“A comedy track”: The classic Rolling Stones song that started off as a joke
It says a lot about The Rolling Stones’ 1960s heyday that even their jokes were catapulted to number one during the period. They were so profusely creative that they could gild even pithy little studio gags into gleaming hits that proved to be among their most iconic works. They were the shake-up that made bands fear the British Invasion, and they were taking it all one laugh at a time.
‘Paint It Black’ is a very dark song, and that stretches beyond the fact that Mick Jagger yells about wanting everything cast into monochrome. Behind the literal surface is a song about shutting out the sun and lulling in the darkness of loss. How such a song could be rooted in a joke seems unfathomable, but Keith Richards explained that the origin of the music was lighter than the heavy result.
“Mick wrote it,” Keith Richards told Rolling Stone, “I wrote the music, he did the words. Get a single together. What’s amazing about that one for me is the sitar. Also, the fact that we cut it as a comedy track.” That’s some very dark comedy, indeed. But the guitarist isn’t twisting the truth; tomfoolery truly was the crux of this 1966 classic.
Eric Easton was the band’s manager at the time and the iconic fast-paced organ playing on the tune was Bill Wyman’s attempt to make a mockery of his manager’s stylings. “Bill was playing an organ, doing a take-off of our first manager who started his career in show business as an organist in a cinema pit,” Richards explained.
Now, it’s often omitted from the lore of the Stones – perhaps because it doesn’t fit their wayward image – how hard-working they are. They’ve spent countless hours in studios, and with that comes a touch of play. “We’d been doing it with funky rhythms,” Richards continues, “And it hadn’t worked, and he started playing it like this and everybody got behind it. It’s a two-beat, very strange. Brian playing the sitar makes it a whole other thing.”
The building pace of the song certainly adds a sense of drama to the track and colours the downbeat lyrics with a viscerally emotional edge. In the end, we are left with the spellbinding, frenzied incantation that the song swells into–like a man rhythmically screaming in the street, adding a visual element. If the organ playing has derived origins in a theatre pit, then the resultant ‘joke’ is certainly cinematic.
This spoof, however, was not the only influence on the eventual sound of the song as Jagger also drew inspiration from the compositions of Jewish Wedding songs, most notably ‘Hava Nagila’. Whilst the melody is certainly similar, the psychedelic edge that ‘Paint It Black’ is all on the Stones and their desire to dip their toe in the spiraling zeitgeist.
In his 2002 book Rolling with the Stones, Bill Wyman explained that the album was intended to be the soundtrack for the never-filmed movie Back, Behind, and In Front. Mick Jagger met with the proposed director, Nicholas Ray—the man behind the iconic James Dean movie Rebel Without A Cause—and didn’t like him, so the project was scrapped. This surely serves as another reminder of how easily opportunities were arising for the band at the time.
The song remains one of The Rolling Stones’ best, and it is testimony to the band’s talent that it all stemmed from casually mucking around. From churlish beginnings, the band achieved stellar results—if only all creative feats could be accomplished so simply.
Alas, the highest irony of all comes from the fact that the band Big Star would later write a song joking about how serious ‘Paint it Black’ is.
