New Left in Victorian Drag: <i>The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus</i>

Abstract

The Rolling Stones' first television program was mostly, but not only, an at- tempt to capitalize on the blunder that the band's friendly rivals, the Beatles, had made with their home movie, Magical Mystery Tour. The Beatles' movie aired on the BBC on Boxing Day in 1967, bewildering fans and irritating crit- ics. The Stones' television program, The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus, filmed in December 1968, aimed to one-up the Beatles in capturing rock performance on film. Unlike the Beatles' music movie, The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Cir- cus was never aired, and a quasi-consensus has formed that has dismissed the project accordingly and stigmatized it as an aesthetic failure. However, as a cultural text, the Rock and Roll Circus program remains a key document of the era. The mise-en-scene for the Rolling Stones' performance, the rock show as circus act, a subject chosen by the band and followed through on by the program's director, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, was, I will argue, chosen with deliberate care. The Stones' movie was meant to build a pow- erful link between the new rock music and the British working-class past, an attempt to consolidate two different political movements, traditional working-class struggles with current youth politics. This chapter sets the Rock and Roll Circus project in the specific historical contexts of British popular music and the emerging cultural un- derground. I hope to explain how the scheme, aimed at building a bridge between rock music and radical politics, reveals broader transformations in what constituted aesthetics and politics at the time. 1 Historicizing the Stones' film allows us to grasp the changing definitions of art and politics in the British '60s. The Rock and Roll Circus project originated in an effort to make rock political by explicitly aligning the music and musicians with working-class struggles against capitalism. I argue that the final product discloses Jagger and his band's commitment to a self-conscious work ethic that sidesteps the question of rock politics; instead, the guiding assump- tion is that the politics of rock music is a consequence of how audiences