I spoke on the Stones' Rock and Roll Circus to the FSU Society of Musicology; I'm posting it here in three installments.
On Art, Politics, and the Rolling Stones
One. The first thing I want to say is THANK YOU so much for inviting me to talk. I’m not a musicologist, but I think we have a lot in common, mainly a commitment to interdisciplinary study. We think of music not only as a thing in itself, but as something that touches on most human endeavor. I do cultural studies of music: which means that I think a lot about how music functions in a culture, and within history. I mostly write about discourses that surround music, and that seek to make sense of it. You can’t overestimate the power of discourse to situate an object, even something as intangible and disembodied as music. This is even—perhaps especially-- true of rock music; 60s rock critics were mostly non-academics, barely credentialed members of the middle and lower middle classes. Yet within a short period, these writers had set up a canon of important rock albums mostly publishing in the free or underground press. For better or worse, their evaluations remain foundational for the study of pop and rock music today.
Tonight I will discuss the Stones’ TV film, the Rock and Roll Circus, directed by Michael Lindsey-Hogg, including some crucial events that occurred between the time the idea was hatched and the actual filming in December 1968. The main idea of the program was to combine a select concert bill of the Stones and a few of their favorite artists with circus acts. The film seems like a curio of the times; I will argue it was much more than that; the idea points beyond itself to a desired, utopian resolution of the structural divide that separates art and social praxis. By discussing the Stones’ film within its time, I hope to address a much broader topic, the age-old question about the relation between art and politics. I see the Rock and Roll Circus as very much part of its time, but also as a rupture in history, of the sort valued by Walter Benjamin, in his meditations on revolutionary moments.
This is the broad outline of the story I will tell tonight. For a brief period following the band’s arrests in England for drug related offences, the rock audience in Britain, particularly the student audience who identified with the burgeoning underground movement, projected their own desires for cultural transformation onto the band’s already established anti-authoritarian celebrity image. Thanks to their shrewd manager/provocateur Andrew Loog Oldham, the Stones seemed from the outset to be more than just teenage trouble makers in the tradition of first generation rockers like Jerry Lee Lewis, but revolutionary outlaws, more Che Guevara than Elvis. Whether or not this was a misreading is beside the point (although if the question of the Stones’ actual political convictions interests you, you might want to check out Stanley Booth’s remarkable account of his time touring with the band in 1969, The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones; it would seem that Keith Richards believed this fan interpretation of the band at best naïve and at worst a delusion that posed a danger to the lives of band members, and that Jagger, appropriately enough for an educated middle-class student of the London School of Economics, took bourgeois cultural radicalism pretty seriously, enough to join in the massive student protest against the American war in Viet Nam held at Grosvenor Square in May 1968, before falling largely silent on political matters in his art). What interests me is the product of all this fan projection: the Stones felt empowered to entertain new ambitions for rock music and themselves.
As I will argue, the project of the rock and roll circus expresses a deep-rooted utopian impulse. The TV program was meant to signify the group’s affinity with working class culture, and the Old Left, and their solidarity with a new left, represented by student activists. The circus mise en scene suggested that the roots of British rock lay in carnivalesque entertainments related to far older forms of popular culture. As I will relate, the circus project was a covert act of resistance by rock bands against a music industry that treated rock music as mere commerce. The program was also of a piece with the Stones, and British rock’s, new found art ambitions. Since the mid60s, the Stones had been making records of greater complexity and sophistication: from “19th Nervous Breakdown,” “Lady Jane,” and “Paint it Black.” Part of my project here and in my book, British Rock Modernism, is to align these art ambitions more closely with modernist aesthetics.
The Circus program was to highlight all of this: the new artistic sophistication of the band and their hopes for social transformation through collective action. Finally, it was an attempt to act out a utopian vision, in the manner of many 60s counterculture experiments. The film was intended to express the band’s genial assent to revolutionary change as well as showcase the new sophistication and ambition of their music. For us, the Rock and Roll Circus has a more melancholy lesson: that the tensions between art and politics were such that no amount of good intentions could resolve them. The film also suggests the seeds of the dissolution of the hippie counterculture were present even when underground culture was in the ascendant.
Two. On one level, the Rock and Roll Circus film was an attempt to capitalize on an unprecedented breach in the popularity of the Stones’ chief competitors in British rock, the Beatles. On Boxing Day 1967, the Beatles aired their first auteur effort to make a rock film, Magical Mystery Tour. The reception among fans and the critics was largely negative. Unlike the Beatles, the Stones had yet to appear on film outside from the performance footage in The T.A.M.I Show (1964). There was a tentative plan for the Stones to star in a film adaptation of Dave Wallis’ dystopian novel, Only Lovers Left Alive (1964); even more tantalizing, the band’s manager Andrew Loog Oldham attempted to secure the rights to A Clockwork Orange (1962), Anthony Burgess’ novel about futuristic, ultraviolent youth gang, itself a rewriting of real-life clashes between English Mods and Rockers on Brighton Beach in the early 60s. The Rock and Roll Circus film would allow the Stones to triumph on the small screen, as a prelude to their entrée into cinema; in the process, they would finally best the Beatles, rather than follow in that band’s footsteps.
Yet the origins of the Circus project predate the airing of Magical Mystery Tour by a few months, in an intense, late night, and probably drug fuelled discussion between Jagger, Pete Townshend, and Ronnie Lane in Olympic Studios in summer of 1967. The conversation turned to alternatives to the concert tour. Lane’s idea was to integrate a rock show with circus acts, and combine a touring band and a traveling circus. Fascinated with the circus as a child, Lane associated the fair with his working class adolescence. He had a regular job as a teenager at a summer fair in the East End. Townshend and Jagger came from more solidly middle-class families; yet they too were fascinated by the idea of a rock circus. The discussion may have had its origin in a bull session, but Jagger and Townshend would revisit the idea for many months, finally contacting American concert promoter Chip Monck. Monk, Jagger and Townshend all batted several variations of Lane’s idea around; one version had the Stones and the Who on a mammoth tour bill along with the circus, travelling by railroad across the US, with a movie release of tour highlights as a commercial tie in. Another idea was to have an extended residency of the rock circus in a few major metropolitan areas. (Ironically, the only one of the three who actually toured in a rock circus was Ronnie Lane; after leaving the Faces in 1973, Lane’s rock/circus act travelled and played in the English north country as a caravan with tents and a ringmaster, a venture that quickly used up most of Lane’s savings left over from his more lucrative days playing stadiums with Rod Stewart and the Faces).
This brief account of the subsequent fortunes of Lane’s idea suggests that, even if the idea was made half in jest, it obtained the fascinated interest of celebrity rock stars like Jagger and Townshend. The circus idea conjured up a vision of a vanished England of the imagination, and struck a chord among the three pop stars, part of a single generation who came of age in London after the Blitz: the dreary London of debris (bomb craters), curfews, and food shortages. Lane’s idea also made a covert political statement, creating a link between British rock and the earlier, anti-authoritarian culture of the English working class.
[Not in the talk, but check out Ian McLagen's version of Lane's "Debris"; Mac's introduction brings out the class issues always present in Lane's work: ]
That last point suggests another motivation for Jagger, et al’s interest in a rock circus: distaste for the growing industry in rock music, and for the notion of rock as mere commerce, coming from the rock groups themselves. Beatlemania had prompted that group to do the unthinkable for a pop music band, and stop touring. Was the only alternative for the rock group who desired to be both a commercial and artistic enterprise to retire to the studio? In dreaming about a rock circus, Jagger and Townshend were also imagining, and asserting, the rock group as an autonomous entity. Their dialogue was also a fledgling effort to imagine an alternative to the standard rock concert at a moment when the concert seemed to be at a crossroads. Fan hysteria for rock stars was the subject of Peter Watkins’s dark, virulent satire of contemporary England, Privilege (1967), also released the same year as the rock circus idea was hatched. From director Watkins’ Marxist perspective, hysterical fans and concert tours revealed the true social function of pop music: containing youth resistance, silencing criticism of the status quo, and, most of all, distracting young people from recognizing their collective potential to effect change.
However, at the same time as artists and intellectuals of the Old Left like Watkins were criticizing rock politics, the fledgling new left in England was taking rock music more seriously. This entailed thinking about a gathering of rock fans as constituting a progressive community and re-evaluating the meaning of the rock concert. Mick Farren recalls looking around at the young people in the audience at Bob Dylan’s concert at the Royal Albert Hall in 1966, wondering: “Could all these people be brought back together on other pretexts? When his rebel-stoned electric circus moved on would we all return to our separate and isolated ways?” Most important, Farren asked: “Was it beyond the realm of possibility that we might find other common ground beyond the appreciation” of an artist and their work? I see the rock circus idea as a direct analogue to Farren’s utopian dream of the rock concert as a populist, politically progressive, social gathering.
(Not in the talk, but check out Farren's remembrance of demos past:
