The Rolling Stones' Rock and Roll Circus (London Weekend Television, ABKCO Films, filmed 1968, released 1996)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Performance I screened Charloes a fascinating performance film called The Rolling Stones’ Rock and Roll Circus, which was originally shot over two days – December 11 and 12, 1968 – at a TV studio in the Wembley district of London. According to at least one “Trivia” poster on imdb.com, Rock and Roll Circus was originally the result of a plan by the Rolling Stones and the Who to mount a tour of Great Britain using a circus tent, which they would set up in various locations and perform in. Part of the plan was to have actual circus performers on the bill alternating with the rock bands. In the end the plans were scaled back, and instead of doing a whole tour with a circus motif the Rolling Stones decided to do a one-off TV special to promote their newly completed album, Beggars’ Banquet. This explains why, out of the six songs the Stones performed on the program, four were from Beggars’ Banquet – “Sympathy for the Devil,” “No Expectations,” “Parachute Woman” and “Salt of the Earth” – along with the opener, “Jumping Jack Flash,” which they would actually release as a non-LP single after Beggars’ Banquet. For me, when I first saw this show in 1996 – after 28 years during which the Stones kept it in the vaults, reportedly because they were dissatisfied with their own performance – the biggest surprise was the sixth song in the Stones’ bill. It was “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” and the reason it was such a surprise was I had always assumed this beautiful death-haunted song had been written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards as a memorial for the Stones’ original second guitarist, Brian Jones, whom they had fired from the band about a month before his drug-related death on July 3, 1969. Only here it was performed live well before Brian Jones’ death, and indeed with him there as part of the band!

The Rolling Stones’ Rock and Roll Circus became the stuff of legend when a few tracks of it were bootlegged, including the two contributions by “The Dirty Mac,” a rough jam band formed by John Lennon and Yoko Ono and featuring Lennon on guitar and vocals, Eric Clapton on lead guitar, the Stones’ Keith Richards on bass and Jimi Hendrix Experience drummer Mitch Mitchell. They do the Beatles’ song “Yer Blues” and one of Yoko’s typical excursions into what’s commonly called “extended vocal,” featuring Ivry Gitlis – usually a classical violinist who was born in 1922 and was therefore a generation older than most of the people on this bill. Gitlis was mostly known as a classical violinist who recorded traditional repertoire like concerti by Paganini, Tchaikovsky and Sibelius, as well as more advanced music by Bartók and Stravinsky. But here he managed to enter Yoko Ono’s sound world and play a long opening solo almost totally in double stops (which means playing more than an octave above where the string is tuned) that perfectly sets the stage for Yoko Ono (whose music I actually love; I didn’t at first but eventually I realized that she was imitating avant-garde jazz musicians like John Coltrane, Albert Ayler and Ornette Coleman, the last of whom she actually recorded with).

After an opening sequence featuring Julius Fucik’s “Entry of the Gladiators” – you’ve probably never heard of it but you know it if you’ve ever seen any movie about circuses – the first band we see is Jethro Tull, a group I’ve always admired if only because of the sheer chutzpah of their leader, Ian Anderson, achieving rock-star status despite playing so un-rock an instrument as the flute. They do a piece called “Song for Jeffrey” and this is a souvenir of the few weeks in which Tony Iommi, later the founder of Black Sabbath, was Jethro Tull’s lead guitarist. This is the only time he ever appeared with thenm im public, and during his close-ups you can see his shortened middle finger on his left hand; Iommi lost part of that finger in an industrial accident and briefly thought he’d have to give up playing guitar until someone told him about Django Reinhardt, the legendary French-Belgian Gypsy guitarist who became a jazz legend despite losing the use of three fingers on his left hand in a household fire.

The next band up was The Who, witl all four of their original members (Roger Daltrey, vocals; Pete Townshend, guitar; John Entwistle, bass; and Keith Moon, drums) all alive and reasonably well, though the song they perform is one of my least favorite of theirs. It’s called “A Quick One (While He’s Away)” and it’s an eight-minute opus which Townshend described as a “mini-opera.” It’s all about a woman whose husband has left her for an extended “business” trip and, when he doesn’t show up as scheduled, she’s tempted by “Ivor, the Engine Driver” to engage in some extra-relational activity. Fortunately (or not), her husband finally arrives home just in time to stop her and Ivor from doing the dirty deed, and he forgives her (no doubt because on that “business” trip he’s been doing some sexual shenanigans of his own). The Who gave it a lot more energy on this occasion than they did in the recording studio, but it’s still not onie of their better songs and it’s hard to believe the claim some historians have made that the reason the Rolling Stones sat on this film for 28 years was they thought The Who had outplayed and outclassed them.

The next performer was Taj Mahal, the Harlem-born African-American blues musician whose real name was Henry St. Claire Fredericks, Jr. and who played his song, “Ain’t That a Lot of Love,” with an all-white backing band: Jesse Ed Davis (electric guitar), Gary Gilmore (electric bass), and Chuck Blackwell (drums). After a brief middle-of-the-road interval featuring Marianne Faithfull, Mick Jagger’s then-girlfriend, doing a song called “Something Better” by Barry Mann and Gerry Goffin (without their usual distaff collaborators, Cynthia Weil and Carole King), it’s time for “The Dirty Mac” and then for the Stones. One treat from this show is it’s nice to see Mick Jagger when he was still lithe and moved smoothly on stage – even though my mother, who never particularly liked the Stones, reacted to them when they played the Dick Cavett Show in 1969 by saying, “He doesn’t even dance! He just jumps!” (Obviously mom was expecting Jagger to be a white James Brown, which he never was, and the gulf between them in terms of stage presence was unwittingly demonstrated by the 1965 TV special The T.A.M.I. Show, in which the Stones had to follow the real James Brown.)

Though the Stones’ opening number, “Jumping Jack Flash,” doesn’t have the energy it did on the studio record or in some of the later live versions, all in all they do a quite energetic set and the song “No Expectations,” featuring Brian Jones’ haunting slide guitar behind Mick Jagger’s heart-felt vocal and acoustic guitar, is especially beautiful. Rock and Roll Circus has been processed at least twice, once in 1996 and again in 2018, and there’s a two-CD version containing the original soundtrack on disc one (though without the glitch on Lennon’s “Yer Blues” in which his voice drops out on the final chorus) and outtakes on disc two. The main reason to want this is the much more energetic playing of Taj Mahal – especially on “Leaving Trunk,” which led off his first album and is, as far as I’m concerned, the best song he ever recorded. There’s also John Lennon and company performing a regrettably incomplete version of the Beatles’ “Revolution” as well as another take of “Yer Blues.” For those of us who grew up in the 1960’s, Rock and Roll Circus is indeed the time capsule David Dalton said it was on his printed foreword, in which he wrote that “for a brief moment it seemed that rock ‘n’ roll would inherit the earth.”