News How John Paul Jones shaped a classic Rolling Stones song
The Rolling Stones embodied the idea of sex, drugs and rock and roll throughout their music, especially during the early days. When the band wrote about women, they predominantly focused on objectifying features, which quite often got them into trouble. That being said, some tracks were pure and simple love songs, a rarity in the early days of The Stones but a fundamental part of their back catalogue.
When Rolling Stones released ‘She’s A Rainbow’, it surprised many people because, as stated above, they were hardly a band that focused on the love song. They usually wrote about sex and the often taboo but cooler sides of what it meant to be a rockstar, so when they released something that embodied pure love, it was unexpected.
In trying to embody that feeling of love, the Rolling Stones did a few things; the first was to dedicate a lot of time to the track’s lyrics. Love is naturally tricky to describe, given that when asked when you know you’re in love, most people give a blasé “you just know” answer. Many musicians have tried to put this universal, indescribable feeling into words, and this was the Rolling Stones’ attempt.
The chorus is well known, “She comes in colours everywhere, she combs her hair, she’s like a rainbow,” words that resonated with fans worldwide but that sounded a little too familiar for one person. Michael Stuart-Ware spoke out against the song, claiming that the Rolling Stones had stolen the lyrics from Love’s single ‘She Comes In Colors’. The parallels are there, but no acknowledgement was made about potential influence.
“The Rollings Stones stole the line ‘she comes in colours’ for ‘She’s A Rainbow’,” said Stuart-Ware in an interview, “Wasn’t Mick Jagger afraid of being sued? I remember we all thought, Wow! How could Mick think it was okay to do that?”
The Rolling Stones also decided to go down a different route musically for this song, likely in an attempt to make it more sweet-sounding than their other rock songs. In doing this, they had a string section contribute towards the final cut, which was arranged by none other than Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones. He works wonders on this track as the strings really shape the song and add another layer to it.
The recording took place before he joined the legendary rock band, showing that he was always destined to do great things in the music world. The string section on the song sounds incredibly beautiful, and they bring out those feelings of love and purity more than the lyrics do.
It was a massive deviation for the Rolling Stones to write a song that focussed less on sex and more on love, but they managed to pull it off well in what is still considered one of their best songs. The combination of sweet (and controversial) lyrics with the string section shaped by John Paul Jones manages to work in unison to begin articulating the indescribable sensation of loving someone.
