The Rolling Stones on film: Easy riders

After the Mop Tops, the deluge.

With 1964’s A Hard Day’s Night the Beatles became pioneers, as in so many things, of pop fashion. Rock’n’roll films had been a staple of drive-ins and bottoms-of-the-bill for nearly a decade, and Elvis Presley was already a movie star of sorts. But never before had a rock band played themselves, sort-of-but-not-really, in a narrative film of such commercial and aesthetic success. And inevitably, just as the advent of the Beatles created a demand for cheery foursomes in music shops, so did the record-shattering box office for A Hard Day’s Night signal to film producers the potential of casting Beat Boom bands in feature films.

In 1964 and 1965 several vaunted rivals to the Fab Four made films: Gerry and the Pacemakers (Ferry Cross the Mersey), Freddie and the Dreamers (Every Day’s a Holiday) and, most memorably, the Dave Clark Five, in whose Catch Us If You Can debut director John Boorman created an Antonioni-esque retort to the Godardism of Richard Lester’s Beatles film. A couple of years later – tardy in this as in all things – Herman’s Hermits turned up in Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter, in which the lass of the title is not Peter Noone’s sweetheart but a race dog.

Save for the Boorman, you’re entirely on your own with that sad lot. But there was one 1965 rock film that might have been the pride of the pack.

David Bailey, court photographer of Swinging London, intended that year to make his directorial debut with a short film starring the fellow who had recently stood as his best man when he wed Catherine Deneuve. The film was meant to tell the story of a pop star’s persecution and death at the hands of a moralising middle-aged establishment. It was to be called The Assassination of Mick Jagger.

Alas, it was never made (though Bailey did turn out a similar project the following year: G. G. Passsion, starring photographer Eric Swayne as the doomed pop star and Chrissie Shrimpton, Mick’s real-life soon-to-be-ex, as his amour). But its non-existence does beg the question: how is it that the Rolling Stones didn’t make their own antic-lads movie at the moment of their steepest ascent?

Of course, if you look back at that list of post-A Hard Day’s Night clinkers, you notice right away that the bands that could truly be said to be the Beatles’ peers aren’t there: no Kinks, The Who, Yardbirds or Animals, for instance. But none of those bands had the Stones’ level of success or fame, and so it remains striking that nobody managed to wrangle the Stones into a film. Or maybe not.

The Stones, after all, had a singular role in the Beat Boom and the 1960s counterculture that grew out of it, a role best summarised by a journalist friend of the band as “Fuck that, the Stones don’t do that.” The Beatles, under the proctorship of RADA dropout and posh aspirant Brian Epstein, glad-handed and grinned and performed on stage with the likes of Tommy Cooper and Alma Cogan and dog acts and magicians. Off camera they were far more boozy and randy and cynical than their Fab Four personae would have led you to believe, but at Epstein’s insistence they obliged their elders in an effort to secure a place in the pop firmament. As Ringo Starr later said of Epstein, the band’s only manager, “He really was instrumental in bending our attitude this much so that the public would bend theirs that much to accept us.”

The Stones, on the contrary, never bent in the least. Their manager Andrew Loog Oldham had no pretensions to showbiz tradition or to a table among the luvvies at the Savoy Grill. He understood that for every kid who was allowed to spend his pocket money on Beatles records because his parents thought the band was cute there was another kid who wanted to play something wild and anarchic that his parents would abhor. His band, he reckoned, would provide it.

Oldham had worked briefly for Epstein, and when he finally got a band of his own to manage he determined that it would present itself entirely free of the geniality and polish Epstein forced on the Beatles. He memorably came up with a catchphrase that at once scandalised and drew attention: “Would you let your daughter marry a Rolling Stone?” And he instilled in his charges an insouciant, surly attitude that separated them from the fresh-faced Beat Boom pack.

The Stones wore their hair long before the Beatles did – and didn’t always bother to wash it, resulting in what Oldham called “that ‘just out of bed and fuck you’ look”. They only submitted to the humiliation of matched stage costumes once or twice before contriving to misplace a jacket or waistcoat or pair of trousers each, sabotaging anyone’s attempts to package them. They weren’t as quick with the blithe one-liners or smiles as the Beatles. They didn’t cuddle. They scared people.

Bill Wyman, the Stones’ first bassist, recalled the reactions of promoters getting their first look at the band: “There were no outfits or make-up, none of those things. You didn’t even comb your hair. You just went on and did it, like you were playing a jazz club. And promoters would say, ‘I’m never booking you again, you’re not dressed, you’re not changed into uniforms, you haven’t got matching guitars, you’re a scruffy lot.’ And then the crowd would go wild and they’d book us for the next three weeks at double the price.”

The same, Wyman said, with photographers assigned to shoot the band for magazines and newspapers: “They wanted you to throw up your arms and jump off walls and give the thumbs-up sign and do all those gimmicky things that those awful bands like Freddie and the Dreamers did, and Herman’s Hermits, and the Dave Clark Five. The Stones never did anything like that.” Eventually, of course, the band triumphed over philistine bookers and photographers through the strength of their music and the public response to it. But movies were another nut altogether.

You could record a pop single or even an entire album for a relative pittance and, in the process, encounter no more than a handful of people at a record company – and then for only a few days. You didn’t even need the record company if you had connections and a little bit of ready cash and a delivery van with good tyres. But to make a movie required a small fortune, a sizeable contingent of technicians and businessmen and an international corporation or two to help with distribution – a corporation, most likely, that still considered Julie Andrews the ideal musical star. You had to be able to work with a writer, a director, other actors. You had to be, like The Beatles, housebroken. If you weren’t malleable you had no chance –and nobody ever mistook the Stones for putty. Even with a high-powered agent looking after their film interests – Sandy Lieberson, then working out of the London office of CMA and repping the likes of Paul Newman and Peter Sellers – they were anathema to the old men who ran the movie business.

So no The Assassination of Mick Jagger and, a few years later, no A Clockwork Orange, another project Bailey hoped to direct, with Jagger as Alex and his bandmates as the droogs. Traditional film-making could not, at that pre-Easy Rider pass, contain young men of such anarchic, dangerous energies.

But, it being the 1960s, there were non-traditional options at hand. The pop-oisie of Swinging London had watched with admiration in 1965 as Bob Dylan careered through town with his own documentarian – D. A. Pennebaker – in tow. And even as the finished film Don’t Look Back was held up a couple of years from release, the Stones made their own version of a band-on-the-road film in Ireland, Charlie Is My Darling, directed by Peter Whitehead, who was then chronicling the youthquake scene in such films as Wholly Communion and Tonite Let’s Make Love in London. As captured in the film, the Stones are still kids – how could Keith Richards ever have been so baby-faced? – and there is at least on the surface a wholesomeness, if not quite Beatles-ishness, to the enterprise.

It would be the last time the Stones ever looked remotely innocent or unworldly on film. Just two years later Jean-Luc Godard shot the band in a London recording studio as they worked out the song that would define them separately from the Beatles forever: ‘Sympathy for the Devil’. In the dialectic fashion he was coming to favour, Godard juxtaposed scenes of the Stones creating the song with lengthy and often tedious scenes of revolutionary declamation by young radicals. (That same year the Beatles were making Yellow Submarine, which had the revolutionary punch of a tea towel.)

At the end of 1968 the Stones organised all their mates – including The Who, Marianne Faithful, Eric Clapton, John Lennon and Yoko Ono – for a concept film entitled The Rolling Stones’ Rock and Roll Circus. Sandy Lieberson, who had left agenting for producing, remembered a long night of multiple takes and drugs and backstage gossip, with the Stones finally performing some 15-18 hours after the shoot began. The film, directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg (who shot the Beatles’ Let It Be that same year), didn’t get a proper release until the mid-1990s, partly because the Stones didn’t think their performance was up to standard and partly because the film was one of the last Stones projects to feature Brian Jones, who was dumped from the band by the time a release was possible.

They might have wished the same for their next film project, a documentary which revealed the band in ways that made Oldham’s affectation of naughtiness look like the public schoolboy’s prank that, by and large, it was. For Gimme Shelter the band allowed the Maysles brothers, Albert and David, to film them as they prepared to climax their 1969 American tour with a free concert outside San Francisco. The ensuing debacle at the Altamont raceway is now infamously cited as the anti-Woodstock, and what’s amazing on watching the film is how much of the bad energy of the event – fistfights between fans and musicians and Hells Angels, a murder just beyond the stage – was captured by the camera. For all that, the chief impression you get is of Jagger, vaguely inciting the trouble from the stage and then trying to talk his way out of it with bromides about peace and love. In the final shots of the film he sits in the Maysles’ editing suite and watches his own complicit behaviour on a Moviola, then turns away with a damning look of grim guilt on his face.

The Stones didn’t tour the US for three years, and when they did, two wildly different films resulted, marking a crucial change in the band’s efforts to promote itself. Robert Frank, the photographer who shot the beatnik film Pull My Daisy, had the idea of giving the band members cameras to do with as they wished as they travelled. The resulting film, Cocksucker Blues, is an astounding display of depravity and excess: drugs, groupies, masturbation, destructive violence, and so on. Jagger and co. stopped the film from being distributed, and to this date it’s nearly impossible to see.

What they endorsed instead was a toothless concert film entitled Ladies and Gentlemen, The Rolling Stones. And from then to now, that’s what the Stones have offered of themselves on film: ‘you weren’t there but this was sort of what it was like’ recreations of their concert performances shown on cable or satellite or pay-per-view or, in the case of The Rolling Stones: Live at the MAX, in the mega screen IMAX format. No filmmaker would ever again be allowed to poke a camera lens between the curtains to give the world a taste of the private band. Occasionally they would strive for something a little more, as in Hal Ashby’s 1982 Let’s Spend the Night Together, but as on record and on stage, they by and large retreated into their self- congratulatory identity as ‘the Greatest Rock ’N’ Roll Band in the World’, and you either endorsed their coronation or not.

The exception to this, of course, was Jagger. As is indicated by the fact that he once entertained the thought of appearing in something called The Assassination of Mick Jagger, Sir Michael has always had more cinematic ambition than his bandmates. He liked passing time with Marianne Faithful’s stage and film friends; and he had the instinct that his self-willed transformation from middle-class Kent boy to louche bluesman was, more or less, the same thing as acting. Most famously, he fed this urge in 1968, spending the summer shooting Performance under the proctorship of, among others, co-directors Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg, and Sandy Lieberson, who was producing. Performance is the nearest thing the Stones have to A Hard Day’s Night, a film à clef in which something like the public perception of Jagger’s private life – drugs, orgies, black arts, a queer sort of creativity – is inflated by art into a narrative that can seemingly stand up to infinite readings.

By all accounts of those involved, it was a harrowing movie to make, to distribute and, ultimately, to live down. James Fox, then a rising star, almost went mad and quit acting for nearly a decade; Cammell managed only a handful of pictures before killing himself in 1996; most of the other key actors vanished from the business.

And Jagger, like Dracula, actually got a shot at a film career. A year or so after Performance was filmed, and before it got its hobbled release, he was cast by Tony Richardson as the legendary Australian outlaw Ned Kelly in a dreary film of that name. This was a coup: no Beatle had ever had the lead in a film, after all. But Jagger mumbled and stumbled and didn’t like the work, which was more structured than whatever had gone on on the set of Performance. Panned by critics, he seemed to agree that his performing abilities lay elsewhere.

Now and again, though, he participated in a project by some friend in the avant-garde: Kenneth Anger (Invocation of My Demon Brother), Les Blank (whose Burden of Dreams documented the making of Fitzcarraldo in which Jagger was originally cast), Mario Schifano (Umano non umano) and Marcus Reichert, for whom he played the role of Antonin Artaud in a short film. But he didn’t act in a feature film again until 1985’s Running out of Luck, a curiosity directed by Julien Temple that deals with an ageing rocker named Mick who cheats on his wife on a trip to Brazil and winds up kidnapped. (As in the equally little-seen Blame It on the Night a year earlier, Jagger was credited with writing the story.)

By then, of course, the Stones had simmered to a sometime thing, and Jagger amused himself every five years or so by taking on acting roles that fed off some public perception of his persona: the machiavellian kingpin of Freejack (1992), a transvestite imprisoned in a concentration camp in Bent (1996), an ageing Los Angeles gigolo in The Man from Elysian Fields (2001). He seems comfortable in these parts, enjoying a touch of self-mockery and, apparently, happy to work in low-stakes pictures for directors who are hardly household names. Inevitably he drifted into producing, with Michael Apted’s Enigma (2001) marking the first film to be released under the Jagged Films banner (a second, a starry remake of The Women, was released in 2008).

OK, so Jagger hasn’t managed to forge either the acting career of David Bowie or the producing career of George Harrison, and you can wonder and theorise about that all you like. But save some of your cogitation for this question: how is it that Keith Richards never got grabbed by some visionary director – particularly as he grew into his Guitarist of the Living Dead maturity? It may be a little late for him to start at age – are you sitting? – 62 [at the time of writing, 78 now] but if anybody out there is thinking of remaking Little Big Man, there’s a Chief Dan George from Dartford you simply have to screen test.