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A chart success for the Stones, the song spent eleven weeks – including two at number one – on the US Billboard Hot 100, and spent 10 weeks – including one atop the chart – on the Record Retailer chart in the UK. Retrospectively, critics have considered "Paint It Black" more favourably, and Rolling Stone magazine has ranked it one of the greatest songs of all time. Reviews at the time were mixed and some music critics believed its sitar sound was an attempt to copy the Beatles. London Records included it as the opening track on the American version of the band's 1966 studio album Aftermath. London Records released the song as a single on in the United States Decca Records released it on 13 May in the United Kingdom. A product of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards' songwriting partnership, it is an uptempo song with Indian, Middle Eastern and Eastern European influences and features lyrics about grief and loss. There was also a similarly adventurous and aesthetically mixed reinterpretation of the song by the new wave group the Mo-Dettes in the early '80s." Paint It Black" is a song recorded in 1966 by the English rock band the Rolling Stones. Burdon surely was enamored of the song, as he did it yet again with War in the 1970s. Eric Burdon & the Animals did a noted, if not particularly brilliant, rearrangement of "Paint It Black," heard in the Monterey Pop concert film, utilizing a drawn-out, almost avant-garde violin figure. Also dig how the Stones ride out the fade with creepy background vocals humming the main riff as Jagger becomes particularly excitable, starting to sing-shout the lyrics and announcing that he wants to not just paint everything black, but see the sun blotted out from the sky - surely one of the most despairing images in popular music. This has the double purpose of increasing the tension of the lyric and varying the mood of the song - a mood that, as pop/rock songs go, must rate among the most mordant in all of rock. Watts then kicks into a dynamite hard rock drum pattern to get the tempo going again right after Jagger bemoans how he couldn't imagine this tragedy happening to his lover.
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It's also a cool touch to have the stiff drumbeat briefly replaced by tambourine rattles at the beginning of the last verse, as Jagger lingers on an especially sorrowful line.
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The drums return to a standard hard rock rhythm in the explosive chorus, which has subtle melodic shifts of minor keys that serve as evidence of Jagger and Richards' underestimated skill at creating compelling pop hooks, in the mid-'60s at any rate. That rhythm survives into the final track, serving as an effective counterpoint to Jagger's moodily intoned lyric about, apparently, a dead girlfriend. When Bill Wyman began fooling around on the organ during the session doing a parody of their middle-aged original co-manager Eric Easton (who had been an organist), Charlie Watts joined in the fun and laid down an urgent double-time drum pattern, echoing the rhythm heard in some Middle Eastern dances. It was later reported, in fact, that "Paint It Black" had begun life in a much slower, conventional funky soul vein.
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The exotic twang was a perfect match for the dark, mysterious Eastern-Indian melody, which sounded a little like a soundtrack to an Indian movie hijacked into hyperdrive. The principal riff of "Paint It Black" (almost all classic Rolling Stones songs are highlighted by a killer riff) was played on a sitar by Brian Jones and qualifies as perhaps the most effective use of the Indian instrument in a rock song.
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It also entirely broke free of the blues and R&B influences that had colored their 1965 smashes like "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" and "Get off of My Cloud." That in turn proved that Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were versatile, growing writers who could compete head-to-head with the best rock composers of the era, such as their chief rivals, the Beatles, of course. "Paint It Black" was one of the greatest Rolling Stones singles, reaching number one on both sides of the Atlantic in mid-1966.