The three bands who intended to tour as the ‘Rock and Roll Circus’
In many ways, the Rock and Roll Circus has always existed, both from the perspective of the performer and the audience. You go to gigs ready for a spectacle, and the responsibility then rests on the artist to either soar above the crowds or tumble to the ground. Mick Jagger is, of course, aware of that pressure all too well, so much so that he once decided to bring the circus to the stage himself.
Now, the notion of a rock and roll circus may be familiar with Rolling Stones diehard fans, as it is the name of a concert film that the band created in 1968 staged around a circus tent. But believe it or not, this was very much a downsizing of Jagger’s ambitions for his vision, as initially the circus was physically set to roll into town all over America with a string of other bands also coming along for the ride.
Fellow British invasion bands The Who and the Faces had been meant to join The Rolling Stones on their circus tour, but the mammoth concept sadly never quite made it to life. The Who’s Pete Townshend later shed light on the vision by explaining in an interview: “It ended up with a movie but it started off as a tour idea. Ronnie Lane and I used to hang out in this studio called Olympic in Barnes, where one day we got to talking, the three of us – Mick, Ronnie, and I – about these visions of rock and roll going on and being almost like some great installation sculpture.”
Fleshing out the raucous idea, Townshend added: “Ronnie had this vision of rock and roll being something that travelled around in tents and wagons, and Mick was into the idea of perpetual touring. The triangle was going to be The Who, The Stones and the Faces – [but] Rod Stewart never got in the loop, I think he may have been unkeen on the idea. But we wanted to create a circus that could travel all around America.”
With such an unquenchable thirst for world rapture leading the charge, it seems there could be nothing that would get in the way of making this spectacular dream into a reality – except for actually creating the thing on a logistical level. Jagger had crafted a vision of circus tents, trucks, and a railway rolling stock, but it was the latter industrial feat that ultimately popped the balloon of ambition into a mere lost dream.
Townshend continued: “What actually caused it to collapse was the fact that the railway track then in America was only used for goods and commercial – [it] wasn’t [for] passengers anymore. The track was so slow, the trains could only travel in some places for maybe up to two or three hundred miles at a maximum of four to six miles an hour, so it would have been very tedious to sit on the train.”
Thus, plighted by the pain we all know of delayed trains, the idea of a rock and roll circus tour was put to bed, but at least later resurrected on a smaller scale as a filmed concert. It’s always good to dream big, of course – but in a twisted way, it’s also quite reassuring to know that if the biggest rock titans in the world still can’t make their visions happen, it means not everyone can make a success out of everything.
