FILMED IN DECEMBER of 1968, Rock and Roll Circus became one of the great, lost Rolling Stones projects. It was the brainchild of Mick Jagger and a TV producer named Michael Lindsay-Hogg, who worked with the Stones on Ready Steady Go!
MICHAEL LINDSAY-HOGG: I turned up at Ready Steady Go! around four in the afternoon and there were some bands rehearsing for the show. On the stage were these guys. I had never heard of the Rolling Stones before. There was this amazing kid, Mick Jagger, doing dance steps, and slides and movements and stuff which of course he perfected over the years . . . I thought, “Jesus Christ. Something is going to happen to these people, because this guy’s amazing.”
Lindsay-Hogg ended up filming the Stones on Ready Set Go! several times, including iconic versions of “Satisfaction” and “Paint It Black.”
MICHAEL LINDSAY-HOGG: I thought it would be great if after every chorus he’d put his hands up and take out the lights. The lights would go down verse by verse until you end up with a spotlight on him at the end. I said, “Think of it as you’re Lucifer and you’re taking out all of the light in the world.” I think the very best single song I ever did on Ready Steady Go! was that “Paint It Black.” It does start in full light and certainly by the end, it’s just Mick in this little bit of light and darkness. And then, what happens, we put up the credits over the darkness; the music is still playing; and when we come back there are all these shots of Mick. And I’m doing the thing with the zoom extender and faces shuddering, and it’s very quick cut. And it’s very mesmeric. As we were shooting it, someone kicked loose the junction of his vocal mic. So you couldn’t actually hear him singing. All you could hear was him saying “ahhhahhhah.” So there were no more lyrics, just sound and these strange, rapidly cut camera shots.
Michael Lindsay-Hogg was a real pioneer in music video, working with both the Beatles and the Stones.
MICHAEL LINDSAY-HOGG: Then in ’68 Mick called me up and said, “We’re thinking of doing some promos. Come and talk to me. We got this song called ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash.’” During the break our makeup person started playing around with some makeup and they started to paint their faces. I said, “Let’s paint everyone’s faces.”
As their partnership with him continued to have success, the Stones brought a new idea to Lindsay-Hogg: a television special that blended various rock acts with actual circus performers. The final lineup included John Lennon, Yoko Ono, the Who, Eric Clapton, Mitch Mitchell, Marianne Faithfull, Taj Mahal, Jethro Tull, and lastly, members of a small touring English circus group, Sir Robert Fossett’s Circus. The last (musical) slot came down to either Tull or Led Zeppelin.
MICHAEL LINDSAY-HOGG: Mick and I had seen Jethro Tull on a very late-night BBC show and we were very taken with Ian Anderson, their front man. I think partly what Mick felt was that Jethro Tull would be an interesting addition to the show and fun to watch, but was not in any way threatening to the Rolling Stones or the Who. Maybe Led Zeppelin would have brought more testosterone to the mix than the room could stand.
The original choice to host Rock and Roll Circus was Brigitte Bardot. Lindsay-Hogg hand-delivered a note from Mick to the actress asking her.
MICHAEL LINDSAY-HOGG: I felt like an emissary, prince to a princess. She wanted to do it because she was as famous in Paris and France as Mick was in London; and she could see herself in the outfit. It’s just that she had a TV deal and they wouldn’t let her.
Here are a couple of eyewitness testimonies from the music trades of the time (from Keith Altham and Chris Welch), along with a more modern perspective (from Gary Pig Gold).
KEITH ALTHAM: Michael Lindsay-Hogg, who directed some of the more memorable Ready Steady Go! sagas, produced this epic with a little help from his illustrious friends John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Marianne Faithfull, Eric Clapton, Mitch Mitchell, Jethro Tull, classical pianist Julius Katchen, the Who, and “perpetual” violinist Ivry Gitlis.
GARY PIG GOLD: Director Michael Lindsay-Hogg, who’d already captured the best of the small-screen Stones on various UK pop shows of the moment, masterfully translated Mick Jagger’s vision of “taking out the normal and making a slightly surreal circus” onto celluloid. The primary reason for this may be that Lindsay-Hogg, who had pioneered his amphetamine-paced quick-jump style on the landmark Ready Steady Go! television series (expertly shooting the Stones’ “Paint It Black” in ’66 for example), stretched his skills to supreme effect throughout the Rock and Roll Circus, cleverly cutting his shots to the beat of the songs themselves, and in the Who’s landmark “A Quick One While He’s Away” herein especially, turning an already red-hot performance into a downright incendiary one.
And the quality of the overall show?
GARY PIG GOLD: This particular carnival absolutely provides a nice bright, loud, swinging sixty minutes full of music and merriment, with fire-eaters and trapeze artists unapologetically sandwiched between Taj Mahal and Yoko Ono as only The Ed Sullivan Show had dared to before.
CHRIS WELCH: It was a group fan’s dream, when the giants of pop held a three-hour jam session, while rehearsing for the Rolling Stones’ Rock and Roll Circus last week.
Eric Clapton and John Lennon on guitars, Mitch Mitchell on drums, and Mick Jagger adding a few vocals formed a supergroup that would rock most propagators of rhythm into a cocked hat.
“This is so like the Stones used to sound,” said a road manager as the strains of “Sweet Little Sixteen” boomed through the corridors of Intertel Studios, Wembley. “I don’t think they want anybody in with them,” said Jagger as he dashed about getting the show together and trying to find Keith Richards who hadn’t showed up and was supposed to be on bass.
Then, of course, there were the actual circus performers.
CHRIS WELCH: In the main studio gentle chaos ensued with a tiger dozing fitfully in its cage, the odd dwarf or two wandering about in top hats and huge bow ties, and the stars of stage, screen, and gasworks looking dreadfully bored, with the exception of Keith Moon, as always enjoying himself heartily.
Keith was attempting to play his drums encased inside a glittering clown’s suit, complete with pointed hat and white makeup. He looked pretty terrifying, but it didn’t stop him kicking up a storm of percussion as the Who thundered into “mini-opera,” their contribution to the Circus.
And what about the Stones’ performance?
CHRIS WELCH: Around about two a.m. the Stones were on stage and warming up with “Route 66.” They got through “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and “No Expectations” to prove they still have the most exciting group sound in the world and the most interesting visual vocalist in Jagger. “Sympathy for the Devil” was Mick at his provocative best. He whipped off his shirt to reveal a Devil’s head tattooed on his chest.
Both contemporary observers were always optimistic about the final product.
KEITH ALTHAM: The Rolling Stones put in some overtime last Wednesday when they spent seventeen hours working on their telethon production of the Rock and Roll Circus which is likely to become a pop classic when it is shown.
CHRIS WELCH: If the superstars aren’t knifed, scorched, slap-sticked, or eaten by mistake, the Rock and Roll Circus looks like a winner.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the television: the Stones decided to put the whole thing away. The rumor was always that they backed off because they thought the Who were better than they were.
MICHAEL LINDSAY-HOGG: It’s not that they thought the Who were better than the Stones. The Stones had a very accurate view of who they were: the Greatest Rock ’n’ Roll Band in the World. But they thought on that particular day the Who had gone on stage at four in the afternoon; they were fresh; they also had been touring; they’d been on the road; their act was really together. The Stones hadn’t been on the road. They didn’t think the Who were better as much as they thought the Stones weren’t as good as they could be.
BILL WYMAN: We weren’t really satisfied with our performance on that. Mick, in particular, wasn’t happy. We thought about reshooting our sequence, but it would have involved redoing the whole three- or four-day spectacle to preserve continuity, or else you would have seen the differences in lighting or whatever.
There was also another major reason that Rock and Roll Circus stayed buried: legal hassles.
BILL WYMAN: And then we broke with [manager] Allen Klein, and to have done anything about Rock and Roll Circus at that point would have involved enormous legal hassles and negotiations about ownership. So in the end it was just shelved. Permanently.
What happened to the film?
MICHAEL LINDSAY-HOGG: Before the Stones went to France [see chapter 28], they had a very large, commodious office in London. To save money, they moved into very small offices. So the cutting room was closed down and all of the cans of film were moved to this very small office, where there really wasn’t room for them. They were in the bathroom and on top of the toilet seat.
There was talk of just chucking this stuff out because nobody was ever going to want it. That day, when there was this kind of low-level discussion, Ian Stewart was in the office. And he thought, “Maybe someone will want this stuff someday.” His van was outside and he put all the cans of film in his van and he drove it out to his house in the country.
There it was, and there it remained, until 1985, when Ian Stewart passed away.
MICHAEL LINDSAY-HOGG: Then Ian died young and Cynthia, his widow, was looking around the property to see what was where and what was what, and she went into the barn and up against the wall with a rake leaning against it were these cans with tape on the side of the cans peeling off saying, “The olling stones ock and oll ircus.” It had been there for like fifteen years.
And how did it finally see the light of day?
MICHAEL LINDSAY-HOGG: The information of it being found got to Allen Klein because Allen, because of an agreement when he split from the Stones, was given the right to the pre-1970 Stones material. Also, he had the rights to the footage. And he’s the one—we took the cut to New York. He found some stuff that had been lost. [The Who’s] stuff had been used in the documentary The Kids Are Alright. That’s where their Circus performance was. We got it all back. We put it together . . . and there was Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus, which was not shown until the New York Film Festival in 1996. I was thrilled to see it on the big screen. The reviews were good. We knew we had something special. Brian had died; Keith Moon had died. It had a poignancy to it as well as vibrancy.
GARY PIG GOLD: This archival hour provides perhaps the best existing audiovisual documentation of a time truly in turmoil; of a musical and even social changing of the guard between, well, “All You Need Is Love” and Altamont.