When I listen to The Rolling Stones‘ “Paint It Black,” something feels off. There’s something haunting about it. Charlie Watts comes in like he’s playing a march for a funeral, and then the riff lands. That riff you’ve heard in a bunch of Vietnam War movies, but if you try to hum the tune, you’ll trip over a note that doesn’t seem to belong on a 1966 pop chart. That note is an F natural, sitting one fret above an E. It is considered by some to be one of the most important wrong notes in rock and roll.
(Re)Introducing The Flat 2 In “Paint It Black”
The Rolling Stones recorded “Paint It Black” in March 1966, a time when pop radio was very… let’s call it a meat-and-potatoes affair: major keys, minor keys, the occasional bluesy bent third. One thing you didn’t hear a lot of on pop radio was the Phrygian mode, which is what Keith Richards and Brian Jones smuggled into the riff.
Phrygian is the third mode of the major scale. If you play all the white keys from E to E on a piano, you’ve played E Phrygian. The mode’s calling card is the half step right at the top: E to F. That tiny interval, a flat 2 above the root, is the entire reason the song sounds the way it does. Latin guitarists use it. Flamenco lives there. So does a lot of Indian classical music. In Western pop in 1966, it was very seldom heard.
The chord movement underneath the riff makes things even stranger. The verse alternates between E and B7 (some transcriptions notate it as E minor, others as E major). The lead line walks around in E Phrygian with that flat 2 sitting right where it seemingly shouldn’t – the harmony hovers, and the melody quietly insists on something darker. Listen for the moment within the riff where it goes E, F, G, F, E. That F is the point of the tune where it gets haunting.
Compare “Paint It Black” to something contemporaneous like “Eight Miles High” or “Norwegian Wood,” both records that were nibbling at the edges of non-Western tonality around the same moment. But the Stones took the idea and ran with it.
There’s a reason the song became shorthand for dread on film soundtracks. The use of the song at the end of Full Metal Jacket works because the riff is already doing the heavy lifting. You don’t need a string section telling you something is wrong when the melody itself is built on the sound of wrongness.
The Sitar And The Problem It Creates For Guitarists
The sitar on the record is Brian Jones, and the story of how it got there is partly a George Harrison story, because nothing happened in the late 60s music business without the Beatles being involved… Harrison had used a sitar on “Norwegian Wood” a few months earlier, and he’d been studying with Ravi Shankar. Jones, who was the kind of musician who’d pick up any instrument left lying around the studio and have something usable on it by lunchtime, bought a sitar and started messing with it. He wasn’t a sitar player in any serious sense. He had no real training in raga or in the instrument’s classical technique. He had ears, an ego, and a good engineer.
What he plays on the record is a melody, basically. He’s not droning, he’s not improvising over a tanpura, he’s playing a tune the way a guitarist would play a tune. But the instrument transforms it. The sitar’s main strings sit above sympathetic strings that ring out in response, so every note he plucks contains a halo of buzzing harmonics. The pick attack is sharper than a guitar’s. The sustain is longer and weirder. Even when Jones plays something simple, it sounds like it’s coming from a far-off land.
This created a problem that guitarists have been trying to solve at home and on stage for sixty years. You cannot get a Telecaster to do what a sitar does. You can get close, and the ways people get close are kind of charming. The most common move is to lean on the bend. A sitar player articulates pitches by pulling the string sideways across the fret, producing those liquid, vocal slides between notes. On guitar, big half-step and whole-step bends, especially with vibrato at the top, get you into the same ballpark. Hammer-ons and pull-offs help too, because they mimic the rhythmic ornaments (gamak and meend) that give sitar lines their forward motion.
Tone-wise, guitarists usually reach for the bridge pickup, roll the treble up, and add a touch of compression. A capo at the seventh fret on a 12-string gets you the brightness and the slight chorus-y shimmer of sympathetic resonance. Some players tune the high E down a half step so it drones against the riff’s tonic. Others just plug into a sitar emulator pedal and call it a day, which is the least interesting solution but probably the most reliable on a bar gig. Although I will say, if you bring a sitar to a bar gig just to cover this song, I’m going to salute you.
What Makes “Paint It Black” Work On (Almost) Any Instrument
Most cover versions actually sound less Eastern than the original, even when the player is trying to honor the sitar part. The instrument was doing so much of the work that translating it back to guitar inevitably flattens it. What you keep is the melody and the flat 2. With that, you can find ways to translate it into a wide variety of instruments.
That trade-off is what makes the song so fun to arrange. Every version of “Paint It Black” you find on MuseScore is a small argument about which part of the original mattered most. The riff? The drone? The march feel? You can build a credible arrangement around any one of those and lose the others, and plenty of people have. Solo classical guitarists tend to keep the modal weirdness and let the rest go. String quartets keep the funeral march. Marching bands, somehow, keep all of it and add a snare line that would have impressed even Charlie Watts (R.I.P.). Sixty years on, the song still doesn’t really sound like anything else. The riff is the reason. One foreign note, played on a foreign instrument, by a band that wasn’t supposed to know any better.
