Old Gods Almost Dead (37 page)

Peter Swales: “The Stones weren't a functioning band at that point. Mick, Keith, Charlie, and Bill desperately wanted to get the show back on the road. Mick had told the press the Stones would tour in 1969, and the
Rock & Roll Circus
was supposed to be the first step. Mick was the 'spiritus rector,' the guiding spirit behind the
Circus,
which was done without the input of—indeed was done almost in spite of—Allen Klein.”

Mick originally wanted the Stones to appear with the Who, Marianne Faithfull, Dr. John, Gram Parsons's new band, the Flying Burrito Brothers, and a “supergroup” led by Steve Winwood, whose band Traffic was just breaking up. (As the great sixties bands began to disintegrate, their principal stars began linking up with stars from other bands: “supergroup” was a major buzzword of the era.) Keith wanted Johnny Cash, who declined. The Isley Brothers were too busy.

Peter Swales: “Allen Klein tried to sabotage the
Circus
by withholding money and completely failing to book Dr. John and the Burritos. Tom Keylock and I went to Steve Winwood's flat to beg him to do the
Circus
('No shame in trying to blackmail him,' said Tom), but Winwood said he was physically ill and wouldn't budge. Then Glyn Johns played me an acetate of Jimmy Page's new band, still called the New Yardbirds [soon to be Led Zeppelin], and pleaded with me to get them on the
Circus.
Jagger said no without hearing the record, and I thought there may have been some bad blood there.

“By now it was getting close to taping, but we had no acts except the Stones and the Who. So Mick played his trump card and called up his idol—John Lennon. Mick didn't really want to do it because he didn't want to be beholden to John, but he did it. Lennon said he would do the supergroup and brought in Eric Clapton. Mitch Mitchell [from the Jimi Hendrix Experience] would play drums, and Keith elbowed Bill Wyman aside and insisted on playing bass.

“The final show came together only days before the taping. Taj Mahal and his band were recruited too late to get them work visas, so they flew in as tourists and had to work secretly. I found a new band called Jethro Tull after hearing 'Blues for Jeffrey' at Pie Studios. Then Brian Jones, who'd been given no role in the
Circus
other than a few lines, insisted that Ivry Gitlis be flown in from Paris to perform. [Gitlis, a Paris acquaintance of Brian's, was one of the last living inheritors of the great European violin virtuosos. At forty-seven, he was the embodiment of the romantic tradition and a champion of modern composers like Bartók and Stravinsky.] Brian was obviously under a huge emotional strain. He was sozzled on vodka at the meetings, often crying in the office. Brian insisted that Gitlis was a genius, and we accommodated him.” Puzzled by the invitation, Gitlis accepted out of respect for Brian.

                

On December 5,
the Stones hosted a drunken press party for
Beggar's Banquet
at a London hotel that ended in a pie fight. Brian Jones was the favorite target; even Les Perrin mashed a pie in Brian's face. Lord Harlech, former British ambassador to Washington, took a direct hit. So did Prince Rupert Lowenstein, Mick Jagger's new financial adviser and éminence grise, a London merchant banker descended from Viennese Jewish aristocracy with a millennium-old Bavarian title. There was a delegation in town from the San Francisco scene—writer Ken Kesey and Rock Scully, who managed the Grateful Dead—hanging out at the Stones' office. They got pied too.

As it turned out, the press didn't need much prodding.
Beggar's Banquet
got rave reviews as critics realized the Stones had rediscovered their blues and country roots and were building something admirable out of them. Mick Jagger described the album to
International Times
as “just a hazy mirror of what we were thinking last summer when we wrote the songs.” The hazy mirror was a Top Ten album in England and America, a sharp reflection of the convulsive psychic currents coursing through the Western world. Nothing else captured the youthful spirit of Europe in 1968 like
Beggar's Banquet.

                

On December 6,
the Stones and the Who rehearsed at the Marquee to test the new French TV cameras that would be used for the
Circus,
shooting film and videotape at the same time.

Peter Swales: “The rehearsals for the
Rock & Roll Circus
were held at the Londonderry Hotel. Nobody had seen the Stones play in England since 1966 and there was a lot of suspense. Could they still do this? Eventually the gear got set up [with Nicky Hopkins on piano and Rocky Dijon on congas] and the Stones started to play 'Sympathy' in a rearranged format, and I watched Jagger just
whip
the Stones back into form. It was incredible!

“But, no Brian. He was tinkering, fiddling, couldn't get his guitar in tune. But I had the sense that, even then they were still willing to give Brian the benefit of the doubt.”

                

The
Rock & Roll Circus
was filmed over three days, December 10 to 12, at InterTel studios in Wembley. Beseeching telegrams to Allen Klein to send money for the production went unanswered, so Mick Jagger had to put up 10,000 pounds to secure the studio. On the first day, the cast rehearsed on the set, half a circus tent with a sawdust ring in the center. Ringmaster Jagger presided over an archway, flags, colored lights, and a four-track mobile studio parked outside, in which Glyn Johns recorded the tracks. Sir Robert Fossett's traveling circus provided trapeze artists, clowns, and even a tiger. John Lennon, Eric Clapton, and Mick jammed on “Peggy Sue.” Lennon insisted his supergroup be called the Dirty Mac, a play on guitarist Peter Green's hot new blues band, Fleetwood Mac, then taking London by storm with its faithful Elmore James revival.

The main
Circus
taping began at noon on Wednesday, December 11, and would last for eighteen hours. The audience, picked from fans who'd sent in coupons from
New Musical Express,
were given bright ponchos and floppy hats, and sat around the circus ring. Technical problems with the cameras and the lights kept interrupting the flow of the event, with many delays and retakes for each artist. The Kesey/Dead entourage, accustomed to the spontaneity of California happenings, complained about the canned, media-event nature of the show and left early.

Most who stayed enjoyed themselves. Jethro Tull did their number between clown acts. Taj Mahal and band played the old Homer Banks song “Ain't That a Lot of Love.” Keith, outfitted in top hat and black eye patch, introduced a fire-eater, assisted by top model Donyale Luna (who got asked out by Brian backstage). Charlie introduced Marianne's number, “Something Better,” which she mimed motionlessly seated in a flowing purple dress, looking tragic and sedated.

Peter Swales: “Marianne was nervous, really very tense. At one point, she was sitting near the entrance when six London cops trotted in. The dressing room area was fragrant with hash smoke; Marianne thought it was a bust and flipped! She went bananas, totally hysteric, until it became clear they only wanted to have their tea in the studio canteen.”

                

To introduce
the Dirty Mac, Mick dressed up as Allen Klein, in a pastel blue sweater and turtleneck shirt. Mimicking Klein's accent and delivery, he interviewed Lennon as “Winston Legthigh” backstage, while John ate a plate of rice with chopsticks. The Dirty Mac took the stage just after ten and ran through “Yer Blues,” a track from
The White Album
that featured the line “I feel so suicidal, just like Dylan's Mr. Jones.” Yoko Ono reclined in a black bag at John Lennon's feet and held his hand between takes. Eric Clapton played a couple of fiery guitar solos, earning his place in what became the Plastic Ono Band after the Beatles broke up a year later. After “Yer Blues,” Ivry Gitlis joined the band for an R&B jam, with Yoko adding her piercing banshee cries to the mix (this was later titled “Her Blues”).

Next came the Who, just off an American tour and impossibly hot. They did several takes of Pete Townshend's mini-opera “A Quick One (While He's Away),” each better than the last, ending in a molten climax of windmilling power chords and Keith Moon's explosive fusillade of drumrolls. The Who were so powerfully
on
they proved impossible to follow.

Three hours now went by as the musicians broke for a meal and the Stones' T-shaped stage was set up by Stu. Some of the audience left to catch the last trains of the night. Finally, at two in the morning, the Rolling Stones with Nicky Hopkins and Rocky Dijon began to warm up. The band looked great: Mick's hair was longer than ever, still dark brown from his role as Turner. Keith had his trademark shag cut, and even Charlie's hair was below his shoulders. Brian looked okay, but he strummed his guitar listlessly off to one side (he had tried to introduce one of the circus acts but could hardly manage his lines). Bill Wyman wore pink velvet boots and played great, as usual.

The lights and cameras were turned on, and the band started running through songs—“Jumpin' Jack Flash,” “Parachute Woman,” “No Expectations”—again and again. Long pauses between songs were taken up with discussions with the director and Glyn Johns about whether another take was required. “You Can't Always Get What You Want” was given its debut performance around 4
A.M.,
with Mick singing directly to Marianne, who was sitting off to one side. Another take, played to the camera, was lurid and alive as Mick relaxed and began to dance. Brian couldn't get through the chords, so Keith had to get the song over without the rhythm guitar.

Exhausted and drained, the Stones did a couple takes of “Sympathy” at 5
A.M.,
with Rocky Dijon beating his congas and Nicky Hopkins pounding the piano keys as Mick stripped off his shirt, revealing a painted devil covering his chest. Keith tore off a blazing guitar solo as Mick writhed on the stage floor. It was a serious, passionate performance that revealed the darkness lurking in the heart of the song.

The night ended at six in the morning, with Keith and Mick singing along with the backing track of “Salt of the Earth” while seated in the audience, with the Who and their roadies clowning around them. With everyone dancing and making merry, the remaining audience filed out to waiting buses. Mick and Keith shook their hands and thanked them for staying. Bill Wyman thought the whole thing was “a load of laughs and a great spirit.”

It was Brian's last appearance with the Stones.

                

Mick Jagger
was disgusted when he viewed the taped footage of the
Rock & Roll Circus
a couple days later. The Rolling Stones had sucked. They were obviously off their form and had been badly upstaged by the rip-roaring Who. With some early interest in the film from London Weekend Television, Michael Lindsay-Hogg edited the footage down to an hour.

Peter Swales: “We all went to see the first version of the
Circus
in a little preview theater in Soho. Allen Klein sat next to Jagger and—right there—killed the movie.

“He said, 'I don't like it. Why? Because the Who blew you off your own stage!' It was all he had to say.”

In near-panic mode, the Stones planned to reshoot their own sequence of songs, but it would have cost another 10,000 pounds and never happened. The
Circus
was obsolete when Brian Jones died the following year, and when the Stones split with Klein in 1970, he took the film with him. It would be another twenty-five years before Klein finally released the film as a videocassette, one that almost everyone agreed was a quite wonderful period piece.

                

At the end of 1968,
Mick and Marianne and Keith and Anita took ship for Brazil, telling the press they were making a pilgrimage to visit a famous magician. The two couples were trying to patch things up after a difficult year. Anita was pregnant with Keith's baby, but she liked to tease Mick about it being his. On the crossing, Anita hemorrhaged, inspiring “the clean white sheets stained red” in Marianne's final version of “Sister Morphine.” New Year's Eve was spent at a macumba voodoo ceremony on the beach in Rio.

And on a hot and dusty cattle ranch where they tarried before they continued their adventure in Peru, Keith wrote a honky-tonk cowboy tune on acoustic guitar, a song about the black ranch hands and their ponies that would change and grow over the next few months until it became something else entirely.

Blow with Ry

January 1969.
Brian was in Ceylon over New Year's. He had problems checking into good hotels that didn't want a disheveled hippie as a guest. He visited visionary
2001
author Arthur C. Clarke and saw an astrologer who reportedly told him to be careful around water in the coming year. While he was in Ceylon, a London court turned down his appeal of his second drug conviction. Not even Jo Bergman's friend in Grosvenor Square could get Brian an American work visa now.

It was almost all over for the Beatles as well. On January 30, they played their final concert on the roof of their office building, filmed by Lindsay-Hogg for the
Get Back
film. The cameras also caught the discontent and burnout in the studio, as they recorded with Billy Preston on keyboard. Allen Klein took over management of the Beatles after John Lennon was persuaded by Mick that this would be a good idea. Paul McCartney, opposed to Klein but outvoted by his band, was bitterly upset, and the seeds for the end of the Beatles were sown. Conventional wisdom has Mick helping get the Beatles for Klein as a way of getting him off the Stones' back, but Jagger has denied this.