The Dirty Mac: John Lennon's One-Off Supergroup at the Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus

The Dirty Mac was a supergroup assembled for one night only in December 1968. John Lennon didn’t want to play his Beatles songs alone for the Stones’ TV special, so he brought in Eric Clapton on guitar—a then-rumored replacement for George Harrison—along with Keith Richards on bass and Jimi Hendrix’s drummer Mitch Mitchell. It’s the only known recording of Lennon, Clapton, and Richards playing together.

They were billed as “The Dirty Mac” (a sly play on “The Dirty Macs,” a Cockney term for cheap work boots, but also a nod to Lennon’s “Mac” nickname). The set included a raw, snarling cover of the Beatles’ “Yer Blues,” which fit Lennon’s post-White Album rage, and a loose jam called “Whole Lotta Yoko” with Yoko Ono on vocals. The Circus footage was shelved for decades because Mick Jagger reportedly felt his own band’s performance was inferior, so the Dirty Mac’s set didn’t see official release until 1996.