
- #John lennon mick jagger the dirty mac sessions how to#
- #John lennon mick jagger the dirty mac sessions full#
The show could best be described as a flamboyant and colorful psychedelic assemble of one of the greatest musicians on the planet, some of whom we would come to miss too soon.
#John lennon mick jagger the dirty mac sessions full#
Listen to the full aired story at the audio link.1968, London was as swingy as it could get, and nothing would stop the Rolling Stones from putting on the greatest show on earth – or as some people put it: The greatest show never to air on TV. It captures all these characters just as they are moving from one phase to another." "But what this film has captured is that pivot point. "I think it is impossible to see this without thinking of the tragic histories that befell a lot of these individuals," he says. It is precisely for showing that moment of transition, Riley suggests, that the new concert film is so valuable. They're moving into a sort of diabolical, Luciferian set of personae, particularly on the part of Mick Jagger." "When you watch the Rock and Roll Circus, it looks like a rehearsal for the terrible events that happened at Altamont," Riley says. James Riley, a lecturer at Cambridge University and author of The Bad Trip, a book about the end of the '60s, traces a trajectory between the two events. An audience member was stabbed and died, and the show went down as one of the most infamous in popular music history. "There was an apocalyptic air about the whole thing."Ī year after the Rock and Roll Circus, almost to the day, the Stones played at California's Altamont Speedway.

Jimi Hendrix died, Janis Joplin died, Jim Morrison died, Brian Jones died," she says in the film. "Everybody knew something was coming, and it did. Marianne Faithfull, who played the Circus and spent many years struggling with addiction herself, also spoke with director Robin Klein about that moment in the rock and roll scene. "He just looked like the gods had shunned him and turned their backs on him, you know?"Īt the time of the Circus, heroin hadn't fully taken over the rock-and-roll scene - but it was looming. "He almost looked as if he had become the kind of scapegoat for all the sins of swinging London," Dalton remembers. In the remastered version of the film, Dalton describes watching Brian Jones onstage. And as the event went on, the artists grew less and less sober.
#John lennon mick jagger the dirty mac sessions how to#
The concert film was being shot with new French cameras that no one quite knew how to use and that kept breaking down. Indeed, spontaneous supergroups aside, attendees of the Circus say there was a certain darker messiness about the event. And I had a sense that things could not last in this glorious way." But then, as we come into the last year of that decade, there was starting to be casualties. "In the middle '60s, no one had been wounded or damaged by drugs. Still, Lindsay-Hogg says, there was a palpable sense of oncoming change amidst the Circus' fun. "He looks up L, he calls John, and then John says he'll do it." Lennon, Richards and Eric Clapton joined forces to play as The Dirty Mac, a last-minute addition to the show and the group's one and only performance (which featured a jam with a classical violinist and Yoko Ono). "All the performers in the show had basically come out of a little address book in Mick Jagger's back pocket," Lindsay-Hogg explains. The Circus' legend-studded line-up came together in a quintessentially easygoing '60s-fashion. The Who perform at the Rolling Stones' Rock and Roll Circus. He recalls how the Circus - complete with a live tiger, trapeze artists, and a 25-year-old Mick Jagger dressed as a ringmaster - symbolized the decade to an almost-surreal degree. Michael Lindsay-Hogg, a young director in the 1960s, shot the show. The 4K restoration captures a snapshot of a critical moment in rock and roll history - a time when the Stones and their contemporaries sat at the height of their fame but teetered on the brink of Altamont-esque unraveling. Now, a remastered film and concert album presents unreleased outtakes from Lennon and others.

Recordings from the event were subsequently released in 1996. Then, the filmstock went missing.ĭecades later, the Circus' reels were found leaning against a hay bale in a barn in France. Over the two-day lifespan of the "Rock and Roll Circus," which was intended to air on the BBC, the Stones recorded performances from that era's most celebrated artists - the Who, John Lennon and Eric Clapton, to name a few.īut the Stones wanted some re-shoots, and the production lost momentum.

In December of 1968, some of the biggest names in rock and roll came together to film a concert organized by The Rolling Stones.
