Song Lyric of the Day (The Rolling Stones, on a Line of Cars, ‘All Painted Black’)

“I see a line of cars and they're all painted black
With flowers and my love, both never to come back.”—English rock ‘n’ rollers Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, “Paint It Black,” from the Rolling Stones’ Aftermath LP (1966)

Sixty years ago today, “Paint It Black,” was released as a single in the U.S., eventually spending two weeks at number one during the summer and serving as the lead song of their fourth studio album, Aftermath.

Among the early hits of the Rolling Stones, this one remains distinctive to me. With “Satisfaction” in 1965, Mick Jagger was already well-launched on the misogyny that characterized so many of his subsequent lyrics, and he stayed stuck in the same mental groove in in two songs from this new collection, “Under My Thumb" and "Stupid Girl."

But “Paint It Black” gave evidence of something larger than dissatisfaction with “the birds” that so obsessed the Stones’ lead singer. It’s far more than the sweet, strings-laden melancholy of “Yesterday” by their compatriots in the British Invasion, the Beatles.

From Brian Jones’ unusual, even unnerving sitar opening, the Stones were evoking a severe depression with the potential to throw you off your axis, even locating it in something specific: grief (that “line of cars” suggesting a funeral procession).

“ ‘Paint It Black’—I wrote the melody, he [Jagger] wrote the lyrics,” Richards recalled in his 2010 autobiography, Life. “It’s not that you can say in one phrase he wrote that and he did that. But the musical riff is mostly coming from me. I’m the riff master.”

According to Simon Harper’s May 2025 account, the March 1966 recording session for the tune in RCA’s Los Angeles studio wasn’t jelling. Producer Andrew Loog Oldham had decided that, if no movement occurred in 10 minutes, they’d move on.

Just then, bassist Bill Wyman suggested Hammond organ pedals, with Jones—tiring of his normal six-string guitar and becoming the band’s de facto multi-instrumentalist—tried out sitar chords he’d been strumming, the byproduct of tutelage under virtuoso Harihar Rao.

The song had evolved into something far more mesmerizing and disturbing than what everyone in the studio had been hearing originally. The other Stones supposedly felt that their collective improvisational input entitled them to share songwriting credit on the band’s sixth single with Jagger and Richards.

In the end, it may not have mattered that much. In the early 1970s, to free themselves from their early, pugnacious manager Allen Klein, the Stones signed away rights to this and others up to 1971.

And that would be enough fill most ordinary people with the kind of depression associated with “Paint It Black”—except that the Stones have made so much more money, and been even more savvy about saving it, since then.

Oh, by the way: some audiophiles have their recordings of the song with a comma in the title: “Paint It, Black,” as seen in the image accompanying this post. Why?

Years later, Richards confirmed that it was the band’s intention not to include the comma. It was a mistake on the part of their record company, Decca, that produced the errant punctuation mark.

This reminds me of what happened with one of my favorite Supremes songs, “Stoned Love.” Writer Kenny Thomas had written it as “Stone Love,” intending to evoke the strength of amour with the lyrics. Yet when it came back from the Motown warehouse, the letter “d” had been tacked onto the first word of the title.

I couldn’t help but think that someone at the record plant had been stoned when he made that mistake—and that similarly, a mind-altering substance led someone at Decca to insert that idiotic, confusing, useless comma. If that was the case, it’s too bad that the Rolling Stones didn’t take the cue and quit drugs cold turkey.

Quote of the Day (George Eliot, on ‘Golden Moments in the Stream of Life’)

“The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone.”—English novelist Mary Ann Evans, a.k.a. George Eliot (1819-1880), quoted in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)

Quote of the Day (Idris Elba, on Bad Guys’ Appeal to Audiences, Actors, and Authors)

“These people get to say things that we only think in the deepest, darkest recesses of our brains. They say horrible things and scream horrible things and get to be completely socially unacceptable. As an actor, that’s sometimes a gift, sometimes a bit of therapy. These characters tend to be well-written. When you see a really interesting bad guy, you’re going to think about the actor, but think about the writer. It’s the writer who’s dark. You’ve got to give him or her a hug.”— British actor-director Idris Elba, on playing villains, quoted by Lane Florsheim, “My Monday Morning: Idris Elba on 4 A.M. Workouts and the Best Part of Playing a Bad Guy,” The Wall Street Journal, June 8-9, 2024

The image accompanying this post, of Idris Elba at the Berlinale 2018, was taken on Feb. 22, 2018, by Harald Krichel.

Flashback, May 1926: Miffed Sinclair Lewis Nixes Pulitzer for ‘Arrowsmith’

After bypassing Sinclair Lewis twice in the past half-dozen years, the Pulitzer Prize board –whether in recognition of present merit or compensation for past mistakes—awarded him the fiction prize for Arrowsmith in early May 1926.

Whether out of genuine principle or annoyance over his Main Street being passed over in 1920 for Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence or, in 1922, his Babbitt for Willa Cather’s One of Ours, Lewis rejected the citation. It may have been the most resounding rebuke of a cultural institution before George C. Scott and Marlon Brando refused to accept their Best Actor Oscars in the early 1970s.

Privately, Lewis told publisher Alfred Harcourt that he intended to turn it down because of “the Main Street burglary.” While some observers suspected peevishness on his part, Lewis gave a more high-minded public justification.

The terms of the Pulitzer called for the award to go to work that represented “the wholesome atmosphere of American life, and the highest standard of American manners and manhood”—precisely the grounds on which Main Street and Babbitt, with their withering satire, had been bypassed before.

Those terms, Lewis wrote in his letter of rejection, “would appear to mean that the appraisal of the novels shall be made not according to their actual literary merit but in obedience to whatever code of Good Form may chance to be popular at the moment.”

With three bestselling, highly acclaimed novels to his credit, Lewis wielded a great deal of credibility, particularly when he framed his rejection in the context of his also declining election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters. His refusal of the Pulitzer and the $1,000 that went with it earned front-page notice in The New York Times.

As there always are in such cases, cynics wondered if there was more to the situation than Lewis explained, and their case was bolstered four years later, when he accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature—particularly because, in turning down the Pulitzer, he had stated that “All prizes, like all titles, are dangerous.” [emphasis added]

Arrowsmith may have been the most universally appealing of Lewis’ novels to this point, featuring a protagonist who, though flawed, was an idealistic, science-oriented doctor dedicated wholly to the pursuit of knowledge and truth.

While not dispensing with the author’s gift for satire (in this case, targeting medical quackery, public-health bureaucrats, and doctors who shamelessly pursuit financial success at the expense of patients), it gave readers a chance to admire a major character unreservedly.

As the son and brother of doctors, Lewis came by his interest in the medical profession naturally. But what many critics and ordinary readers may not have realized at the time is that the career of Martin Arrowsmith drew on Lewis’ recent friendship with 35-year-old microbiologist and pathologist Paul De Kruif—one that became so close that it evolved into a genuine working collaboration.

As James Tobin explains in this blog post, Lewis even suggested to De Kruif that he be listed as co-author, with the two splitting royalties 50-50. The doctor, as much stunned by the generous offer as aware that Lewis’ name constituted the proposed project’s main selling point, thought that the split should be 75% to 25% in Lewis’ favor.

In the end, either Lewis’s publisher or the author himself rejected the microbiologist’s request for a single line on the title page: “In collaboration with Paul De Kruif.”

Instead, Lewis set out his debt to De Kruif in a different fashion, acknowledging his help “not only for most of the bacteriological and medical material in this tale but equally for his suggestions in the planning of the fable itself  – for his realization of the characters as living people, for his philosophy as a scientist.”

In the end, it wasn’t insufficient acknowledgement of his creative input that fractured De Kruif’s relationship with Lewis, but at least several incidents of the latter’s erratic, often alcohol-fueled misbehavior that at last couldn’t be ignored.

Nevertheless, his association with the now-prizing author benefited De Kruif enough that he came to write a bestselling nonfiction account of medicine later that year, Microbe Hunters, launching a second career for him as a popular writer of medical histories, biographies, and public-health advocacy.

After winning the Nobel Prize, as his alcoholism worsened, most critics agreed that the quality of Lewis’ work suffered, and his reputation took a further hit with Mark Schorer’s 1961 biography. But periodically, readers who have returned to the novels written at his peak discover their continuing relevance, and Arrowsmith is no exception.

As I mentioned in this post from late last year, though not read as widely as two other novels published in 1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, it shared with them a searing criticism of American materialism at the height of the Roaring Twenties.

More than a few 21^st-century patients will nod appreciatively at how, in med school, Arrowsmith listens to a professor who extols the value of salesmanship to his students—including the value of convincing patients of the need for dubious small but money-making operations.

They will also detect the early baleful influence of Big Pharma in the Hunziker Company’s harassment of Arrowsmith’s mentor, the German scientist Max Gottlieb, for his reluctance to market an antitoxin he’s developed until he’s absolutely certain of its effectiveness—and, since COVID-19, they will shudder on the enormous pressures and responsibilities felt by Arrowsmith as he battles the outbreak of bubonic plague on an island in the West Indies.

Quote of the Day (Joe Queenan, on Parents Who 'Behave Like Bozos' at Their Kids’ Games)

“As the years have passed, I find myself fondly recalling the experience of watching other parents behave like bozos. I miss hearing the refs accused of gross miscarriages of justice, of being on the underworld payroll, of lacking even a scintilla of basic human decency. I miss getting to stand on the sidelines watching other parents drench the ground with tears just because the ump called leaden-footed Bree out at the plate. Which she forgot to tag anyway.”—American satirist and critic Joe Queenan, “Moving Targets: A Tribute to the Inane Dramas of Sideline Parents,” The Wall Street Journal, June 8-9, 2024

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Jean Bethke Elshtain, on Peace, Love and Justice)

“This is where love comes in — love of God and love of neighbor — and this is where justice comes in as well. Augustine's alternative definition [of the commonwealth] starts with love. ‘A people is the association of a multitude of rational beings united by a common agreement on the objects of their love.’ It ‘follows that to observe the character of a particular people, we must examine the objects of its love. No single man can create a commonwealth. There is no ur-founder, no great bringer of order. It begins in ties of fellowship, in households, clans and tribes, in earthly love and its many discontents. And it begins in an ontology of peace, not war.”—American ethicist, political philosopher, and public intellectual Jean Bethke Elshtain (1941-2013), Augustine and the Limits of Politics (1996)

Quote of the Day (Tana French, on Irish Speech as a Product of Colonialism)

“Ireland is a postcolonial country and that makes a huge, huge difference to the entire mentality. What I was talking about just now where people are quite oblique about communicating anything —especially anything with any heavy emotional charge—I think that has a certain amount of post-colonial resonance, where if you've spent centuries culturally in a position where anything that you say could in fact have huge consequences and be used by an occupying power, an oppressor, it makes you quite cautious about what you say and what you say openly….We've got a weird relationship with authority over here where we don't like to defy it openly. We don't like to stand up against it, but we really like finding clever ways around it. So, it makes for an interesting combination where you can see these people who have been the subject of really brutal penal laws and oppression like valuing the skill of finding a clever way to outward authority. But now it's changed because the people who are in authority, the government, are in fact elected by the Irish. They are the Irish. And yet you still have this mentality that you'll get some politician who took a ton of bribes or something and there's a slight undercurrent of ‘fair play to him--stuck it to the man.’  [Now,] it's like, dude, you are the man. We are the man. What do you mean we stuck it to the man? But there's still that respect for outwitting authority underlying.”—American-born Irish mystery novelist Tana French, in conversation with Anna Kusmer, Boston Globe, “Say More” podcast, “Tana French’s Endless Fascination with the Irish,” aired Apr. 9, 2026