Paint It Black: How Brian Jones’ Sitar Gave the Stones a Dark Psychedelic Breakthrough

The recording story of “Paint It Black” starts with a sitar Brian Jones bought at a London antique shop. Jones had been obsessed with Indian classical music ever since hearing Ravi Shankar in 1965, and he taught himself the instrument by trial and error. During the Aftermath sessions at RCA Studios in Hollywood, he plucked a riff that turned a standard rock demo into something hypnotic and doomed. The band built the arrangement around that descending sitar line, layering it with a galloping drum pattern from Charlie Watts and Keith Richards’ open-tuned rhythm guitar. The result sounded like nothing else on the radio in spring 1966.

The sitar part wasn’t just a gimmick—it fundamentally changed the song’s mood. Instead of the minor-key dirge the lyrics implied, the drone and microtonal bends of the instrument created a swirling, almost disorienting atmosphere. Bill Wyman’s bass followed the sitar’s root note, while the tambourine and maracas added a manic, percussive edge. Producer Andrew Loog Oldham pushed the mix to make the sitar prominent, rejecting the idea that it should be background color. The band nailed the track in a few takes, but Jones kept re-tuning his sitar between runs, searching for the exact pitch that would sound both mournful and aggressive.

The song stayed controversial—some radio stations balked at the sitar, others at the suicidal lyrics. But it shot to number one in the US and UK, proving that the Stones could absorb non-Western influences without sounding like tourists. Jones’ sitar work on “Paint It Black” became his most lasting contribution to the band’s catalog, and it directly inspired George Harrison to go deeper into Indian music on “Within You Without You” the following year. The take is a snapshot of a moment when a $25 instrument, bought on a whim, rewrote the rules for pop production.