The Rolling Stones song that Keith Richards said “doesn’t sound right”
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Some of the world’s biggest artists can be guilty of eating their own tail after a while. There may be great moments throughout their careers, but fans always smell when a superb rock band ends up releasing something inauthentic or technically different than they normally would. Keith Richards didn’t usually have to worry about sounding like anyone other than himself, but he admitted that “Paint It Black” didn’t really sound as organic as he imagined it would.
But by the early 1960s, the Stones were taking more risks than they were used to in most of their work. In a perfect world, they would have continued playing the same old blues progressions they’d loved since childhood, but by stepping out of their comfort zone, they discovered they had a lot more options to work with.
While there will always be a handful of people who put the Stones on a par with the Beatles, they themselves never thought in those terms. They were proud to be in the same scene as the Fab Four, but what they offered was something meaner, and “Paint It Black” was a perfect example of that.
Despite some obvious parallels to George Harrison’s Indian influence through the inclusion of sitars, Mick Jagger is the only singer who could have sung such a track in the 1960s. Instead of John Lennon singing that all we needed was love, Jagger’s protagonist lives in darkness the entire time, rivalled only by Richards’ rhythm guitar anchoring everything and Charlie Watts’ heavy use of percussion.
However, when the band started jamming in the background, Keef felt things were getting a little out of hand, saying, “It ends up being over-recorded. The electric guitar I’m playing doesn’t sound quite right to me. I should have used a different guitar; at least a different sound. And I think it sounds rushed. I think it sounds like we said – which we did – ‘This is great. If we do any more, we’ll lose the feel of it.'”
While Richards can criticize his own work all he wants, this kind of overproduction is actually what makes the outro so much more exciting. The speed that Richards spoke of may well have been the case, but the nervous energy paints a picture of a man slowly losing himself in a world of darkness better than a simple acoustic guitar break.
If anything, the Stones could have benefited from focusing on this side of their sound, and the next few records they made in the 1970s are a better example of this overproduction. There are certainly times when they simply had more people working on their albums, but the jam at the end of “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking” or the change of tempo on “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” keep the listener engaged the entire time.
In that sense, a song like “Paint It Black” probably had to come about in order for the Stones to get to their more menacing material. It’s easier to appreciate everything in retrospect, but it takes a song like this to truly appreciate the spooky mood of “Gimme Shelter,” which would come later.
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