Why 'Paint It Black' Marked a Sharp Turn for the Rolling Stones — and How Brian Jones’s Sitar Pushed It East
Most people know “Paint It Black” as the snarling, funeral-march hit from 1966, but at the time it felt like the Stones had suddenly swapped their blues-rock sneakers for a pair of Moroccan slippers. Up until then, the band was still mining Chicago blues and R&B grooves—songs like “Satisfaction” and “19th Nervous Breakdown” were built on distorted guitars and Keith Richards’s gritty riffing. “Paint It Black” arrived with a droning sitar line, a spooky organ, and a galloping tempo that owed more to Middle Eastern scales than to Muddy Waters. The shift was so abrupt that some fans initially thought the band had swallowed a bottle of hallucinogens and wandered into a raga.
The sitar was Brian Jones’s idea, and it’s the single element that makes the song sound like nothing else in the Stones’ catalog. Jones had become obsessed with Indian music after hearing the Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood” and went out to buy a sitar and a tambura. He taught himself just enough to lay down the descending, hypnotic riff that opens the track. Producer Andrew Loog Oldham later said that when Jones first played it in the studio, everyone else fell silent—it was weird, anxious, and completely unlike the Stones. That sitar line, combined with Bill Wyman’s waltz-like bass and Charlie Watts’s floor-tom-heavy drumming, created a sense of relentless forward motion that mirrored the lyric’s grief and paranoia.
The departure wasn’t just in sound—it was in the song’s entire emotional register. “Paint It Black” is a song about wanting to paint the whole world black because the singer can’t escape the image of a dead lover. That’s a long way from “I can’t get no satisfaction.” The Stones pulled it off in part because the sitar gave the song an exotic, almost ritualistic feel—like a funeral procession you can’t stop marching in. It was a one-off experiment for the band; they never made another record with such a strong Indian influence. But it proved that the Stones could absorb a radically different tradition and make it sound like their own menace.