How Brian Jones’s Open-Ear Curiosity Paved the Way for Beck and Tame Impala

Most people remember Brian Jones as the Rolling Stones’ original frontman, but his real legacy is how he treated the studio like a global instrument shop. On Aftermath and Between the Buttons, he’d pick up a sitar for “Paint It Black,” a dulcimer for “Lady Jane,” a marimba for “Under My Thumb”—not as gimmicks, but as serious textural choices. He wasn’t a virtuoso on any of them; he just had the curiosity to grab whatever made the song feel stranger, richer, more itself. That attitude—that a rock band can borrow from anywhere—opened a door that later shape-shifters like Beck and Tame Impala walked straight through.

Beck’s whole catalog is a collage of that same Jones impulse. On Odelay, he’ll drop a sitar-like slide guitar into “The New Pollution” or a marimba loop under “Where It’s At,” treating rock as a frame for whatever odd object fits. Kevin Parker of Tame Impala has named Jones’s multi-instrumentalism as a direct influence—listen to the flanging, filtered marimba on “Apocalypse Dreams” or the dulcimer-esque swells on Currents. Both artists inherited Jones’s belief that rock’s palette isn’t limited to guitars, bass, and drums; it’s a permission slip to raid the world’s rhythms and timbres.

The key isn’t technical mastery—it’s the attitude of a collector. Jones didn’t play sitar like Ravi Shankar; he played it like a rock star who wanted a different color. That casual, almost throwaway approach made it feel less like world-music appropriation and more like a band just finding sounds that fit. Beck and Tame Impala took that permission and ran with it, proving that the