their earlier London recordings, and it’s where they started using everything from mar