Music Pete Townshend and Mick Jagger’s “amazing” original plan for ‘Rock and Roll Circus’
In 1968, The Rolling Stones hosted the ambitious, pioneering concert film Rock and Roll Circus. The project was directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg, with LSE alumnus Mick Jagger placing a firm hand on the rudder. Although the Stones ultimately collated the landmark event, inviting the likes of Jethro Tull, The Who, Taj Mahal and Marianne Faithfull to join the bill, Pete Townshend, the guitarist and principal songwriter of The Who claims to have had the initial idea.
In November 2023, Far Out sat down with Townshend for an interview, during which he discussed the rock circus concept as a brainchild of his and the legendary Woodstock 1969 lighting engineer Edward ‘Chip’ Monck. “Chip Monck and I came up with the Rock and Roll Circus idea,” Townshend noted. Adding that “Ronnie Lane was the one who wanted to be the Gypsy in the roaming caravan”.
Townshend and Small Faces co-founder Ronnie Lane joined forces with Jagger in the mid-1960s and began spitballing ideas for a circus-themed tour. “It was going to be The Who, the Faces and the Stones,” Townshend continued. “Mick Jagger and I met with Chip Munck, and he decided that what we needed was the old Barnum and Bailey circus-style railway trains.”
“We were talking about this and all getting very excited – this was in LA a year or two before they actually filmed the show with Michael Lindsay Hogg,” Townshend added. “The idea was that we were going to do this rock and roll circus, and it was going to be three big bands, and this was to really show The Beatles how to do it!”
Despite the tantalising prospect of a train-bound circus tour with The Who, The Rolling Stones and Small Faces, this initial plan never came to fruition. “Chip said, ‘There’s one problem, and that’s [that] the railway track that’s in America is in very bad condition. It’s mainly used for freight, so the maximum speed is about ten miles an hour.’”
Not only would this tour take an eternity to complete if it intended to span the US, but Townshend picked up on another issue. “I looked at Mick, and he looked at me, and I said, ‘For you, it’s being trapped on a train moving at ten miles an hour with Keith Richards; for me, it’s being trapped on a train moving at ten miles an hour with Keith Moon. This is not going to happen,’” he exclaimed, laughing.
Sadly, the real circus was never to be, but Townshend said it would have been “amazing” if it were possible. “[Chip] had all the designs,” Townshend added. “Apparently, in those days, Barnum and Bailey had these fair sites where the trains would roll up in a great big circle and the last part of the train, the side would open up, and the circus tent would appear. The seating would appear, and then the straps would all come out of the trains.”
Indeed, this pie-in-the-sky spectacle would have shown “The Beatles how to do it,” but in the end, The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus concert film actually welcomed one of the Fab Four. Among the esteemed acts to join the cast was the one-off supergroup, The Dirty Mac. Assembled by frontman John Lennon, the band boasted the talents of Eric Clapton, Keith Richards and Mitch Mitchell.
The movie was scheduled to air on the BBC, but The Rolling Stones withheld it. Marred by exhaustion and a significant indulgence in drugs, the band deemed their performance substandard. The concert film was shelved for many years before being released commercially for the first time in 1996.
