How 'Mother’s Little Helper' Used a Guitar Drone and Uncomfortable Truths to Break 1960s Taboos

The most unsettling thing about “Mother’s Little Helper” isn’t the sitar-like drone—it’s that the drone isn’t even a sitar. Brian Jones created the droning effect by putting a capo high on his Gibson Firebird and playing an open-string pattern, giving the song a hazy, Eastern-tinged tension without a single Indian