50 Licks Read online

  MICHAEL LINDSAY-HOGG: I turned up at Ready Steady Go! around four in the afternoon and there were some bands rehearsing for the show. On the stage were these guys. I had never heard of the Rolling Stones before. There was this amazing kid, Mick Jagger, doing dance steps, and slides and movements and stuff which of course he perfected over the years . . . I thought, “Jesus Christ. Something is going to happen to these people, because this guy’s amazing.”

  Lindsay-Hogg ended up filming the Stones on Ready Set Go! several times, including iconic versions of “Satisfaction” and “Paint It Black.”

  MICHAEL LINDSAY-HOGG: I thought it would be great if after every chorus he’d put his hands up and take out the lights. The lights would go down verse by verse until you end up with a spotlight on him at the end. I said, “Think of it as you’re Lucifer and you’re taking out all of the light in the world.” I think the very best single song I ever did on Ready Steady Go! was that “Paint It Black.” It does start in full light and certainly by the end, it’s just Mick in this little bit of light and darkness. And then, what happens, we put up the credits over the darkness; the music is still playing; and when we come back there are all these shots of Mick. And I’m doing the thing with the zoom extender and faces shuddering, and it’s very quick cut. And it’s very mesmeric. As we were shooting it, someone kicked loose the junction of his vocal mic. So you couldn’t actually hear him singing. All you could hear was him saying “ahhhahhhah.” So there were no more lyrics, just sound and these strange, rapidly cut camera shots.

  Michael Lindsay-Hogg was a real pioneer in music video, working with both the Beatles and the Stones.

  MICHAEL LINDSAY-HOGG: Then in ’68 Mick called me up and said, “We’re thinking of doing some promos. Come and talk to me. We got this song called ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash.’” During the break our makeup person started playing around with some makeup and they started to paint their faces. I said, “Let’s paint everyone’s faces.”

  As their partnership with him continued to have success, the Stones brought a new idea to Lindsay-Hogg: a television special that blended various rock acts with actual circus performers. The final lineup included John Lennon, Yoko Ono, the Who, Eric Clapton, Mitch Mitchell, Marianne Faithfull, Taj Mahal, Jethro Tull, and lastly, members of a small touring English circus group, Sir Robert Fossett’s Circus. The last (musical) slot came down to either Tull or Led Zeppelin.

  MICHAEL LINDSAY-HOGG: Mick and I had seen Jethro Tull on a very late-night BBC show and we were very taken with Ian Anderson, their front man. I think partly what Mick felt was that Jethro Tull would be an interesting addition to the show and fun to watch, but was not in any way threatening to the Rolling Stones or the Who. Maybe Led Zeppelin would have brought more testosterone to the mix than the room could stand.

  The original choice to host Rock and Roll Circus was Brigitte Bardot. Lindsay-Hogg hand-delivered a note from Mick to the actress asking her.

  MICHAEL LINDSAY-HOGG: I felt like an emissary, prince to a princess. She wanted to do it because she was as famous in Paris and France as Mick was in London; and she could see herself in the outfit. It’s just that she had a TV deal and they wouldn’t let her.

  Here are a couple of eyewitness testimonies from the music trades of the time (from Keith Altham and Chris Welch), along with a more modern perspective (from Gary Pig Gold).

  KEITH ALTHAM: Michael Lindsay-Hogg, who directed some of the more memorable Ready Steady Go! sagas, produced this epic with a little help from his illustrious friends John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Marianne Faithfull, Eric Clapton, Mitch Mitchell, Jethro Tull, classical pianist Julius Katchen, the Who, and “perpetual” violinist Ivry Gitlis.

  GARY PIG GOLD: Director Michael Lindsay-Hogg, who’d already captured the best of the small-screen Stones on various UK pop shows of the moment, masterfully translated Mick Jagger’s vision of “taking out the normal and making a slightly surreal circus” onto celluloid. The primary reason for this may be that Lindsay-Hogg, who had pioneered his amphetamine-paced quick-jump style on the landmark Ready Steady Go! television series (expertly shooting the Stones’ “Paint It Black” in ’66 for example), stretched his skills to supreme effect throughout the Rock and Roll Circus, cleverly cutting his shots to the beat of the songs themselves, and in the Who’s landmark “A Quick One While He’s Away” herein especially, turning an already red-hot performance into a downright incendiary one.

  And the quality of the overall show?

  GARY PIG GOLD: This particular carnival absolutely provides a nice bright, loud, swinging sixty minutes full of music and merriment, with fire-eaters and trapeze artists unapologetically sandwiched between Taj Mahal and Yoko Ono as only The Ed Sullivan Show had dared to before.

  CHRIS WELCH: It was a group fan’s dream, when the giants of pop held a three-hour jam session, while rehearsing for the Rolling Stones’ Rock and Roll Circus last week.

  Eric Clapton and John Lennon on guitars, Mitch Mitchell on drums, and Mick Jagger adding a few vocals formed a supergroup that would rock most propagators of rhythm into a cocked hat.

  “This is so like the Stones used to sound,” said a road manager as the strains of “Sweet Little Sixteen” boomed through the corridors of Intertel Studios, Wembley. “I don’t think they want anybody in with them,” said Jagger as he dashed about getting the show together and trying to find Keith Richards who hadn’t showed up and was supposed to be on bass.

  Then, of course, there were the actual circus performers.

  CHRIS WELCH: In the main studio gentle chaos ensued with a tiger dozing fitfully in its cage, the odd dwarf or two wandering about in top hats and huge bow ties, and the stars of stage, screen, and gasworks looking dreadfully bored, with the exception of Keith Moon, as always enjoying himself heartily.

  Keith was attempting to play his drums encased inside a glittering clown’s suit, complete with pointed hat and white makeup. He looked pretty terrifying, but it didn’t stop him kicking up a storm of percussion as the Who thundered into “mini-opera,” their contribution to the Circus.

  And what about the Stones’ performance?

  CHRIS WELCH: Around about two a.m. the Stones were on stage and warming up with “Route 66.” They got through “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and “No Expectations” to prove they still have the most exciting group sound in the world and the most interesting visual vocalist in Jagger. “Sympathy for the Devil” was Mick at his provocative best. He whipped off his shirt to reveal a Devil’s head tattooed on his chest.

  Both contemporary observers were always optimistic about the final product.

  KEITH ALTHAM: The Rolling Stones put in some overtime last Wednesday when they spent seventeen hours working on their telethon production of the Rock and Roll Circus which is likely to become a pop classic when it is shown.

  CHRIS WELCH: If the superstars aren’t knifed, scorched, slap-sticked, or eaten by mistake, the Rock and Roll Circus looks like a winner.

  But a funny thing happened on the way to the television: the Stones decided to put the whole thing away. The rumor was always that they backed off because they thought the Who were better than they were.

  MICHAEL LINDSAY-HOGG: It’s not that they thought the Who were better than the Stones. The Stones had a very accurate view of who they were: the Greatest Rock ’n’ Roll Band in the World. But they thought on that particular day the Who had gone on stage at four in the afternoon; they were fresh; they also had been touring; they’d been on the road; their act was really together. The Stones hadn’t been on the road. They didn’t think the Who were better as much as they thought the Stones weren’t as good as they could be.

  BILL WYMAN: We weren’t really satisfied with our performance on that. Mick, in particular, wasn’t happy. We thought about reshooting our sequence, but it would have involved redoing the whole three- or four-day spectacle to preserve continuity, or else you would have seen the differences in lighting or whatever.

  There was also another major reason that Rock an
d Roll Circus stayed buried: legal hassles.

  BILL WYMAN: And then we broke with [manager] Allen Klein, and to have done anything about Rock and Roll Circus at that point would have involved enormous legal hassles and negotiations about ownership. So in the end it was just shelved. Permanently.

  What happened to the film?

  MICHAEL LINDSAY-HOGG: Before the Stones went to France [see chapter 28], they had a very large, commodious office in London. To save money, they moved into very small offices. So the cutting room was closed down and all of the cans of film were moved to this very small office, where there really wasn’t room for them. They were in the bathroom and on top of the toilet seat.

  There was talk of just chucking this stuff out because nobody was ever going to want it. That day, when there was this kind of low-level discussion, Ian Stewart was in the office. And he thought, “Maybe someone will want this stuff someday.” His van was outside and he put all the cans of film in his van and he drove it out to his house in the country.

  There it was, and there it remained, until 1985, when Ian Stewart passed away.

  MICHAEL LINDSAY-HOGG: Then Ian died young and Cynthia, his widow, was looking around the property to see what was where and what was what, and she went into the barn and up against the wall with a rake leaning against it were these cans with tape on the side of the cans peeling off saying, “The olling stones ock and oll ircus.” It had been there for like fifteen years.

  And how did it finally see the light of day?

  MICHAEL LINDSAY-HOGG: The information of it being found got to Allen Klein because Allen, because of an agreement when he split from the Stones, was given the right to the pre-1970 Stones material. Also, he had the rights to the footage. And he’s the one—we took the cut to New York. He found some stuff that had been lost. [The Who’s] stuff had been used in the documentary The Kids Are Alright. That’s where their Circus performance was. We got it all back. We put it together . . . and there was Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus, which was not shown until the New York Film Festival in 1996. I was thrilled to see it on the big screen. The reviews were good. We knew we had something special. Brian had died; Keith Moon had died. It had a poignancy to it as well as vibrancy.

  GARY PIG GOLD: This archival hour provides perhaps the best existing audiovisual documentation of a time truly in turmoil; of a musical and even social changing of the guard between, well, “All You Need Is Love” and Altamont.

  CHAPTER 19

  LET IT BLEED

  BY LATE 1969, the Stones rediscovered and reasserted their in-studio recording chops with the widely acclaimed and very well-received Beggars Banquet album. But what the Rock and Roll Circus undeniably proved was that the group’s live-performance skills were very, very rusty. For reasons of money, pride, and self-respect, 1969 was the year that something had to be done about it, but there were many obstacles in the way. First and foremost among them was the continuing disinterest, disintegration, and, eventually, the death of Brian Jones. Jones’s personal struggles were a factor during the recording of Beggars Banquet, and it became clear that it was going to be an even bigger factor during the Let It Bleed sessions. Mick expressed his frustration and dissatisfaction to Roy Carr:

  MICK JAGGER: We weren’t playing, that was the thing, but we were recording a lot of good material on our own . . . the four of us Keith, Bill, Charlie, and myself. Brian played on some of Beggars Banquet . . . not all of it. Let’s say he was helpful. I don’t know exactly how many tracks he played on but that was his last album. We did Let It Bleed without him. But Brian wasn’t around towards the end. What we didn’t like was that we wanted to play again on stage and Brian wasn’t in any condition to play. He couldn’t play. He was far too fucked-up in his mind to play.

  In June 1968, Mick, Keith, and Charlie informed Brian Jones that the band was going to move on without him.

  MICHAEL LINDSAY-HOGG: It is sad and I think he felt life had gone the wrong way for him because originally it had been his band and they took it over. But he was drinking and drugging and it wasn’t doing him any good. I think what happened partly, he couldn’t play well anymore. He’d been to north Africa a few months before to record an album with a Joujouka tribe. He’d broken his wrist. So he couldn’t play; he couldn’t finger the way he was used to doing . . . And that depressed him and then he drank and that depressed him. His emotional constitution wasn’t strong anyway.

  Charlie’s overview on “The Life of Brian” is even more personal:

  CHARLIE WATTS: For a long time he was the most popular person in the band, fan letters and all that, for what it’s worth. It was Brian, Brian, Brian. Then it became Brian and Mick. Then it became Mick and Brian. Then it became Mick, and Keith and Brian. And Brian slowly faded off and his ability to play on many, many instruments, which was his best thing, to be able to pick up any instrument that was lying around in a studio and perform on it, not as an expert but to use it in a recording, like a harp. All those early albums was Brian using marimbas and sitar and anything. He would just pick it up and play it and it made a track different, did something to another song. He just got worse . . . I think the whole band as a whole got better performing on their instruments and Brian didn’t get better, he stayed where he was. And eventually he wasn’t where he should have been and it did create a lot of conflicts.

  They were conflicts that had to be addressed. The great American guitar virtuoso Ry Cooder was brought in to work on the Let It Bleed sessions, and later described Brian as a phased-out, sad character who spent most of his time in the corner of the studio sleeping or crying! Others insist that the Stones had given Brian every benefit of the doubt for a very long time, but that their patience had worn thin. They ALL wanted to get back out on the road, yet realized that Brian’s deteriorating mental and physical condition would certainly make that impossible just as it had in 1968. And even if he were able to rally, he might not get the proper paperwork to reenter the United States because of his drug arrests. It all came to a head on June 9, 1969, when Mick, Keith, and Charlie paid an anticlimactic visit to Brian’s home to work out the details of his departure from the Rolling Stones. A press release went out the next day with this quote from Brian: “I no longer see eye to eye with the others over the discs we are cutting. The Stones’ music is not to my taste any more . . . I have a desire to play my own brand of music rather than that of others. We had a friendly meeting . . . I love those fellows.”

  British blues icon John Mayall offered us this sad memory:

  JOHN MAYALL: The week before [Brian’s death], Alexis Korner and I both had been to Brian’s house and talked to him about putting a band together of his own that never came to pass unfortunately . . . He was definitely a casualty. By the time we met with him near the end of his life, the damage had already been done. The coordination between his right hand and his left hand was definitely off. His rhythm was all over the place. It was one of the side effects of the drugs, all very sad. The drugs and all that were going around really took their toll. It’s a tragedy that was all too familiar at that time with Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison. It was that time where the drugs really took over.

  Eddie Kramer recalls Jones dropping by the studio when he was working with Jimi Hendrix on Are You Experienced.

  EDDIE KRAMER: He adored Jimi. Brian used to come over to Jimi’s sessions. You could hear him on the tape. I have a multitrack of when we’re cutting “All Along the Watchtower.” You can actually hear him as he stumbles into the control room and he stumbles out to the studio. He’s trying to play the piano and Jimi says, “No, no, no.” Jimi would wink at me. “See if you can get him out of here.” Because he was out of his mind . . . He would come into the control room and collapse in a heap . . .

  We’ve heard all our lives that a rolling stone gathers no moss, so it shouldn’t come as any surprise that a solution to the “Jones problem” was already in the works well before the June 9 confrontation. The mental decision to ease Brian out of th
e group was probably made in May. Eric Clapton was always a possible candidate, but at the time he was completely wrapped up in his newly formed “supergroup” Blind Faith with Steve Winwood, Ginger Baker, and Ric Grech.

  Young Ron Wood was another possibility after he was let go by the Jeff Beck Group, but he wasn’t available for long, opting to join the Small Faces soon after. Ron had a passing acquaintance with the Stones and recalled a visit with them in 1968:

  RON WOOD: I went to Olympic Studios in London when they were doing Beggars Banquet and I saw little odds and ends going down and I was very impressed then. And I met Brian then. Nicky Hopkins introduced me to Brian and I used to think he was a very nice character, very outlandish; he was wearing all these brilliant colored clothes and floppy hats, feather boas, and I used to think, “Christ this guy gets away with murder.” He was a great character.

  Would Wood have joined the Rolling Stones? We’ll never know. Here’s why:

  RON WOOD: I must put in another bit here . . . Before the Small Faces started with Rod and myself in the lineup, Ronnie Lane very nicely said no to the Stones before they got Mick Taylor, because apparently they’d asked me then but I knew nothing about it. Ronnie Lane said, “No, Ronnie won’t do it. He’s gonna stay with us.”

  That was thanks to Ian Stewart, occasional member of the Stones, and he’s like the old sixth Stone going back many years. He said, “Why don’t you get this guy Ronnie Wood. Let’s give him a try.” So he rang up Laney [who] said no on my behalf. I don’t blame him. I had a fantastic time with the Faces. And chronologically everything took its own form and shape.