Circus of Confusion

I realize I am four decades late to the party, but last night, in an idle moment of channel scanning (cage fighting, home improvement, local news,) I bumbled into the tent just as the "Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus" took the ring on the public TV. This thing starts innocently enough with Mick Jagger on stage as ring-master, introducing a really big show. We're in the safe and sanitized world of variety TV. Immediately though Jagger struggles to read a line from cue-cards and the game is afoot: "Yuve 'erd of Oxford Cirgus. Yuve 'erd of Piggadilly Cirgus. And this is the Rolling Stones Cirgus." There is no applause.

As time recedes, it becomes hard to resist allowing an era or a movement to simplify itself into a brand -- the 1960s! Rock and Roll! All the ambiguity, confusion and conflict wash away and you're left with the costumes and the pose.

What a joy then to see the Stones in a never-aired BBC concert special where everything seems to unravel. Apparently, cameras kept breaking in an amazing chaos that took most of a day and a night to film. The strain shows on the audience, who are forced to wear bright red, green and yellow capes. By the end they have become the medieval mob they are being asked to portray: stupid, riotous, brutish.

At one point, the camera cuts away to show a visibly bored family who have mutinied by removing their color-coded caps. By the end, when Jagger wades into the audience mid-song and singles out a blonde girl to tell her "you can't always get the man you want," she seems oblivious. Is she stoned? Exhausted? Her friends poke her in the arm to get her to react.

It's also amazing what a mash-up this music had become -- and how campy and obvious the borrowing was from the English music hall and the blues of black America, with the occasional dash of Eastern mysticism for zest.
The result is disorienting: Jethro Tull doing a yoga pose while he plays the flute and sings in a weirdly put-on American voice, Taj Mahal covering "Ain't That A Lot of Love" while dressed in a Howdy-Doody costume.

But what makes it impossible to look away is that by the end an undertow of real weirdness has swept away all the artifice. John Lennon chats with Jagger and insists on calling him Michael. He hands Mick a bowl of noodles with chopsticks: "I'd like to give you this on behalf of the British public." Jagger is not amused and calls for the song cue: "Yer blues, John. Yer blues, John."

Well, "Yer Blues" happens with Lennon accompanied by both Eric Clapton and Keith Richards. (Lennon to Jagger re. Richards: "Your soul brother." Jagger, ominously: "Dirty. Dirty." Lennon, smiling: "Great.")

Then Yoko Ono is pulled onstage for "Whole Lotta Yoko." Accompanied by this all-male British invasion super-group and an electric violin for good measure, she begins wailing and speaking in tongues. She looks like one of the ghosts from a J-Horror movie.

It's hard to forget everything you think you know about Yoko, but this does it for me. First of all, her self-possession is astounding. She is punk before punk. What is she thinking? She's upstaging Eric Clapton and Keith Richards -- not to mention John Lennon. What she's doing is not musical, and she must know this. It's also not quite a primal scream. It's just grating, that voice. Clapton and Richards never smile or show they're in on the joke. What are they thinking? Is she testing the limits of John's love? Is she going where no groupie has gone before?

But then you think: if boys from England can get rich riffing on black American music, why can't a girl from Tokyo expose the whole thing for what it is by shrieking over their music? Maybe she's calling them out. And then again maybe she's just the biggest rock star on that stage because she doesn't even need the adulation. In fact, she seems to feed on the hostility and indifference. It is a moment unlike anything else.

(The only other woman to take the circus stage, incidentally, is Marianne Faithful, who is striking for her haunting beauty and apparent chemically-induced inability to stand up. The stage hands seem to have improvised a shot around her on the floor. In the big number at the end, seated at Mick's feet, she collapses. )

But I'm saving the best for last, because when the Stones take the stage everything has already gone to hell. Cues are missed. Jagger is looking into the wrong camera. Richards is so tired he's playing the guitar sitting down. The audience, at this point, are hostages.

But here's the thing: Jagger's sexuality is molten. He's both coquettish and threatening. He's prancing. He's Marilyn Monroe and Marlon Brando. He has a look that says, "come hither...so I can fuck you to pieces." He's Dionysus. If we listen to him, the orgy is on now. By morning, we will have resorted to cannibalism.

(I'm reminded at this point of my appearance as an extra in an outdoor college production of "The Bacchae." While a fake orgy raged offstage, I stood by holding a spear -- a representative of civic society, a straight. By the end rehearsals and the performance, I had a raging sunburn and horrible nipple chafing from my polyester tunic.)

It's a bit of a further digression but I'm also saddened, watching Mick at this moment, by how much cultural literacy has been lost in the past half century of moving faster and thinking less. Here he is singing "Sympathy for the Devil," inspired apparently by Bulgakov's "Master and Margarita." He uses "politesse" in a rhyme. He suggests a collective guilt for the way the dreams of the decade have gone wrong. Does anyone get that? Is it thought provoking?

But who has time to think? You can't stop watching Mick writhing and then shedding his purple baby-t (this was before the fashion category existed.) He emerges shirtless with crudely drawn fake tattoos of satan on his chest and arms. Aha! He's the devil. Well, we knew that.

If you've all already seen this, I apologize. If you haven't, you must. But don't rent or buy the DVD, you should properly wait until you can accidentally encounter it on late-night television and then just let it happen.