Paint It Black (1966)

They’re selling hippie wigs in Woolworths, man

The Legend

The second episode of the BBC’s ‘90s series Sounds of the Sixties closes with a series of performances that allows us, the jaded grandchildren of the sexual revolution, to understand something important about the impact of the Rolling Stones. It’s not so much about the song they’re performing (‘The Last Time’, 1965) as the fact that have been preceded by the parodically fey ‘You Were Made For Me’ by Freddie and The Dreamers (literally performed on an episode of Blue Peter), and ‘Ferry Cross The Mersey’ by Gerry and the Pacemakers. The milquetoast context makes it startlingly obvious that these young men have not only heard of sex, but have almost certainly had some. What’s more, they fully intend to have more.

The Rolling Stones’ ‘Paint It Black’ is perhaps the most mid-’60s record imaginable. Time magazine’s declaration in April ‘66 that London was ‘Swinging’ was, in itself, a sure sign that the party was drawing to a close, but it wasn’t the only portent. In October ‘65 The Beatles had recorded ‘Nowhere Man’, which echoes ‘Paint It Black’ in its story about a lost and despairing individual. Lennon’s quip in March ‘66 about being ‘more popular than Jesus’ had tarnished their fun facade, and they played their last live concert in August of that year. As ‘Paint It Black’ was released in May, the Moors Murderers were on trial; in July, 31 people were arrested at an anti-Vietnam protest outside the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square. That August in the US, Charles Whitman climbed to the top of the Texas University tower, having already murdered his mother and sister, and opened fire on the streets below, killing a further 15.

The Stones were supposed to be the gritty alternative to The Beatles; as such, they were the perfect band for this moment. By 1966 they were starting to find an identity with their first album of wholly self-penned material, the US version of which opens with ‘Paint It Black’, a fraught study of a depressed mind turning destructively inwards. ‘Nowhere Man’ is a story of empathy and possible redemption, but ‘Paint It Black’ offers no such poptimism. Indeed, it directly refutes the ‘Sky of blue / And sea of green’ of ‘Yellow Submarine’ (1966): ‘No more will my green sea / Go turn a deeper blue’. The sun will be blotted out, and the world painted black. The character in the song no longer ‘wants to be your man’; there is always an acrid streak of misogyny in the Stones’ work and here, when the narrator catches sight of some girls, he has to ‘turn my head/until my darkness goes’. Far from not fading away, the flowers and love are never coming back. There isn’t even a chorus, at least not a conventional one. There’s a whiff of patchouli in the sitar curlicues, but ‘Paint It Black’ is more psychotic than psychedelic; it throbs with the beat of a racing heart, dark and thunderous, the narrator only just holding himself back from doing something unspeakable. The decade is taking a turn.

As the situationist Paris ‘68 slogan has it, ‘Sous les pavés, la plage!’; beneath the cobblestones, the beach. A new beginning might be discovered in the ruins of the old, grey order. But the Paris students only knew that there was sand under the streets because they had torn up the cobblestones to hoick them at les flics. The old order could only be reduced to ruins if someone pulled it down. The social revolutions of the ‘60s were driven not just by hope, but by anger; not just by love, but by violence. ‘Paint It Black’ is pregnant with that fury.

The Reality

They’re selling hippy wigs in Woolworths, man. The greatest decade in the history of mankind is over and as Presuming Ed here has so consistently pointed out, we have failed to paint it black.

Danny the drug dealer, Withnail & I (1988)

What Danny is trying to suggest here, in his addled state, is that by 1969, nothing significant had changed. By the time Withnail & I came out in the late ‘80s all the hippies had got haircuts, swapped acid for coke, and made a serious bread in advertising and computers. But Danny is wrong (in this as in many other things). There was a social and political revolution in the ‘60s; it just didn’t involve airborne cobblestones and painting everything black. It was more concerned with expanding civil and human rights, and trying to improve people’s living standards. These things were insufficiently exciting for pop stars, of course. ‘Taxman’, the opening track of The Beatles’ album Revolver (1966), is an extended moan about wealth taxes.

It is entirely possible, though, that painting everything black wasn’t a well-worked-through policy position. Rather than anything specific, the song speaks to the inarticulate, inchoate anger and despair of a young man who doesn’t know what he’s rebelling against. (As has often been pointed out, the Black American rhythm and blues music that the Stones loved to rework reads very differently when performed by white British grammar school boys. As a fellow middle class boy with nothing to rebel against except a headteacher, this spoke to my condition.)

These days the Stones are the epitome of the ‘60s sellout. Their brand promise is chugging, swampy rock; their riffs are machine-tooled and mass produced, efficiently churned out on endless world tours, coming to a stadium near you soon. They have a logo. They are middlebrow rock for middle-aged middle managers. On the cover of Dirty Work (1986), twenty years on from ‘Paint It Black’, the band are all in pristine linen suits in vibrant ‘80s slab colours. The work may be dirty, but they are not. The only thing painted black is their hair.

Another album released in 1986 did contain some dirty work: Pussy Galore’s cover of Exile On Main Street. It sounds like it was recorded in a single session, with instruments detuning, stamina flagging and tempers fraying. It is a practically unlistenable mess of furious distortion, and it is a hundred times more grimy, unnerving and underground than the original. But then what else would you expect from angry and upset middle-class kids like Jon Spencer and Julia Cafritz?

Significantly, though, I’m willing to bet that you have never heard it; you’ve quite possibly never heard of Pussy Galore. Their version of Exile On Main Street was released on cassette only in a limited run of 550 copies. The lesson Generation X learned from the failure to paint it black was that it wasn’t worth trying at all.

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You know who else was making dark music in the mid-’60s? The Velvet Underground, that’s who. And they never sold out.