Paint It Black

This is written from the viewpoint of a person who is depressed; he wants everything to turn black to match his mood. There was no specific inspiration for the lyrics. When asked at the time why he wrote a song about death, Mick Jagger replied: "I don't know. It's been done before. It's not an original thought by any means. It all depends on how you do it."

The song seems to be about a lover who died:

"I see a line of cars and they're all painted black" - The hearse and limos.

"With flowers and my love both never to come back" - The flowers from the funeral and her in the hearse. He talks about his heart being black because of his loss.

"I could not foresee this thing happening to you" - It was an unexpected and sudden death.

"If I look hard enough into the setting sun, my love will laugh with me before the morning comes" - This refers to her in Heaven.

The Rolling Stones wrote this as a much slower, conventional Soul song. When Bill Wyman began fooling around on the organ during the session doing a takeoff of their original as a spoof of music played at Jewish weddings. Co-manager Eric Easton (who had been an organist), and Charlie Watts joined in and improvised a double-time drum pattern, echoing the rhythm heard in some Middle Eastern dances. This new more upbeat rhythm was then used in the recording as a counterpoint to the morbid lyrics.

Jagger got the line "I turn my head until my darkness goes" from James Joyce's Ulysses.

Stones guitarist Brian Jones played the sitar on this. He made good television by balancing the instrument on his lap during appearances.

Keith Richards: "We were in Fiji for about 3 days. They make sitars and all sorts of Indian stuff. Sitars are made out of watermelons or pumpkins or something smashed so they go hard. They're very brittle and you have to be careful how you handle them. We had the sitars, we thought we'd try them out in the studio. To get the right sound on Paint It Black we found the sitar fitted perfectly. We tried a guitar but you can't bend it enough."

This was used as the theme song for Tour Of Duty, a CBS show about the Vietnam War which ran from 1987-1989.

On the single, there is a comma before "Black" in the title. Some people thought this was a racial statement.

Mick Jagger: "That was the time of lots of acid. It has sitars on it. It's like the beginnings of miserable psychedelia. That's what the Rolling Stones started - maybe we should have a revival of that."

U2 did a cover of this for the 7" B-side of "Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses," and used some of it in live versions of "Bad." Other artists who have covered it include Deep Purple, Vanessa Carlton, GOB, Tea Party, Johnny Lang, Face to Face, Earth Crisis, We Are Sex Perverts (W.A.S.P.), Rage, Glenn Tipton, Elliott Smith, Eternal Afflict, Anvil, and Risa Song.

Jack Nitzsche played keyboards. Besides working with The Stones, Nitzsche arranged records for Phil Spector and scored many movies. Nitzsche had an unfortunate moment when he appeared on the TV show Cops after being arrested for waving a gun at a guy who stole his hat. He died of a heart attack in 2000 at age 63.

The Stones former manager Allen Klein owns the publishing rights to this. In 1965, The Stones hired him and signed a deal they would later regret. With Klein controlling their money, The Stones signed over the publishing rights to all the songs they wrote up to 1969. Every time this is used in a commercial or TV show, Klein gets paid.

This is featured in the closing credits of the movie The Devil's Advocate. It is also heard at the end of Stanley Kubrick's movie Full Metal Jacket, where it serves as an allegory of the sorrow of the sudden death in the song relating to the emotional death of the men in the film, and of all men in war.

"Paint It Black" was referenced in the second verse of the song "Thirteen" by Big Star: "Won't you tell your Dad get off my back? Tell him what we said 'bout Paint It Black. Rock 'n' Roll is here to stay. Come inside where it's OK. And I'll shake you."

This song was used in the movie Stir Of Echoes with Kevin Bacon. In the movie, Bacon's character hears the first few chords of it in a memory, but could not think of the song. It drives him crazy through most of the movie.

Talking on his Absolute Radio show, Stones' co-guitarist Ronnie Wood disclosed that Keith Richards has trouble remembering how to play this song. He revealed, "We always have this moment of hesitation where we don't know if Keith's going to get the intro right."