To sum up: The Rock and Roll Circus film attempts, in true counterculture spirit, to act out the community it wishes to create. The Stones used their concert film to communicate two messages simultaneously: their new, subversive artistic ambitions and abilities, as well as their solidarity with the revolutionary aims of the counterculture. How well does that work out for them, you may well ask. I will let you decide. Yes, this is where the paper gets interactive! I want to close by viewing what a clip of the final song of the film, where the cast joins in a performance of “Salt of the Earth.” The song is by Jagger/Richards and is on the Stones’ Beggars Banquet album, released less than a week prior to filming the Rock and Roll Circus.
That album would go on to receive commercial success and considerable critical acclaim in the nascent rock press (cf. Jon Landau's review in Rolling Stone; the band was praised for returning to and focusing on the straight ahead, heavy blues rock that many fans and critics believed suited the group best. In retrospect, though, "heavy” does not adequately describe the sound or overall feel of Beggars’ Banquet. There's a strong emphasis on acoustic blues on the record, , rather than the urban electric blues of Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf. Old time gospel blues like “Prodigal Son” sit alongside English folk songs like “Factory Girl,” or the pastoral folk rock ballad, “No Expectations.” (It’s worth recalling that the only actual musical performance in the Performance movie is a brief scene of Jagger singing an acoustic blues, Robert Johnson’s “Come On in My Kitchen”).
With characteristic insouciance, the Stones rewrite “Salt of the Earth,” a expression of alienation from the masses, into a populist rallying cry for the film. Originally, “Salt of the Earth” was the final track on Beggars Banquet, where it put a question mark to the calls for revolution in “Street Fighting Man” or indictments of class hypocrisy (“Jigsaw Puzzle”) elsewhere on the record. “Salt of the Earth” also demonstrates the new reach and attainment of Jagger the lyricist, with its carefully cultivated ambiguity. The song’s chorus proposes a toast to the “common people.” The invitation to a communal sing-along is complicated by the introduction of much darker images of the working class; the chorus seems to proclaim a refined alienation from the masses. (circulate lyric sheet)*
(I showed the "Salt of the Earth" clip on DVD; YouTube has the clip as well, but only with the audio track. I've posted it here. Note Jagger’s Dylanesque phrasing; his rising intonation, suggesting distaste, when he sings “wife and his children”; most important, there are the ad-lib, revised lyrics: “they don’t look real to me” to “do we all look real to you?” It seems a pretty weak attempt to open up the song to a broad audience. It’s as if Jagger realizes in the moment, as cameras were rolling, that there's no way to present the song as a rousing, unambiguous, populist anthem.)
(from Beggars')
(from RR Circus)
(For the hell of it: I never knew this existed! Admit it, you want to see the Rose/Jagger summit)
Although the Rock and Roll Circus was finally released on VHS in 1996, we still don’t know the specifics as to why the Stones, specifically Jagger, never tried to air their movie. Speculations include that the Stones acknowledged that they were bested by the Who’s performance (the Stones had taken the stage at 3 AM, at the end of a twelve hour shoot).* For me, the "Salt of the Earth" segment suggests another reason why Jagger might have decided to shelve the film. The scene demonstrates the gap that remained between the populist form that the Stones adopted for their movie and the band’s aesthetic, which, now more than ever, entailed the relentless pursuit of transgression aimed at alienating segments of the mass audience. The Rock and Roll Circus was intended to swallow whole all the contradictions that inhered in the idea of the commercial artist; it ended up strangling on them.
A few years later, the Stones would release their double album Exile on Main Street, perhaps the first dystopian rock record. Many songs on the album thematize the dissolution of the counterculture explicitly (“Soul Survivor,” “Shine a Light,”), others (“Stop Breaking Down,” “Casino Boogie”) seem to offer an allegory for surviving into a post-revolutionary era (one where revolutionary hopes that once were raised are now dashed). I have described The Rock and Roll Circus as a project based on dreams, several strands of them in fact, woven together. Unintentionally, the film has become a melancholy testament to the dissolution of the counterculture ideal, at the very moment when it seemed that rock and revolution had finally taken over the world.
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