The Rolling Stones and The Who played the Rock and Roll Circus show on December 11, 1968, and it wasn’t officially released in 1996. It was billed as The Rolling Stones’ show, but Keith Richards unloaded after the band’s subpar performance, saying The Who ought to be the top billed act after upstaging them. The Who singer Roger Daltrey made a bold Led Zeppelin ripoff claim recently.
Michael Lindsey-Hogg said, “We had a rough cut, we put it together just so they’d get a sense of what it looked like, and we showed it to Mick [Jagger] and Keith and Allen Klein sometime in January ’69. They liked it but they thought, seeing them together, that The Who were better than they were on the day.
Well, The Who had gone on at 4 o’clock in the afternoon, The Rolling Stones had got on at two in the morning, The Who were tight, The Rolling Stones were coming unravelled. Keith said ‘I wouldn’t mind if it was called The Who’s Rock And Roll Circus, but it’s not’. They thought they were okay but could be better.”
Bill Wyman added, “I think he was talking about himself, actually, and not the band. It was discussed afterwards that we should redo our part, which I thought was way over the top, because it meant recreating the entire thing. It would cost a lot of money again. And there wasn’t that much money floating about at the time.”
Michael Lindsey-Hogg concluded, “We had a rough cut, we put it together just so they’d get a sense of what it looked like, and we showed it to Mick and Keith and Allen Klein sometime in January ’69. They liked it but they thought, seeing them together, that The Who were better than they were on the day.
John Lennon’s widow recently revealed what Keith Richards did to her. You can read the full retrospective at NME.
