"Tell me baby! What's my name! Aawh! Ooh-hooh!" Mick Jagger is literally crawling on his belly as he sings, writhing on the runway inches from his audience and managing to peel his shirt off while never missing a beat. Behind him, Keith Richards, riding the powerful surge of the percussion section and Nicky Hopkins' propulsive piano, is spitting out searing variations on the masterful guitar lines he played just months earlier on the Stones' studio version of "Sympathy for the Devil." Now they're playing the song live for the first time, and it's a performance of incredible immediacy, intensity, power and skill. It's December of 1968. It's the Stones at an all-time peak -- by far the best filmed performance we're ever likely to see from them.

It is, in fact, The Rolling Stones' Rock and Roll Circus, a legendary performance I've been waiting to see since it was first filmed almost thirty years ago. Now finally it is available to us all on home video, and brothers and sisters, it was worth the wait. Furthermore, it arrives this fall along with several other marvelous new video and CD reissues representing the creative peaks not only of the Stones but also of the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix -- that makes three of the four greatest, most influential rock artists (along with Bob Dylan) of the Sixties, and hours of thrilling, mind-opening music, showcased in the Rock and Roll Circus, in the third 2-CD volume of the Beatles Anthology series, and by an amazing new concert video, Jimi Hendrix Live at the Isle of Wight 1970.