We've got sounds and sights and marvels to delight your eyes and ears!
--Mick Jagger
Wednesday, December 11, 1968...
...And December 12, because technical issues stretched the recording session to fifteen hours.
The Rolling Stones
The Who
Taj Mahal
Marianne Faithfull
Jethro Tull
The Dirty Mac
Several performers from Sir Robert Fossett's Circus and then-popular model Donyale Luna
The Stones wanted a TV special and engaged director Michael Lindsay-Hogg, best-known for pop program Ready Steady Go! , who came up with the big top pop concept. Tony Richmond handled the cinematography. A crowd of contest winners, Rolling Stones fan club members, and a few Hell's Angels from the U.S. gathered on a mock-circus setting, most of them wearing colourful hats and ponchos provided for the occasion. The rock royalty came as circus performers. Jagger himself played ringmaster, though he switched to more familiar outfit for his performance. It's a time capsule, a shard of a coloured-glass moment in pop-culture history.
It would not be released for nearly thirty years.
The concept of marrying Rock and Roll with circus trappings suits the dreamy sensibility of the era. The show opens with brass and woodwind and brash optimism. The camerawork is less active than current pop audiences expect. Compared to MTV a little more than a decade later, it seems positively static. We get performances by the various bands. Black Sabbath's Tony Iommi fills in for absent Jethro Tull member. The Who give a striking, nine-minute performance of their little opus, "A Quick One (While He's Away)." They upstage most of the subsequent performances. For years, this was the only footage anyone saw (at least, legally) of the Circus; it appears in the Who documentary, The Kids are Alright (1979).
In between the various acts, we get brief circus performances and some banter between Mick and John Lennon. The Beatle was there with his one-shot band, Dirty Mac, which consisted of Eric Clapton, Keith Richards, Mitch Mitchell (from the Jimi Hendrix Experience), Yoko Ono, and Israeli violinist Ivry Gitlis. They play "Yer Blues" from the recently-released Beatles "White Album" and an improvised piece later variously identified as "A Whole Lotta Yoko" and "Her Blues." Ono has come under considerable criticism for her musical takes, but I rather enjoyed this one.
Most of the music-- bluesman Taj Mahal, for example-- the bands played live. Others-- like Marianne Faithfull-- sang to a recorded track. The audience remains enthusiastic throughout. By all accounts, most were as lit up as they look.
But more than twelve hours passed before the circus's hosts rolled onto the stage to play.
Lindsay-Hogg himself considers Jagger's performance of "Sympathy for the Devil" to be the "classic take" of the song. It may well be-- but it's 5am and the Stones, not exactly the cleanest-living bunch of guys, look tired. Brian Jones almost pulled out of the project that week. It would be his final performance with the band. They get through, with a little help from their friends, including studio pianist and frequent Stones collaborator Nicky Hopkins, Ghanaian percussionist Kwasi "Rocky" Dzidzornu, and American classical pianist Julius Katchen. They also have the considerable energy of the young Mick Jagger, who remains on his game.
It wasn't enough for the Stones. They felt upstaged in their own show, and the special never aired as planned. Clips and tracks turned up here and there until 1996, when both the film and an album received official release. The audio recording includes several bonus tracks, including a performance of "Revolution." A 2004 DVD release featured a number of additional song sand circus performances, and some banter. In 2019, the film finally played a limited number of theatres.
You can't always get what you want. Whether you need another psychedelic 60s nostalgia trip or further glimpses of a time when pop musicians were part of a real-world community remains a personal question. This isn't the best of the lot: it's not Monterrey Pop or Woodstock or the Harlem Cultural Festival. It's not even the Toronto Rock and Roll Revival. It is, however, worth the time if the sounds and sights and marvels of the era hold your interest. And it proved a lot less murderous then the Stones' next film project.