THE ROLLING STONES – "Paint It, Black"

I’ve not got much to say about the content of “Paint It, Black”, either, but I would like to see the Comments kicked off… (ooops – xpost) so here’s the usual Resurrection Watch.

It was, of course, the theme for the Vietnam TV series Tour Of Duty and comes at the end of Vietnam movie Full Metal Jacket, and the video game Twisted Metal. Other movies include Stir Of Echoes and Devil’s Advocate.

Paint It Black was the inevitable title for the Stones reggae covers album, the title track being taken by Chalice. Other coverers include Rick (& Adam) Wakeman, Deep Purple, Anti-Nowhere League, David Essex, The Vines, Chris Farlowe, The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra With Marc Almond, Eric Burdon, The Band Of Susans, Skrewdriver, Vanessa Carlton, The Flamin’ Groovies, The Mo-Dettes and W*A*S*P*.

It’s another of those immense songs that U2 has bathetically covered, live and as a b-side. Echo & the Bunnymen used to do it live, too, with Ray Manzarek.

The song also lives on in reference to the teenage girl’s dad in Big Star’s “Thirteen”, and some bands and a couple of films of the same name. Unlikely to have been used in many adverts, though I read that the All Blacks bought the rights to use it as a promo in exchange for giving Mick & Keith some sporting memorabilia and a houseful of readies.

Do Anglican cathedrals traditionally have red doors (hence the red door that he wants painted, black)?

I have to say, I really see this as a ten. Why do you think Kubrick chose this song for the end of Full Metal Jacket?

There were a plethora of death songs in the early 60’s, but nothing like “Paint It, Black.” (God knows the English professor in me hates to type that comma.) The morbid fare that had been served up only recently before was mawkish, overly sentimental, and less than sincere no matter how hard it tried to convince. One need think of J. Frank Wilson’s ghastly “Last Kiss” (latterly resurrected–no pun intended–by Pearl Jam). He just doesn’t sound all that bereaved–after all he got a kiss before she’d “gone to heaven.” To be sure, many of those death songs–from “Moody River” to “Leader of the Pack”–seem to reflect a bit of Schadenfreude, as if taking some perverse pleasure in the death lamented, as if the best girlfriend/boyfriend is a dead one. (Hey–they never argue, cheat, dump, age or otherwise change.)

But “Paint It, Black,” by contrast, seems truly tormented, and it’s not just the lyrics or Jagger’s vocal. The eerie, exotic, and fragile melody of the sitar opening (one of those incredible touches that only Brian Jones could contribute) abruptly shifts into Charlie Watts’s ferocious pounding–a rapid mood swing of the sort one might experience in a distraught moment–sets the pace for what is to come. Layer upon layer of dread on top of gloom–the droning, sinister, “hmn-hmn-hmn-hmn-hmn” backing vocals, the fuzzy instrumentals–present grief as a wall of sound toppling over on the bereaved as it drives into chaos engulfing Jagger’s final cries. All in all, this is what melodrama (in the truest sense) was meant to be, a great piece of drama on vinyl.

It was the sonic emotionality that impressed me when I first heard it; it took several hearings for me to sort out the lyrics altogether. (Already preordained for my future profession, though, I not only understood but was also mightly impressed by the arch and archaic “I could not foresee this thing happening to you.” A rather gothic touch that heightens the black tone, that. It still puts me in mind of Poe’s “Annabel Lee.”

Nonetheless, I remember feeling a shock when I first understood the subject matter–I couldn’t (and still can’t) recall such a treatment of death in rock/pop music.

Is it sincere? Has Jagger EVER been sincere? Was Poe sincere, for that matter? In the end, I don’t think the sincerity of the piece is what matters. What makes it extraordinary is the overwhelming sonic impression of an emotion whose inevitability we would all wish to be spared.

Doctor Mod

No colours any more

No more pop either. Or a different, more malevolent manifestation of the worst things that unresolved grief can do to a person.

The carnal brutalism versus the reined-in meditation – maybe even black versus white – 21st century cold rationalism against 19th century warm temperance…

…and therein lies the difference between “Eleanor Rigby” and “Paint It, Black.” McCartney addresses the passing of an unmourned, unnoticed life as though George Sand were being briefly hijacked by Beckett – but more of that when we come to it – but Jagger rages, the music, like a thousand-strong phalanx of Dave Clark Fives (the pitiless but resolute thumping by Charlie Watts which inevitably mutates into a martial death march at fadeout), rages alongside him (not behind him), sticking the second-hand dagger into the belly of cosy Beat Boom architecture.

To many people of 1966, this wasn’t quite where the Stones stopped being “pop” and started being “rock,” but the schism certainly dates from their singles output of that year. Compare the motivated but polite innovations of “Paperback Writer” and “Rain” with the suitably epileptic “19th Nervous Breakdown” (“Paint It, Black”‘s predecessor, which significantly stopped at #2) or the etiolated chaos of its successor, “Have You Seen Your Mother Baby, Standing In The Shadows.” For the latter was the Stones’ Strawberry Fields/Boys Keep Swinging/Kid A let’s-test-the-audience litmus test, both with its very masculine transvestite video, the record’s grotesque mauling of music hall memes (the brass is like Jack Hylton’s front line sinking in the Lusitania) and the way it explodes and teeters into anarchistic silence. That got no further than #5 – a significant commercial failure by the Stones’ standards – and it could be argued that this was the point when the cloakroom girls deserted them. Indeed, from about ’68 onwards they have scarcely bothered with singles as anything other than album trailers.

But then there’s that other key line in “Paint It, Black” (why the mysterious comma? A Decca typing error, says Keef) – “Like a newborn baby, it just happens every day.” The business of death, that is, for the people who “turn their heads” – but the anxiety in Jagger’s delivery suggests that he dies anew every day anyway (“No more will my green sea turn a deeper blue”).

It’s a thunderous and still disturbing record – its absence from Club Popular on Friday night was noticeable in the way that something like “Johnny Remember Me” wouldn’t have been – and only Jagger’s It Ain’t Half Hot Mum-isms towards the fade deter me from giving this my second 10.

It’s also interesting that this may not have been Jagger-Richards’ first stab at this subject. I’ve always assumed that As Tears Go By was about the death of a lover as well. In that song the situation brings on a loss of innocence, but here it goes even farther–now only the annihilation of the whole world will match his grief.

I once heard a fundamentalist preacher denounce this song as satanic, and I sort of shrugged it off as nonsense, but, in a way, he was right. If you think of satanism as the ultimate nihilism, then this song appears to be as satanic as you can get, especially if you don’t listen to the lyrics carefully enough to realize what the circumstances are, which is what I imagine this preacher did. He felt the song, but he didn’t really listen.

It is probably prudent not to shape a reliable global outlook on the basis of what Mick Jagger says in his interviews.

Well, war and death go together like beans and cornbread, and Jagger may have been inspired to write this by the idea of grieving soldier’s wives, but I find it hard to see this as an anti-war song, either, except in the most general way. As for there being two people who have died, I don’t want to get into a grammatical argument, but I always assumed it’s the flowers and the lover who are the “both” who aren’t coming back, the loss of the flowers symbolizing the death of beauty that comes with the death of the lover.

Who is the song paint it black based on?

Tom I think your earlier reading has still not been quite dislodged. “I could not foresee this thing happening to you” is addressed to his dead lover, surely, rather than some other person? But I supposed the meaning of lyrics always shift with the moods one is wearing at the time, and the ways in which they become useful.

In any case, this is a wonderful edition of Popular, one I’d missed the first time around.

Browser gave me funny feedback, can’t delete this duplicate!

Well, admittedly it’s a very long song, but Days it took him?

A few good examples by the Pogues too: “and then he sang a song, “The Rare Old Mountain Dew”” (Fairytale); “and “The Blackbird” broke the silence as you whistled it so sweet” (Thousands Are Sailing); “and on the jukebox Johnny sang about a thing called love” (A Pair of Brown Eyes).

DJ Punctum: A song along those lines (although mentioning names of singers and bands as well as songs) that actually was a hit in the U.S. was the immortal “Life Is a Rock (But the Radio Rolled Me)” of 1974 by “Reunion” (really a bunch of studio musicians).

I always associate Reunion’s “Life Is A Rock (But The Radio Rolled Me)” with Kevin Johnson’s “Rock And Roll (I Gave You The Best Years Of My Life)”, the flip side of the coin which came out a few weeks later. One is a jibberish celebration of Rock’n’Roll as novelty, as if a Mickey Dolenz skit in a Monkees episode is an ultimate; the other is dues-paying of the worst kind, but so full of self-loathing, so pathetically damaged it becomes perversely enjoyable. Edwyn Collins sang it at the last ever Orange Juice show.

Just found my way here and never realised the song was about the death of a love before either. As soon as I read that it made me think of Queen Victoria, who literally had almost everything painted black after Prince Albert died.

The Stones met Warhol in ’64, which was of course pre-Velvet Underground. But there’s no question the Stones knew the VU; “Stray Cat Blues” was famously an attempt to duplicate the VU sound. Tangentially, “Citadel” was allegedly about two drag queens from the Warhol crowd.

DESERT ISLAND DISCS WATCH:

Peter Melchett, Executive Director of Greenpeace, Campaigner(2000).

TOTPWatch. The Rolling Stones performed Paint It Black on Top Of The Pops on 12 May 1966. Also in the studio that week were; Manfred Mann, Neil Christian, Paul & Barry Ryan, Peter Cook & Dudley Moore, The Merseys and The Troggs. Pete Murray was the host. No copy survives.

For your consideration:

http://simonlegend.tumblr.com/post/72796500312/marathonpacks-not-sure

Top notch raga rock and really good sitar sounds in this Stones single. I’ve gone for an 8/10.