The Rolling Stones on the Brink of Superstardom

Before the making of Charlie Is My Darling was underway, other film projects were initially considered, including two proposed literary adaptations that would star Jagger, one of A Clockwork Orange and another of Dave Wallis’s novel Only Lovers Left Alive, about a dystopian world populated solely by violent teens (per the cover: “SMASHING, LOOTING, KILLING, LOVING—THE TEENAGERS TAKE OVER THE WORLD!”). Michael Winner and Nicholas Ray were among the directors considered for the latter, but nothing came of either project. Enter Whitehead, recruited by Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham on the reputational strength of his documentary Wholly Communion, which captured an all-day Beat poetry concert/happening at the Royal Albert Hall. A working-class art-school graduate, Whitehead was at the beginning of an eclectic career that would include collaborating with Niki Saint de Phalle on her 1973 Daddy before moving away from filmmaking altogether to pursue falconry. Whitehead didn’t know the Stones at all, nor had he planned to become a nonfiction filmmaker. He later reflected: “Bergman, Godard, Fellini, Antonioni. That was the cinema, completely. There was nothing else [ . . .] that’s what I was brought up on. God knows why I ended up making documentary films.” Charlie Is My Darling draws less from those influences than from Whitehead’s background as a newsreel photographer. He was able to shoot flexibly, subbing in prerecorded music whenever the live tracks were unusable, for a film that the band—or at least its management—didn’t find flattering.

Given what a contentious object Charlie was from its inception, it’s remarkable that Whitehead would continue to actively collaborate with the group over the next two years, working on multiple music videos while pitching larger projects that never came to fruition. Whitehead and Oldham repeatedly argued about the former’s edits, and the filmmaker claimed that the manager broke into his flat with an accomplice, saying that if Whitehead didn’t hand over Charlie they’d “beat the fuck out” of him. It took many years for the film, which was reedited in 2012, to make its way back into public circulation; inevitably, the qualities that worried the band and its team the most—its uncommercial nature, particularly the jagged editing and the relatively unpolished interviews—are the ones that have helped the film age best.

The tour shown here wasn’t the Stones’ first time in Ireland; in January of that year, the band was on a three-day tour when it stopped in a small army-surplus shop. As bassist Bill Wyman would recall, “Mick, Keith, Charlie, and Andrew went inside to look around. The proprietor refused to serve them, and talked about ‘having not forgotten Oliver Cromwell.’ They exchanged insults, and walked out, but Andrew peed against the shop front.” Later that year, the Stones would make the news for their own urination-on-a-gas-station incident—one of their early, relatively innocuous brushes with tabloid fame, this time leading to a court date—but none of that contextual agita is even implicitly perceptible in the good-natured film.

Whitehead joins the band a few months after the latter incident as they fly from London to Dublin, then travel by train to follow-up gigs in Belfast, conducting sit-down interviews with all members along the way. Jagger holds forth on fame and celebrity while chain-smoking; Brian Jones earnestly expresses his desire to transition to film directing; Wyman claims that being in a band doesn’t mean he’s an actual musician of the caliber he aspires to be; and Watts similarly describes his inferiority complex. Keith Richards is less present in interviews than in late-night jam sessions where he and Mick trade lyrics back and forth, strumming along as they carve out casual milestones and slipping into their most natural shared language. “What I liked most about this film,” Whitehead reflected in 1974, “was the fact that when the Stones were talking they were really quite inarticulate. [ . . .] There was a kind of groping. There was an extraordinary inability to describe what they were doing. In fact, Brian Jones was the only one who was really articulate.” These verbal infelicities come across as the endearingly dazed reaction of young men just barely able to wrap their heads around what’s happening to them; seeing them play is a reminder of why all this is happening in the first place.

Their private nocturnal hangouts were in part a matter of necessity: the film shows the Beatlesesque hysteria that shadows the band as they get from one location to another, and the shows were no less intense. Wyman has described July and August of 1964 as “probably the two most horrendous months of our career. Every gig we did was stopped by the police with crowds on the stage.” The songs in this film are delivered less as performances than as experiments—borne with phlegmatic stoicism by the musicians—in seeing how far the band can get before being derailed by fans rushing the stage. During a Dublin rendition of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” the Daily Mirror reported, “Bill was knocked to the floor, an arm badly sprained, as screaming girls and boys stormed the stage. Mick was lifted off his feet and pushed through a door at the side of the stage. His jacket was torn to shreds. Andrew Oldham cracked his head as he fought to clear the teenagers off the stage. Keith, Charlie and Brian ran out of the stage door into a waiting car.” While that particularly chaotic gig isn’t depicted here—a calmer take of the months-old hit being performed is used instead—Michelangelo Antonioni was reportedly influenced by a cut of the film he watched in Whitehead’s apartment before shooting a scene for Blow-Up in which Jeff Beck destroys a guitar, starting a riot.