Paint It Black: Bill Wyman’s fists underneath Brian Jones’s sitar
Bill Wyman put his fists to the organ pedals on Paint It Black. In his interview with Elliot Stephen Cohen, published by Guitar World, he remembered the band wanting more weight beneath the bass guitar. He suggested organ pedals, then realized he did not know how to play them. Lying on the floor and operating them with his hands supplied the extra part. The odd posture had a practical purpose: a bassist was finding another way to thicken the bottom of a recording.
Wyman described the pedal part as a way to add weight to the bass. His account explains the extra part through its sound and his unusual way of playing it. The same interview preserves the homemade history of his main bass: an initially unsatisfactory instrument reshaped by a neighbor, stripped of paint and fitted with a Baldwin pickup. Worn frets rattled, so Wyman removed them, intending to replace them when he could afford it. He preferred the resulting sound and said he used the instrument on Stones albums through 1975. The organ intervention belongs beside that willingness to alter the means of making a bass part.
Keith Richards independently credited Wyman's pedals in an interview first printed by Guitar World in November 2005. Discussing Paint It Black, he paired the bassist's contribution with Jones's sitar and called the tune one of their “semi-gypsy melodies.” That phrase expresses Richards's sense of its character. It does not identify a particular borrowed melody, a named traditional composition or a documented musical lineage. He immediately said he did not know where those ideas had come from. His attribution of the pedals is considerably more definite than his explanation of the melody's origins.
Richards also described why Jones's sitar appealed to him. The sympathetic strings resonated beneath the played strings. He found the strings too thin to enjoy playing the instrument himself, while Jones enthusiastically explored it. That distinction places two separate experiments inside the same track: the sitar added its own resonance, while the organ reinforced the bottom. Richards's description of Jones moving between sitar, dulcimers and mandolins supplies the working context. The band could use a different instrumental color because one member was willing to explore how to produce it.
The organ pedals were note controls. A Hammond Instrument Company patent, US 2,508,514, granted on 23 May 1950, describes a bass pedal system in which depressing one pedal closes switches connecting electrical tone generators to the output. The apparatus combines a fundamental pitch with harmonics, and provides separately adjustable bass registrations an octave apart. The document names John M. Hanert and Laurens Hammond as inventors. Its diagram labels individual pedals by pitch, with a separate chart tabulating generator connections for the lowest octave. The description uses three representative pedals, labeled C, C-sharp and B, to explain the circuit. Its concern is the harmonic richness of low notes and the practical circuitry needed to supply it.
That specification gives the pedal instrument a different job from a volume pedal or a guitar effects switch. The pedal selects a musical pitch, while drawbars determine the intensity of the coupled tones. The patent also describes sending the result through volume control, amplification and a loudspeaker. Wyman's fists replaced a player's feet at the note controls; his recollection does not identify the exact organ model or settings used on Paint It Black. The engineering document describes the kind of bass-generating system available, while the session memories establish the musical reason for adding a pedal part.
Mick Jagger's later recollection leaves a different boundary around the creation of Paint It Black. In his 2026 MOJO interview, quoted by MusicRadar, he said he could no longer recall his thoughts while writing the lyrics or how Richards had originated the music. He did remember Jones's sitar lick as dominant and continued to find the chord sequence and mood unusual. The admission limits any tidy reconstruction of one fully planned moment of invention. It also gives Jones an explicit place in Jagger's description of the finished sound, even where details of the preceding writing process had faded.
The Recording Academy preserves a more fixed piece of the history. Its Grammy Hall of Fame register identifies the Rolling Stones' London single from 1966, entered in 2018 under the title Paint It, Black. Established in 1973, the Hall of Fame honors recordings at least 25 years old for lasting musical quality or historical significance. A specialist committee selects the entries. The single's inclusion therefore records a later judgment about the completed performance, with its parts already combined. The register identifies a performer, label and release year, while the musicians' testimony supplies the hands-on decisions behind that recorded object.
- Elliot Stephen Cohen, Guitar World: Bill Wyman interview, organ pedals on Paint It Black and the construction of his fretless bass — www.guitarworld.com
- Alan di Perna, Guitar World: Keith Richards’s November 2005 interview on Jones’s sitar, Wyman’s organ pedals and the melody of Paint It Black — www.guitarworld.com
- John M. Hanert and Laurens Hammond, US patent 2,508,514, Electrical Musical Instrument, 23 May 1950: bass pedal note selection and tone generation — patents.google.com
- Paul Elliott, MusicRadar, 16 June 2026: Mick Jagger’s MOJO recollection of Paint It Black and Brian Jones’s sitar — www.musicradar.com
- Recording Academy: Grammy Hall of Fame register, Paint It, Black, London 1966 single, inducted 2018 — www.grammy.com