“PAINT IT BLACK” is one of the Rolling Stones’ most enduring songs, and has been invoked in various bleak and scary movies, including Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, and the horror flicks The Devil’s Advocate and Stir of Echoes. In its earliest incarnation, it was nothing more than a send-up of an early Stones associate—Eric Easton (the man who co-managed the group with Andrew Loog Oldham from 1963 to 1965).
KEITH RICHARDS: What’s amazing about that one for me is the sitar. Also, the fact that we cut it as a comedy track. Bill was playing an organ, doing a takeoff of our first manager who started his career in show business as an organist in a cinema pit. We’d been doing it with funky rhythms and it hadn’t worked, and he started playing like this and everybody got behind it. It’s a two-beat, very strange. Brian playing the sitar makes it a whole other thing.
There’s no mystery about how and where Brian picked up the sitar.
GEORGE HARRISON: I always used to see Brian in the clubs and hang out with him. In the mid-sixties he used to come out to my house—particularly when he’d got “the fear,” when he’d mixed too many weird things together. I’d hear his voice shouting to me from out in the garden: “George, George . . .” I’d let him in—he was a good mate. He would always come round to my house in the sitar period. We talked about “Paint It Black” and he picked up my sitar and tried to play it—and the next thing was he did that track.
So that’s how it went from being an inside joke to a somber, deeply dark, nihilistic rant.
And although certainly not intended, the song has always had a strong connection to the war in Vietnam. At the end of Full Metal Jacket, it plays over the credits to illustrate the literal and emotional deaths of all men engaged in war. It was also the theme song of a short-lived CBS television series (Tour of Duty) about Vietnam that ran from 1987 to 1990. And Thomas Bird, founder of the Vietnam Veterans Ensemble Theater Company (VETCo), told me that it was the most compelling and relatable song that he listened to during his entire time in Southeast Asia. Then too there is this powerful recollection from www.songfacts.com of a Vietnam vet from Queens, New York:
BILL FROM QUEENS: While the Rolling Stones’ song “Paint It Black” was not written about the Vietnam War, it has great meaning for many combat veterans from that war. The depression, the aura of premature death, loss of innocence, abandonment of all hope, are perfectly expressed in the song. When you walk off the killing fields, still alive, physically intact, you want everything painted black, like your heart, your soul, your mind, your life.
This is a clear-cut case of life imitating art rather than art imitating life. The Stones had their fingers on the pulse of the mid-sixties international turmoil even when that was not their primary artistic intention.