For three minutes, this song does something almost nobody in 1966 was doing on a number one single, and almost nobody noticed how strange it was while it was happening. Listen to the top. A drone bends in from somewhere east of London, a string that doesn’t belong on a Rolling Stones record, and then Charlie Watts comes in underneath it like a march. Not a dance. A march.
That instrument at the front was never the plan. The song started its life as something else entirely, a flat little minor-key thing the band nearly walked away from in the RCA studio in Los Angeles. What you hear instead is the sound of five people fixing a problem in real time, with whatever happened to be lying around the room. The famous sound at the front of this record did not get there the way you would assume. How it actually arrived is stranger, and luckier, than a band sitting down and deciding on it.
A number one you have been singing wrong for sixty years.
Pull the arrangement apart and it stops sounding like a pop song at all. The organ has a lilt to it that the band themselves recognized, a flavor that has nothing to do with London or Chicago blues. Jagger and Richards both, separately, reached for the same comparison when they tried to describe what they’d built, and it is not a comparison you would expect from two Englishmen who grew up on American records. The piano leans the same way. There is a whole second tradition humming under the surface here, and once you hear it you cannot un-hear it.
Then there are the words. People sing along to this at full volume without slowing down on what is actually being described. It reads like a young man’s mood piece, all that color draining out of the world. It is not a mood piece. There is a very specific scene behind it, and a very specific reason the singer wants everything turned the color it is. The line about the row of cars is the tell. Sit with what that line is actually describing.
The Stones cut this in March 1966 and it went to number one on both sides of the Atlantic. Then, two decades later, it found a second life in a place none of them could have written toward. Press play. You have been singing a darker song than you think.
Surface any pearl, in any order, to hear what's really going on.
“That sitar drone was the whole idea from the start.”
It almost did not exist. The band had a limp minor-key pop arrangement they were ready to bin. Bill Wyman, fooling around on a Hammond organ chasing a heavier bass, dragged it somewhere darker. Then Brian Jones's sitar teacher happened to walk into the studio holding one. The most famous sound in the song arrived by accident, carried through the door by a man who was not even on the session.
“A moody anthem about feeling angry and dark inside.”
It is a funeral. The narrator is watching his partner being buried; that famous image of black cars in a row is the procession, and the black he wants smeared over everything is grief, the color draining out of a world that lost its center. Tony Visconti called it "desperation and desolation, no hint of hope." It is not a mood. It is a man at a graveside.
“That exotic sitar line is the band reaching for India.”
Not in their heads. The Stones never heard this as Indian music. Jagger said they were writing "songs for Jewish weddings." Richards called the riff "Hava Nagila or some Gypsy lick." Under the sitar sits Wyman's klezmer-flavored organ and Jack Nitzsche's gypsy piano. The sound the world filed as psychedelic raga is, by its own authors, Eastern European: a wedding dance turned funeral march.
“The bass on this is just a bass, played hard.”
Look closer at the instrument. Bill Wyman is believed to have pulled the frets off his bass for this track, then kept the eerie, sliding tone it gave him: what may be the first recorded fretless bass in rock. The low end that makes the song feel like it is sinking is not a normal bass played well. It is a bass with its teeth removed.
“This is the definitive Vietnam War song.”
It is now. It was not when it was written. "Paint It Black" came out in 1966 as a song of private grief, nothing to do with any war. The Vietnam association was bolted on twenty-one years later, when it played over the end credits of "Full Metal Jacket" and became the theme to the TV series "Tour of Duty." A grief song was drafted, long after the fact, into a war it never mentioned.
Bruce Springsteen · Born in the U.S.A. · 1984
Born in the U.S.A.
The whole stadium sang it wrong for a decade. Listen to who the verses bury.
The real meaning of Born in the U.S.A. →
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