Paint It Black nearly got scrapped until a joke on the organ changed its mood
The Rolling Stones first recorded Paint It Black as a plodding minor-key pop tune that Mick Jagger compared to music for Jewish weddings. They almost dropped it. Then Bill Wyman started fooling with a Hammond organ during a break, and Brian Jones picked up a sitar that had just walked into the studio.
By 1966 Jagger and Richards were writing all of the band's material, and Aftermath would be the first album made entirely of their songs. Jones, who had founded the group, felt increasingly sidelined and bored with conventional guitar parts. He turned to Eastern instruments, drawing on lessons with Harihar Rao, a pupil of Ravi Shankar, and on a conversation with George Harrison, who had just played sitar on Norwegian Wood. One of the melodies Jones worked up became the song's famous opening line.
The band cut it in Los Angeles, at RCA Studios, on 6 and 9 March 1966, a looser session than the band's usual rush jobs. Wyman's heavy organ bass pushed the tempo up and gave the tune its Eastern feel; Rao arrived holding a sitar, and Jones fused his improvisations with the chords and lyrics. Wyman had stripped the frets from a bass guitar planning to replace them, liked the sound, and played it here, possibly the first fretless bass on record. The structure is unusual too: no chorus, five straight 16-bar verses, a chanted passage and a frantic ending. Jagger later called it a sort of Turkish song, and one scholar hears the Middle East more than India.
Wyman later objected that only Jagger and Richards were credited, arguing the arrangement grew from a jam by Jones, Charlie Watts and himself and should have carried the band's shared pseudonym, Nanker Phelge. Early reviews were mixed; some accused the band of copying the Beatles, others doubted a hit.
They were wrong. Released in May 1966, it topped the charts in the US, where it became the Stones' third number one, and in Britain, their sixth, as well as Canada and the Netherlands. It was the first number-one single built around a sitar, widening the instrument's reach and feeding the young psychedelic sound, and it entered the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2018.
Source: Paint It Black
