There is a version of this record that lives in your collection as a curiosity — the famous TV special that never aired, the night John Lennon played guitar in a leather jacket while Yoko sat on the stage floor wrapped in a bag. You’ve put it on a few times at parties, let “Sympathy for the Devil” do its work, then flipped to something else. Tonight, do it differently. Sit down with it.
The Rock and Roll Circus was filmed at Internel Studios in Wembley over two days in December 1968, and the whole enterprise was Mick Jagger’s idea — a proper televised spectacle with a big top, acrobats, fire-eaters, and the greatest rock band in the world closing the show. Except the Stones didn’t close it well enough, at least not to their own satisfaction. Jagger watched the Who tear the roof off the tent during their afternoon set and apparently decided the Stones’ own performance looked pale by comparison. The tapes went into a vault. They sat there for twenty-eight years.
What You Might Have Missed
The Dirty Mac sequence, which opens side two of this expanded edition, deserves more than the five minutes you’ve probably given it. John Lennon assembled this pickup band specifically for the Circus — Keith Richards on bass (not his instrument, and it shows in the best possible way), Mitch Mitchell from the Jimi Hendrix Experience on drums, and Eric Clapton on lead. They play “Yer Blues” from the White Album, released just six weeks earlier. Lennon is ferocious. His voice is cracked open and raw in a way the studio version never quite captures.
Then comes Yoko and Ivry Gitlis, the classical violinist, joining for a freeform piece called “Whole Lotta Yoko.” Most people skip it. Don’t skip it tonight. Gitlis was sixty-something years old, a concert hall virtuoso, and here he is scraping his bow across a violin while Lennon feeds back through a Marshall and Yoko makes sounds that have no genre. It is completely unhinged and completely sincere and it lasts four minutes. It rewards the patience.
The Stones Themselves
The Stones’ set — recorded somewhere around 2 AM after a full day of filming — is genuinely ragged in ways that a careful listen rewards. Charlie Watts sounds exhausted and locked in simultaneously, which turns out to be his whole genius in concentrated form. “Jumping Jack Flash” has a looseness that none of the studio versions ever achieved. “Sympathy for the Devil” runs over ten minutes here, and the conga work from Rocky Dijon drags it into something hypnotic and genuinely menacing. The Stones were right that they weren’t at their peak that night. They were also wrong to bury it.
The sound on the expanded edition, finally released officially in 1996 and remastered since, is better than it has any right to be given the circumstances — a live television recording from a circus tent at midnight. ABKCO’s reissue production managed to pull genuine warmth out of those 1968 tapes. The low end on “Salt of the Earth,” which closes the set with the full company joining in, is something you feel in the chest if your room is set up right.
Jethro Tull plays a number. The Who play “A Quick One While He’s Away” in its entirety and it is one of the greatest live performances they ever committed to tape. Marianne Faithfull sings “Something Better.” Taj Mahal opens the whole night.
There’s a reason this didn’t feel like a singular experience on the first few listens — it’s too dense, too varied, and the Dirty Mac segment always seemed like an interesting footnote rather than the centerpiece it actually is. Put on the headphones. Find the moment where Lennon hits the second verse of “Yer Blues” and Richards’ bass note rings just slightly too long. That’s the sound of four extraordinary musicians playing together for the first and only time, at midnight, in a circus tent, with nothing to lose.