The 1966 song Mick Jagger labelled “the beginnings of miserable psychedelia”
When thinking of The Rolling Stones, a vision akin to the old “sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll” maxim comes to mind. The band are deemed the ultimate hellraisers in music.
The band’s various members have all contributed to this notorious mythos over the years, with special props going to the leading duo of frontman Mick Jagger and lead guitarist Keith Richards and late multi-instrumentalist Brian Jones.
At points, this infamy has threatened to overshadow the group’s undoubted musical achievements. One of the most important creative efforts is the ominous ‘Paint It Black’, which Jagger once deemed to the start of “miserable psychedelia”.
A key ingredient in that sound came from Brian Jones, who devised the track’s distinctive sitar line at a time when he was increasingly marginalised within the band’s core songwriting partnership.
Inspired by the growing presence of Indian instrumentation in Western music, and following conversations with George Harrison, Jones immersed himself in the instrument, studying under Ravi Shankar associate Harihar Rao and developing melodies that would eventually form the backbone of the song.
That sitar motif gives ‘Paint It Black’ its haunting, psychedelic texture, amplifying the bleakness of Mick Jagger’s lyrics. The imagery hints at grief and loss, with lines that evoke funeral processions and sudden tragedy, while the music leans into a darker strain of psychedelia. Jagger later described the track as part of a wave shaped by heavy LSD use, a more melancholic take on the genre that contrasted with its typically brighter tones.
It was the band’s founder, Jones, who came up with the sitar riff for the 1966 track despite him feeling increasingly sidelined by the partnership of Jagger and Richards at the time. During this period, the Indian instrument had started to gain prominence in Western popular music, thanks to its appearance in hits such as The Kinks ‘See My Friends’, and, most famously of all, The Beatles ‘Norwegian Wood’, from the prior year.
Jones was noted for his ability to quickly devise a melody on the sitar. He was taught the way of the instrument by Harihar Rao, a disciple of Ravi Shankar, the world’s foremost sitarist. After a discussion with The Beatles’ George Harrison, who played the instrument on ‘Norwegian Wood’ the previous October, Jones began spending more time perfecting his musicianship with the sitar, putting more complex melodies together and trying to integrate them into the band’s music. Over time, one of those melodies morphed into the lead line, which carries ‘Paint It Black’.
The sitar gives the song its deeply psychedelic feel, thanks to the genre’s inherent debt to the music and scales of the East. It also added a different dimension to the bleak lyrics that Jagger sets out, which appear to be about a lover who has passed away. Take the following lines, for example. The first, “I see a line of cars and they’re all painted black”, suggests a funeral procession, and the next, the unexpected circumstances surrounding the person’s death, “I could not foresee this thing happening to you”.
Interestingly, when asked why he wrote a song about death around the time of its release, Jagger replied: “I don’t know. It’s been done before. It’s not an original thought by any means. It all depends on how you do it.”
Elsewhere, Jagger noted the song’s psychedelic sound and the copious amounts of acid that influenced it. He described it as “miserable psychedelia”, which can be taken as a version of the genre containing more emotional weight than the overtly optimistic one it started as. He said: “That was the time of lots of acid. It has sitars on it. It’s like the beginnings of miserable psychedelia. That’s what the Rolling Stones started – maybe we should have a revival of that.”
