Under The Tent

On the afternoon of December 11, 1968, Mick Jagger walked into a BBC soundstage in Wembley dressed as a ringmaster and declared a circus open. In the room were John Lennon, Eric Clapton, Pete Townshend, Keith Moon, Roger Daltrey, and a pre-Black Sabbath Tony Iommi. There was also a real circus: fire-eaters, acrobats, a boxing kangaroo, and a tiger. The audience included Rolling Stones fan club members, winners of a New Musical Express competition, and a handful of visiting American Hells Angels. The whole thing had been conceived, funded, and assembled in two weeks. It was supposed to finish in one day. It ran fifteen hours. When it was over, Mick Jagger watched the footage, decided it was not good enough to broadcast, and put it in a vault where it would sit untouched for nearly three decades.

The Idea and the Budget

The Rolling Stones had just released Beggars Banquet, and Jagger was looking for a way to promote it that went beyond the standard press cycle. He approached director Michael Lindsay-Hogg, who had already directed promotional films for the Stones and would soon direct the Beatles' Let It Be documentary. The concept was simple in outline and staggering in execution: an all-star concert filmed under a circus big top, broadcast on the BBC, with the Stones closing the show as ringmasters of their own spectacle.

The budget was reported at around 50,000 pounds, which the Stones funded themselves. They put together the bill in a matter of days. Traffic and Cream were both invited and both unavailable, having recently dissolved. The replacements they landed were, by any measure, not a downgrade: The Who, Jethro Tull, Taj Mahal, Marianne Faithfull, and a one-off supergroup assembled specifically for the occasion that would never perform together again.

The Dirty Mac and the Room Next Door

The supergroup called themselves the Dirty Mac. The lineup was John Lennon on guitar and vocals, Eric Clapton on lead guitar, Keith Richards on bass, and Mitch Mitchell of the Jimi Hendrix Experience on drums. They played a version of "Yer Blues" from the White Album, followed by an improvised piece called "Whole Lotta Yoko" with Yoko Ono wailing and violinist Ivry Gitlis sawing away while the band played behind them. Eyewitnesses described the audience standing completely still, not moving or talking, unable to process what they were watching.

For Lennon, the Circus was a genuine milestone. It was the first time he had performed before a live audience outside the Beatles. He later said the experience changed something for him: hearing a different noise behind him, playing with different people, he realized that performing could be fun again. That observation would have consequences. Within two years the Beatles were finished.

The backstage scene was its own event. Music critic David Dalton, who was present, later wrote that he looked into a room and saw Lennon, Jagger, Townshend, and Clapton sitting together playing blues on guitar and harmonica. Keith Moon was playing spoons on a table.

The Acts Nobody Talks About

Jethro Tull opened the show and delivered one of the most quietly remarkable performances in the film. Ian Anderson played flute while standing on one leg, looking, as Dalton put it, like a twitching werewolf in a long grey coat. What makes the footage historically strange is the guitarist standing next to him: Tony Iommi, who had briefly left the band he was forming, then called the Polka Tulk Blues Band, to fill in for Tull's departing Mick Abrahams. In the film, Iommi keeps his hat pulled low and barely moves. He was not plugged in. He later said he had no interest in being seen there. Within months he was back with his own band, which became Black Sabbath. The Rock and Roll Circus is the only footage that exists of Iommi playing with Jethro Tull.

Taj Mahal performed with a band that included guitarist Jesse Ed Davis, and Pete Townshend later said that Taj was, as always, extraordinary. Davis was playing horn parts on the guitar note for note, and almost nobody in the rock press covered it. The Circus has always been discussed in terms of its headliners. The undercard rewards attention.

The Who's Seven and a Half Minutes

The Who performed a complete version of "A Quick One, While He's Away," the nine-part mini-opera from their 1966 album. They had been on a concert tour immediately before filming and arrived at the soundstage in peak form. What they delivered in roughly seven and a half minutes is widely considered one of the greatest live rock performances ever captured on film. Townshend windmilling. Daltrey unleashed. Moon playing like a man trying to destroy the kit before it destroys him.

Townshend himself has acknowledged that it did not happen by accident. He said later that there are nights when a white magic replaces the black magic and everything starts to fly. That night it flew. By the time the Stones went on at two in the morning, the audience had been inside a circus tent for twelve hours. They had seen the Dirty Mac, Taj Mahal, and The Who at full power. What they needed to see from the Stones, in that context, was transcendence. What they got was a tired band playing well but not brilliantly, closing a show that had already peaked hours earlier.

Brian Jones, Last Call

The most painful thing in the Rock and Roll Circus, visible only in retrospect, is Brian Jones. The night before filming, he told Lindsay-Hogg that the other Stones were being mean to him and that he did not feel part of the band anymore. On camera he is clearly impaired. His guitar is largely inaudible in the final mix, with the exception of a slide part on "No Expectations" that still manages to be beautiful. Lindsay-Hogg said Jones could not really contribute at all, except for a few chords. The Rock and Roll Circus was his final performance with the Rolling Stones. Seven months later, in July 1969, he was found dead in his swimming pool at the age of 27. The film was being edited at the time.

The Vault, the Barn, and the Recovery

After Jagger reviewed the footage and decided the Stones had been outperformed on their own production, the film went nowhere. The BBC broadcast never happened. No theatrical release materialized. For years it was assumed that significant portions of the footage had simply been lost. Then in 1985, Stones road manager and founding member Ian Stewart died. Going through his belongings, people found film canisters. A substantial additional portion of the footage was later discovered in a vault belonging to The Who. The pieces were eventually reassembled and the complete Rock and Roll Circus premiered at the New York Film Festival in October 1996, twenty-eight years after the cameras stopped rolling. A soundtrack album followed two days later on ABKCO Records, which by then controlled the Stones' Decca-era catalog through Allen Klein.

A newly digitized version screened across America in 2019, and the consensus that has formed over time is that Jagger was wrong to bury it. The Stones' performance is uneven but not embarrassing. "Sympathy for the Devil" builds into something hypnotic. "You Can't Always Get What You Want" is rough at the opening and then ignites. The whole film, circus performers and all, captures something that rock music has not managed to reproduce: a night when the best musicians in the world were all in the same room with nothing to lose and everything to prove, and most of them delivered.

The Who clearly won. But it was still the Rolling Stones' circus.

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