How Brian Jones’ Sitar Gave ‘Paint It Black’ Its Haunting Edge

The most famous sitar in rock history almost didn’t happen. During the Aftermath sessions in early 1966, the Stones were messing around with a track originally called “Take It or Leave It.” Brian Jones had been fascinated by Indian classical music ever since he borrowed George Harrison’s sitar at a party, and he brought his own to the studio. The band was stuck on a standard blues progression until Jones started plucking that sitar’s sympathetic strings. The whole room stopped. Mick Jagger later said the song went from “a throwaway” to “a completely different animal in five minutes.”

Jones’ part was actually recorded last. Keith Richards played the descending guitar line on a fuzzed-out Danelectro, but it was the sitar’s droning, modal melody that gave the track its disorienting, Middle Eastern—well, technically raga-based—feel. Jones wasn’t a trained sitarist, but he had enough ear to blend the instrument’s twang with the song’s martial drumbeat and Bill Wyman’s driving bass. The result was a chart-topping single that sounded like nothing else on the radio, and it permanently linked the Stones with psychedelia even though they never deeply explored Indian music again.

The recording also caused tension. Jagger and Richards thought the sitar was a gimmick, but Jones insisted. He played it live in the studio, layered over the band’s take, and producer Andrew Loog Oldham mixed it high in the final version. That friction—Jones pushing for exotic textures against the band’s resistance—would only grow over the next two years. “Paint It Black” remains the clearest snapshot of his musical ambition before his playing began to fade.