How The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus captured Brian Jones’s isolation in 1968

The film was shot over two days in December 1968, just weeks before Brian Jones was pushed out of the band. By then he was barely functioning — strung out, resentful, and musically sidelined. Watching the Circus footage, you can see him physically detached from the others, often standing a few feet away from Mick and Keith, playing a borrowed Gibson Firebird (his usual Vox or Harmony gear was already pawned or broken) and staring blankly between takes.

The tension isn’t just in his body language. During the Stones’ own set, Brian’s guitar is mixed so low you can barely hear him on tracks like “Sympathy for the Devil” and “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” — Keith and Mick Taylor (who hadn’t even officially joined yet) drown him out. The Circus was supposed to be a grand circus-themed spectacle, but for Brian it became a public display of his irrelevance. He was so checked out that he didn’t even play on the show-closing jam “Salt of the Earth”; Pete Townshend and John Lennon picked up the guitars instead.

The 1996 release of the audio (the film didn’t come out until 1996, over 25 years later) let fans see what everyone in the band already knew: Brian Jones was a ghost at his own party. It’s the most candid document of the Stones’ internal breakdown before his death seven months later.