The Rolling Stones‘ “She’s a Rainbow” opened side two of “Their Satanic Majesties Request” in December 1967 and has been drifting away from that album ever since. Plenty of people who can hum Nicky Hopkins’s piano intro could not name a second track from the record.
Inside the “Their Satanic Majesties Request” Sessions: The Album Nobody Was Steering
The Rolling Stones cut “Satanic Majesties” in fits and starts between February and October 1967 at Olympic Studios in Barnes, west London, during a year dominated by drug arrests and court appearances. Manager and producer Andrew Loog Oldham quit partway through the sessions, worn down by erratic scheduling and by the entourages that turned the studio into a party, as uDiscover Music has documented. “She’s a Rainbow” was tracked in May, early enough that Oldham was still around for it; by the time the album was finished, the band was working alone, which made it the first Rolling Stones record produced without outside supervision.
The results were uneven, and most of the participants have said so since. When Billboard revisited the album at 50, it granted the record two genuine survivors, “2000 Light Years From Home” and “She’s a Rainbow,” and the latter was the one that stuck hardest. Issued as the US single with “2000 Light Years From Home” on the flip, it reached No. 25 on the Billboard Hot 100.
Neither of the musicians most responsible for the sound of “She’s a Rainbow” was in the band. Nicky Hopkins plays the piano. By 1967, he was among the busiest keyboard players in London, having come up through Cyril Davies’s All Stars before Crohn’s disease and a long hospitalization ended any prospect of touring and pushed him into session work full-time. He had already turned up on records by the Who and the Kinks, and he became a regular presence on Rolling Stones sessions from the mid-sixties onward. Ultimate Classic Rock makes a reasonable case that he is the most consequential sideman British rock has produced, and this track is Exhibit A.
The strings were arranged by John Paul Jones, then a session bassist and arranger, still two years away from Led Zeppelin. Keith Richards has described the writing intent plainly. He and Mick Jagger first pictured the thing as “a sort of music box,” Richards told an interviewer in 2016, in a quote uDiscover Music later cited in its history of the song.
Inside the “She’s a Rainbow” Score: B♭ Major, Three Chords, and Two Tempos in Two Bars
The official piano-vocal-guitar score on MuseScore is in B♭ major, and 4/4 throughout. That is the key of the record too, so anything worked up from the chart will sit against the master without transposing. The tempo markings are the first thing worth attention, and there are two of them inside two bars. Bar 1 is marked Slowly, with a ritardando written in. Bar 2 snaps to Moderately, a tempo, quarter note equals 104. That braking and restarting is baked into the composition rather than left to a performer’s discretion, and it recurs. Another rit. arrives at the close of the opening section, followed by a tempo at bar 18, where the verse (“Have you seen her dressed in blue?”) picks up.
The vocal does not enter until bar 8. Seven measures of solo piano is a long runway for a 1967 pop single. Hopkins’s figure climbs the B♭ scale in the right hand from C, skips over the A on the way up, and folds back onto it from the octave B♭ at the top, all of it sitting over sparse quarter notes in the left. That turn at the peak is what keeps the run from reading as a scale exercise, and the shape returns through the whole arrangement, which is why the introduction ended up doing the work of a chorus hook.
The chord symbols across the entire chart are B♭, E♭ , and F7, which are I, IV, and V7 in the home key. Guitarists working from the printed frames will find no surprises. So harmonically, there isn’t much going on. Every bit of the color comes from piano voicing and string writing laid over a plain diatonic frame, which is what makes the song such a useful arrangement study. Strip out Hopkins’s figuration, and you are left with a nursery-simple progression. The form closes with first and second endings around bar 35, sending the player back for the second verse (“Have you seen her all in gold”).
The Legacy of “She’s a Rainbow”
By the 2010s, the song’s audience had very little to do with the Stones’ album catalog. ABKCO, which controls the masters and publishing for the band’s sixties output, reissued “Satanic Majesties” as a 50th-anniversary edition in 2017 and built an animated lyric video around “She’s a Rainbow” to accompany it. The push landed harder than anyone predicted. Variety reported that Acura took the track for its 2019 RDX campaign in June 2018, Dior took the same recording for the Joy fragrance campaign with Jennifer Lawrence that September, and FX dropped it into a pivotal American Horror Story scene the same month. Two national ad campaigns built on one 1967 master were airing inside the same commercial breaks.
ABKCO chief operating officer Alisa Coleman told Variety that music supervisors are hunting for “big, instrumental, recognizable parts,” which describes those opening bars about as well as anything could. Billboard later reported that the placements generated seven figures in sync income and drove the song to No. 7 on the Rock Digital Song Sales chart that September.
The Stones themselves have barely touched it. Before their February 2016 show at Estadio Nacional in Santiago, the band’s website let fans vote for one rarity from a shortlist of four. “She’s a Rainbow” won, and the performance that night was the first since 1998 and, according to Rolling Stone, only the 11th in the group’s entire history.
That scarcity onstage makes sense once you have the chart in front of you. The song was assembled in a studio around a session pianist and an arranger’s string parts, and it does not transfer cleanly to five people with guitars and a drum kit. Anyone working from the official score should treat the ritardando in bar 1 and the a tempo in bar 2 as part of the composition rather than as performance suggestions. Hopkins certainly did.
