New Left in Victorian Drag: The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus

The Rolling Stones’ first television program was mostly, but not only, an attempt 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 critics. 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 Circus 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-scène 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 powerful 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 underground. 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 assumption is that the politics of rock music is a consequence of how audiences use the music rather than something set by the musicians themselves. The standard way that we have narrated this development is by interpreting the self-consciously arty British rock that distinguished the end of the ’60s as expressing the increasingly bourgeois character of the music. However, the Rock and Roll Circus film suggests that rock’s embourgeoisment was not the same thing as its de-politicization. Jagger’s performances are still political after the Rock and Roll Circus—how else to explain Altamont?—and rock was art before suburban tastemakers labeled it thus. Yet what Jagger learned, in part from his experience acting in the Roeg/Cammell film Performance, was the historical necessity of pursuing a specific aesthetic niche for rock music. The results are on display in the Stones’ circus movie, which establishes something like a new set of labor practices specific to rock stars. The progress of the project from conception to production reveals the fierce struggle among subgroups of the bourgeois over the relation between taste and class identity, over whether normative politics should affirm or reject capitalism, and whether artworks that seem opposed to the “establishment” might in fact affirm its most fundamental values. The history of the Rock and Roll Circus project allows us to think through how these questions were importantly different, revealing struggles and fragile alliances among the supposedly homogeneous, middle-class. By drawing attention to shifts in how Jagger claims politics for the Stones’ music, I also hope to shed light on a larger development specific to the late ’60s, from a production based notion of rock’s politics to a reception-driven one.

A year separated the making of the Rolling Stones’ movie and the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour film, but the programs have crucial features in common. First, unlike the many television or film appearances made by these bands, the groups exerted a degree of creative control on their self-presentation. Second, both films aim to restore the novelty...