We tried a guitar but you can’t bend it enough.” In addition to Bill’s organ, there is a piano track played by Jack Nitzsche. To get the right sound on Paint It Black we found the sitar fitted perfectly. We had the sitars we thought we’d try them out in the studio. They’re very brittle and you have to be careful how you handle them. Sitars are made out of watermelons or pumpkins or something smashed so they go hard. They make sitars and all sorts of Indian stuff. Keith Richards explained how it came to feature a sitar, “We were in Fiji for about 3 days. It opened with the track Mother’s Little Helper which the Yanks refused to have on their copies because of the drug connotations, so the American pressing had 11 tracks and ran for just under 43 minutes opening with Paint It Black, which was not on the UK copy. The British pressing featured 14 tracks and ran to just over 52 minutes, a lengthy album for the time. It was the first Rolling Stones album featuring all songs written by Jagger and Richards. Instead the songs were used for their next album Aftermath. The reason being, according to a record company spokesman at the time, “Our label will not issue it with that title at any price”. The Beach Boys were about to release Pet Sounds and the Beatles were finishing up Revolver, but the Rolling Stones had recorded an album with 14 songs on called Could You Walk on Water, but it was never released and remains in the vaults of Decca records. It was a bad time in the world with the Vietnam War raging but musically it was bouncing. This new more upbeat rhythm was then used in the recording as a counterpoint to the morbid lyrics. Charlie Watts joined in and improvised a double-time drum pattern, echoing the rhythm heard in some Middle Eastern dances. “Bill (Wyman) was playing an organ and doing a take-off of our first manager Eric Easton, who had started his career as a cinema organist and the intro sounded alright so we kept it in. It was written as a ballad originally, “But then it became a comedy track,” admitted Keith Richards in Rolling Stones magazine. Paint It, Black was written in March 1966 during the Rolliing Stones’ tour of Australia. What makes it, is the lead instrument, which, as Bill Wyman said, “Brian Jones playing the sitar gives it a whole new thing.” In 1966, the Melody Maker wrote in their review section, ‘Paint It Black is a glorious Indian raga-riot that will send the Stones back to number one,’ they were right.
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