Some of the biggest artists in the world can be guilty of eating their own tails after a while. There might be great moments throughout their career, but fans can always smell when any superior rock band ends up releasing something inauthentic or technically off from what they normally would do. Keith Richards usually did not need to worry about sounding like anyone other than himself, but he admitted that ‘Paint It Black’ didn’t really sound as organic as he thought it should have been.
But in the early 1960s, most of The Stones’ work involved them taking more chances than they were known for. In a perfect world, they would have continued to play the same old blues progressions that they had loved since they were kids, but by going outside their comfort zone, they discovered that they had a lot more avenues to work with.
While there are always going to be a handful of people who try to measure The Stones on the same level as The Beatles, they never thought in those terms. They were proud to be in the same scene as the Fab Four, but what they offered was something a bit more nasty, and ‘Paint It Black’ was a perfect example of that.
Despite some obvious parallels to George Harrison’s Indian influence with the inclusion of sitars, Mick Jagger is the only vocalist who could have sung a track like this in the 1960s. Instead of John Lennon singing that all we needed was love, Jagger’s protagonist lives in darkness all the time, which is only matched by Richards’ rhythm guitar anchoring everything down and Charlie Watts’s heavy approach to percussion.
As the band started jamming on the back end, though, Keef thought that things started to go a little bit off the rails, saying, “It’s over-recorded at the end. The electric guitar doesn’t sound quite right to me, the one I play. I should have used a different guitar; at least, a different sound. And I think it sounds rushed. I think it sounds as if we’ve said – as we actually did – ‘That’s great. If we do anymore we’ll lose the feel of it’.”
While Richards can critique his own work all he wants, that kind of overproduction is actually what makes the outro that much more exciting. That rush job that Richards talked about may have very well been the case, but the nervous energy actually does a better job at painting the picture of a man slowly losing himself in a world of darkness than a simple acoustic guitar break.
If anything, The Stones could have benefited from leaning into that side of their sound, and the next few records they made in the 1970s make a better case for that overproduction. There are certainly times when they just got more people to work on their albums, but the jam at the end of ‘Can’t You Hear Me Knocking’ or the tempo shift on ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’ is what keeps the listener engaged the entire time.
So if taken that way, a song like ‘Paint It Black’ probably had to happen that way for The Stones to get to their more menacing material. It’s easier to appreciate everything looking back on it, but it takes a song like this to truly appreciate the spooky vibe of ‘Gimme Shelter’ that would come later.
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