How John Paul Jones and Nicky Hopkins Shaped 'She’s a Rainbow'—and What It Meant for the Stones

Before he co-founded Led Zeppelin, John Paul Jones was a busy London session arranger. For the Rolling Stones’ 1967 single “She’s a Rainbow,” he wrote and conducted the lush string part that gives the song its swirling, Technicolor lift. Jones had already worked with the Stones on earlier tracks, but this arrangement—full of swooping cellos and violins—turned a folkish piano demo into one of the band’s most orchestrated moments.

Nicky Hopkins, the go-to session pianist for everyone from the Beatles to the Who, played the song’s prominent harpsichord line. That baroque touch, combined with Jones’ strings, made “She’s a Rainbow” the sweetest-sounding outlier on Their Satanic Majesties Request. While the album was the Stones’ attempt to out-psychedelic the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper, the band later dismissed most of it as forced. But “She’s a Rainbow” worked: it captured the era’s flower-power optimism without the heavy studio fog that weighs down the rest of the record