The Day The Rolling Stones Painted The World Black

Paint It Black: The Sitar That Shocked the Charts and Changed Rock Forever

Sixty years ago today, inside RCA Studios in Hollywood, the Rolling Stones were not being serious. Not even slightly. Bill Wyman sat down at the organ and started playing what Mick Jagger later described as “bi-jing, bi-jing, bi-jing” — a dead-on parody of klezmer music, mimicking the style of the band’s former co-manager Eric Easton, who had been an organist. Everyone in the room was laughing. Nobody could have guessed that what started as a collective joke would become one of the most iconic recordings in rock history — the first Number One on both sides of the Atlantic to feature a sitar, and a song that still stops people cold six decades later.

That’s the thing about “Paint It Black.” It arrived disguised as something else entirely.

From Soul Ballad to Psychedelic Earthquake

The Stones had originally sketched the track as a slow, traditional soul number. Jagger and Richards had been working on the chord progressions the previous December and continued shaping the song during the band’s Australian tour in early 1966. Nothing too daring on paper. But what happened in the studio couldn’t have been scripted. When Wyman found that organ pattern — playing the pedals in that lurching, hypnotic way — Charlie Watts locked in with a drum part that felt vaguely Middle Eastern, ancient even. Suddenly the track had a heartbeat that belonged to no particular tradition. It was rock, but it wasn’t. It was blues, but it reached toward something older and stranger.

Then Brian Jones picked up the sitar.

Jones had acquired the instrument just weeks after George Harrison’s landmark performance on The Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood” introduced Eastern instrumentation to mainstream rock audiences in late 1965. Where Harrison had used the sitar as texture and color, Jones leaned into it as the song’s entire spine. His riff — hypnotic, slightly unhinged, with that exotic twang that sits perfectly inside the song’s dark, mysterious mood — has since been described by more than one critic as perhaps the most effective use of an Indian instrument in any rock recording. Keith Richards admitted years later that the song sounded nothing like the finished record until Wyman found that organ pattern. And yet it was Jones who gave “Paint It Black” its soul — or rather, its anti-soul. Its deliberate, almost violent refusal of comfort.

The Darkness Inside the Three-Minute Package

Jagger’s lyrics are deceptively plain. A narrator sees a red door and wants it painted black. He sees girls in summer clothes and has to turn away. He sees a line of cars, all painted black. Every image of color, of life, of forward motion gets swallowed by the same consuming darkness. Jagger himself called it “this kind of Turkish song” — acknowledging that the mood the band had created drew on something older than Indian raga rock, something more Middle Eastern in its drone and its restlessness.

What the lyrics don’t do is announce grief. They enact it. The narrator isn’t protesting or raging. He’s withdrawing, letting the color drain out of everything rather than confront whatever loss is driving the blackness inward. That psychological specificity — grief as erasure rather than explosion — is exactly what keeps the song feeling modern. It’s not an anthem. It’s a collapse.

In the 1966 pop landscape, that was genuinely shocking. Sunshine pop, Merseybeat, Motown love songs — the charts were full of forward momentum and romantic optimism. The Stones dropped “Paint It Black” into all of that like a cold stone into still water. Mick Jagger later reflected on the whole thing with characteristic self-awareness: “It’s like the beginnings of miserable psychedelia. That’s what the Rolling Stones started — maybe we should have a revival of that.”

Brian Jones: The Unsung Architect

You cannot tell this story without sitting with the uncomfortable truth about Brian Jones. He arranged “Paint It Black,” he contributed to the arrangements of many other songs from this period, and yet he never received a songwriting credit — because, according to Richards, he never brought a finished composition to the group. The Jagger/Richards credit was standard practice by then, a business reality as much as an artistic one. But Jones’s contribution to this specific recording goes beyond what any credit line could capture. His restless, almost desperate curiosity about sound — his need to find new timbres, new instruments, new textures — is what transformed a competent rock song into a landmark.

His body of work inside the Stones is full of these moments: lead guitar on “Get Off of My Cloud,” recorder on “Ruby Tuesday.” But the sitar riff on “Paint It Black” may be his single greatest musical achievement. There is a bitter irony in the fact that the song’s most immediately recognizable element — the riff that hooks you before a single word is sung — came from the one Stone who got no credit and would be fired from the band entirely within three years. Brian Jones drowned in his swimming pool in July 1969, aged 27. The sitar riff outlived him by decades, and will outlive all of us.

No. 1 on Both Sides of the Atlantic — and a Comma That Caused a Scandal

Released as a single in the US on May 7, 1966, and in the UK six days later, the response was immediate and overwhelming. In Britain alone, roughly 300,000 advance copies were sold within a week of release. The song raced to the top of both the Billboard Hot 100 and the UK Singles Chart, becoming the band’s third US Number One and their sixth in the UK. More significantly, it became the first song in chart history to reach Number One in both countries while featuring a sitar as a lead instrument.

But the strangest subplot of “Paint It Black” is typographical. A comma appears before the word “black” on the original Decca pressing — “Paint It, Black” — which was apparently a clerical error at the label. That errant comma ignited a controversy about racial interpretation that the band never intended and found genuinely baffling. A punctuation mistake became a culture war flashpoint. The Stones had wanted to paint a door. The world heard something else.

None of it slowed the song down. “Paint It Black” has since inspired nearly four hundred cover versions, appeared in dozens of films and television series — most memorably over the closing credits of the first season of Westworld — and landed at Number 174 on Rolling Stone magazine’s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time list in 2004. Writing on the song’s fiftieth anniversary, critics described it as “an explosion of ideas presented in one neat three-minute package.” That’s exactly right. But it’s also a document of transition — the moment when the Rolling Stones stopped being a very good blues-rock band and became something harder to classify. Something that reached toward psychedelia, toward the East, toward the darkest corners of human experience, and found a Number One hit waiting there.

Sixty years on, the sitar is still playing.

Paint It Black — Song Facts at a Glance