If any one person could claim to be the "father of the music video," it's Michael Lindsay-Hogg. He was certainly there at the conception.
The award-winning film director ("The Object Of Beauty," "Guy") cut his teeth doing rock ‘n’ roll television in England and directed some of the earliest clips by The Beatles ("Paperback Writer"), The Rolling Stones (" Jumpin' Jack Flash" " ) and The Who (" Happy Jack" ).
Lindsay-Hogg was at the helm of two of the ‘60s most legendary full-length productions: The Rolling Stones’ Rock And Roll Circus and The Beatles’ Let It Be. He went on to make videos with Elton John, Wings, Neil Young, Paul Simon and others.
The American-born filmmaker turned up in 2000 as the director of Two Of Us, the VH-1 film that " reunited" John Lennon (Jared Harris) and Paul McCartney (Aidan Quinn).
Lindsay-Hogg knew he would get criticized by Beatles fans by taking on the VH-1 project. He did, after all, have a name to look after. " Over the years Beatles projects had come my way, dramatic ones, and I didn't want to do them because I thought they were gonna be coming from the wrong place," he said.
" But when I read it, I was really surprised to find I liked it. It seemed to me that [writer Mark Stansfield] had got the characters right, and the idea of the dialogue right."
Born in New York City in 1940, Lindsay-Hogg moved to Ireland with his father following his parents' divorce. He went into television production, he said, because Irish TV was in its infancy in the early ‘60s and they needed, and would hire, anyone they could get. In 1965 he was offered a job at Ready, Steady Go, a British music program that featured acts performing live, rather than miming their records. All the bands, he said, loved appearing on RSG for this very reason.
The Stones were regulars on the weekly show, and they began a working relationship with Lindsay-Hogg that would last through the 1980s.
It was The Beatles, however, who with " Paperback Writer" broke the mold of live TV appearances to promote their latest single. " That was very daunting. It's hard to imagine if you're not from that generation how extraordinarily famous they were, and how powerful they were in the world," Lindsay-Hogg said.
" Doing it live was such a hassle for them because the audiences were so out of control. And they were powerful enough to say to the TV stations, ‘Take it or leave it.’"
They took it. Readily.
Lindsay-Hogg shot the Fabs miming their song, and " Rain," its B-side, in a country garden. " When we did ‘Paperback Writer,’ I'd wanted to have a kind of story video, like Paul playing a writer or something in his little garret," Lindsay-Hogg recalled. " But Brian Epstein didn't want that. He said story videos had no future and that the audience wanted to see them play."
A year later, " Peter Brown called me. He said, ‘The boys have a new album coming, and they want to talk to you about doing a kind of concept video. Can you meet them next week?’ And I said, ‘Sure, sure.’" The new album, of course, was Sgt. Pepper.
" Then he called me the day before the meeting and said they'd had a change of plan. What happened was, Paul had met some guy in a nightclub and the guy said he had a great idea about how they should be filmed, and it sounded good to Paul. They did ‘Day In The Life,’ but he shot it on infrared film, and all the images flickered. It was a disaster."
In September 1968, The Beatles' camp rang Londsay-Hogg up again. "I think it was because I'd just done ‘ Jumpin' Jack Flash’ for the Stones,"Although I'd worked with the Beatles in 1966, this was now '68, and McCartney, Lennon and Jagger were all close. And so I think McCartney asked Jagger ‘How did yours turn out?’ and Jagger said it turned out good.
" The idea of ‘Hey Jude’ was dictated by that four-minute chorus at the end," he said. " So I thought we needed something to shoot other than them singing ‘Hey Jude.’
"I had this idea, and Paul and I talked it over, about getting an audience in. And that the audience shouldn't be just the usual kids. There should be a kind of cross-section of life - housewives, postmen, kids, mums and dads, everything like that.
" So we got that audience in, and that worked very well because it wasn't only the kind of teenybopper audience. And that was really the genesis of what became Let It Be, because we did, say, seven or eight takes of ‘Hey Jude.’
"Between takes, while we were getting the cameras ready again and seeing what had gone wrong in the previous take, The Beatles had nothing to do except stand there. And then they started to jam for the audience. They'd play old Motown songs and they'd horse around and stuff, and they enjoyed it. It was the first time they'd performed to any kind of audience since they stopped touring in '66."
Lindsay-Hogg was also at the helm for the famous clip of The Beatles rocking through " Revolution." " I remember John saying that day that the most important thing was to have a big close-up of him - not for ego reasons — on the lyric about Chairman Mao, because he thought that was the most important line in the song."
Lennon, he said, "sang that live, and Paul and George had a couple of those scooby–doo backgrounds they were doing. They did those live, too. In different takes, they would do different kinds of harmony on ‘scooby doo,’ or whatever that little chorus is, but the one we used was the one we used because that seemed to be the best."
Lindsay-Hogg adored The Beatles. " They were very different from The Rolling Stones. The Stones were more accessible - like if you'd give Mick and Keith an idea, you'd bat the idea around together. Whereas with The Beatles, if you gave them an idea or a concept, it was kind of like throwing a piece of meat into the bear pit. They'd paw it over and chuck it around between themselves, and they'd exclude you. They'd do it in a four-way tangle. And then they'd come back to you after a while with their opinion."
Doing Beatles work was fun but intense. " Your adrenalin was not asleep when you were working with them, because they had their own opinions and they were who they were. They were the greatest band and the greatest songwriters of, if not the last 100 years, the last 50 years."
The Stones were next with an idea for Christmas of ‘68. Beggar's Banquet was their new album. " After ‘Jumpin' Jack Flash,’ Mick and Keith wanted to do something else, although they didn't know what it was going to be. They had this idea to do a television special.
" They weren't going to look for financing from anybody else. So the Stones produced it, and because of that you could pretty much get anything you wanted, in terms of musicians. So I came up with this idea of a circus. And Mick and I talked about what kind of circus it would be. We thought it shouldn't be a kind of glamorous, Ringling Brothers, it should be like a small, little European traveling circus, which is a bit shoddy.
" We were going to introduce a new band, or a band which hadn't been around very long - and that was the Jethro Tull spot. There was another band we'd thought of, but it was a kind of heavy guitar band, and Mick didn't like that so much. We chose Jethro Tull, and we turned down Led Zeppelin. They'd sent in some demos."
Lennon made his first non-Beatles musical appearance in Rock And Roll Circus. " In the so-called supergroup spot, Mick had wanted Stevie Winwood," Lindsay-Hogg explained. " But about a week before shooting, Stevie got a cold or something and couldn't do it. So Mick thought, 'Christ, what do we do?' He thought the one who would be most open and available to getting a call on Monday, to shoot Thursday, was John Lennon. He called John, and John said sure.
" John had already been playing with Eric Clapton a little, and so then Keith said, 'Gee, I want to play with John and Eric.' That band came together in like 48 hours.
" And we didn't know that Yoko was going to sing. There was this black bag on the stage, and the poor violinist, he thought, 'Wow, this is my spot. I'm going to be playing rock 'n' roll violin with Lennon and Clapton!' And then this woman gets out of a bag - if you look at it again, you see this look of real consternation on his face, thinking, 'What happened here?'"
Although it was filmed in 1968, Rock And Roll Circus was not released or even publicly screened until the mid '90s. Here's why: " The Who had recorded at three in the afternoon, and they were very good," said Lindsay-Hogg. " The Stones had been there since noon because they were the hosts. As the day turned into evening and into night, other bands would come on. John did his spot about 11, finished that, and the Stones' setup didn't really begin until one in the morning. The Stones didn't start their set until 2 a.m. - they'd been there since noon. I think if a group of nuns had been sitting around for 14 hours, they'd have been in a pretty weird mood, too.
" We didn't get to 'Sympathy For The Devil' until six in the morning. And we thought, 'we're so tired, let's come back tomorrow.' But it was going to cost too much money 'cause the Stones were paying for it. So Mick said, 'If you can get the cameras right, and if the engineers can get the balance right, I will do it one more time. And then we're all going to go to sleep.'
" Then we put the rough cut together. And in those days, they were all very close friends, but they were also rivals. And I think when Mick and Keith saw it, they thought, 'Hmm... The Who are really good.' And it was the last time Brian (Jones) played with them and he wasn't in good health... and one thing led to another, and then a year had gone by. It lost its momentum, and in those days if a rock 'n' roll show lost its momentum, it got put away."
Not long after, the Stones moved to France to escape Britain's suffocating tax laws. When their London office was shut down, pianist/road manager Ian Stewart took the cans of Rock And Roll Circus film. " He didn't tell anyone, because it wasn't important anymore," said Lindsay-Hogg. " But he thought it was worth saving them." (Lindsay-Hogg directed many Stones clips through the 1980s, and every so often Jagger, Richards or one of the other Stones would ask Lindsay-Hogg, 'Whatever happened to the Circus?')
After Ian Stewart's death in 1985, his widow went into their barn to take stock of what was there. " And there against the wall with a bale of hay on top of it and a rake and some gumboots," said Lindsay-Hogg, "are all these cans of film with the tape peeling off, OCK N OLL IRCUS."
After the Circus shoot, in January '69, The Beatles and Lindsay-Hogg's film crew gathered at Twickenham Studios, where the James Bond movies were filmed. It had been the director's idea to get the group into a large space, where the equipment was - big mistake.
" Originally, Let It Be was supposed to be a short documentary that would support a TV special. But they're sitting there in a cold studio and nobody was getting on. They didn't know what they wanted to do. McCartney wanted to do a TV special, John said OK, George didn't... so we'd talk about it. One of them would say, 'Let's do it at the Cavern,' and I'd say, 'Well, you're bigger than the Cavern now. You're for the world.'
" I said I've got this great idea that we go to this amphitheater in Tunisia, which is on the coast of Africa, but it's near an American Air Force base. It was near a black community, an Arab community, and I thought if they start to play at dawn, the music would go out over the desert and people would come. Kind of like Noah's Ark. And by nighttime, the place would be full. We'd have a torchlit concert, which would be great.
"Then the ideas got really fanciful, because The Beatles, they could do it. They were going to hire a boat and rehearse and bring the audience with us. The documentary would be about the rehearsal and you'd do the show."
Accomodations to Tunisia were actually booked; Beatles gofer Mal Evans even got the proper vaccinations in anticipation of leaving early to get things ready. "It was real for at least 48 hours," Lindsay-Hogg said.
But George Harrison got fed up with everything and quit The Beatles. Two of his conditions for returning were a) no more talk of a TV show, and b) let's get out of this place and go to the Apple studio, like real musicians.
And so the bad vibes continued across town. "Magic Alex, who was their resident design guru, had designed a recording studio with no plugs in the wall. There was no light, it totally wasn't ready," Lindsay-Hogg said.
" It was two, three weeks, two cameras, eight hours a day. They'd come in between 11 and 1 and we'd grind it out and grind it out. You'd do 'Long And Winding Road' 30 times."
The Beatles came to ignore the film crew. " Originally, even though they'd hired us, they were sort of irked by the presence of the crew and the cameras," Lindsay-Hogg said. " But after a while that settled down, and I think we became no more annoying than wasps on a summer afternoon."
According to Lindsay-Hogg, it was his idea to film The Beatles performing on the Apple Records roof. " I didn't want Let It Be to get put in the closet because the momentum was gone," he explained. "So the only way I knew to fix it was to have some sort of climax.
"I said unless you just want to go on basically throwing your money away, endlessly shooting the rehearsal of not much, I think we ought to figure something to do, like a show. You wouldn't do it at the Cavern and you wouldn't do it in Tunisia, why don't we do it on the roof?
"Now, I can claim that with a certain amount of sureness because I needed it for the movie, but in light of what happened everybody, including the girl who'd made the hamburgers at lunch, says it was their idea."
To his delight, the idea (whoever thought it up) came out of " the bear pit" more or less intact. " Paul and I and Mal Evans went up on the roof and looked around and shouted to see what the echoes were like and jumped up and down on the floorboards to see if it would take the weight of the amps. And Paul said, 'Let's try and make it work.' Because Paul, to his credit, was always the one who was pushing ahead. Paul always goes forward, which is a very admirable thing.
" We got planks in to shore up the roof for the equipment, where we were going to do it on Thursday, but the weather was bad. So we decided we'd do it at 12:30 on Friday. And they were still arguing at 12:20 if they were going to do it. I thought, 'My God, it's awful, it's typical of this whole project.'
" Paul wanted to do it and George didn't, which was the usual breakdown of the personalities. And then John, who was the leader of the democracy, if he chose to be, said, 'Oh, fuck it, come on, let's do it.' And so we all walked up the little staircase and kind of into history, you know?"
Cameramen were placed around and in front of The Beatles. "We couldn't get far enough away," said Lindsay-Hogg. "Otherwise we'd fall off the roof."
The film crew also had a camera in a water tower across Savile Row from Apple, and a rented helicopter took a few shots, taking care not to get too close lest its sound get picked up on the recording.
The Beatles, Lindsay-Hogg said, "were happy to do it; they felt released by doing it. They enjoyed it. They thought it was a very funny, weird thing to do that fit in with their mindset."
The film was edited in the summer, as The Beatles were back in the studio working on Abbey Road, Lindsay-Hogg recalls. "We did a rough cut and screened it for them, the same day Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, whenever that was.
"It was a much longer cut originally. There was an hour more. There was much more stuff of John and Yoko, and the other three didn't really think that was appropriate because they wanted to make it a '''nicer' movie. They didn't want to have a lot of the dirty laundry, so a lot of it was cut down. So then we ended up with an hour and a half."