Nicky Hopkins’s Piano on 'She’s a Rainbow' and the Stones’ Brief Psychedelic Detour

The most striking thing about “She’s a Rainbow” is how un-Stones it sounds. No Chuck Berry riff, no blues shuffle—just a tinkling, music-box piano that glides the whole thing along. That piano was Nicky Hopkins, a session legend who’d already played on “Sympathy for the Devil” and would later work with the Who, the Beatles, and nearly everyone else. The Stones wanted something delicate and orchestral for Their Satanic Majesties Request, their 1967 stab at psychedelia, so they gave Hopkins a simple chord pattern and let him improvise. What he came up with—a bright, arpeggiated line that rings out in the verses—is the song’s backbone.

The arrangement itself was a radical departure from the band’s usual R&B roots. Instead of a driving rhythm section, there’s a string arrangement by a young session bassist named John Paul Jones (years before Led