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Festival Express with Janis Joplin, Grateful Dead, Buddy Guy, Flying Burrito Brothers, Eric Andersen

Festival Express with Janis Joplin, Grateful Dead, Buddy Guy, Flying Burrito Brothers, Eric Andersen
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Synopsis of the DVD Movie: Festival Express with Janis Joplin, Grateful Dead, Buddy Guy, Flying Burrito Brothers, Eric Andersen

Set in 1970 - and consisting largely of footage that has never been seen since - Festival Express documents an eponymous "happening." Following on the heels of Woodstock, "Festival Express" was a multi-band, multi-day extravaganza that captured the spirit and imagination of a generation and a nation. What made it unique was that it was portable; for five days, the bands and performers lived, slept, rehearsed and did countless unmentionable things aboard a customized train that traveled from Toronto, to Calgary, to Winnipeg, with each stop culminating in a mega-concert. The entire experience - both off-stage and on - was filmed by Peter Biziou, with extensive footage remaining locked away until now. That material, along with contemporary interviews with various participants, witnesses and survivors has been assembled by award-winning director Bob Smeaton to create a thrilling document of something that would - and could - never be duplicated. With performances from Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, The Band, The Buddy Guy Blues Band, and more!

In the summer of 1970 a group of top musicians took a groovy tour across Canada by train, playing concerts in Toronto, Winnipeg and Calgary. But the trip was just as notable for the antics aboard the train as for the music they played! Now more than 30 years later the footage is finally edited into a documentary, complete with new interviews. It's a thoroughly enjoyable film for several reasons, mainly the music. This is the pure thing: raw, uncluttered rock and roll! The live performances simply make most of today's pop acts look like the manufactured hacks that they are. The Band, the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, Buddy Guy--these are astonishingly talented artists who seem to play effortlessly. It's simply impossible to pick a highlight. And the film captures not only their energetic stage acts but also impromptu on-board jam sessions and such off-stage antics as their emergency stop in Saskatoon to restock the train's bar.

Filmmaker Smeaton compiles this material skilfully, showing the events mostly from the musicians' perspective. The footage is extremely well filmed and edited, often using split screen to get even more material out there. Not only do we get a feel for the free-spirited 70s lifestyle, but we also see crowds of fans fighting against commercialism and tyranny ... so they can get free concert tickets! It's a clever look at the period, even if it does slightly sidestep the politics. The comments of promoter Walker add both comic value and insight, as do memories of people 30 years later. This was an experience that's perhaps more notable to the artists than to the fans--living on a train as it travelled across the Canadian wasteland was like summer camp! Yet even with the passing of years, no one seems willing to spill the dirt on everything they got up to on the train. Although we get a pretty good idea.

DVD Movie Rating for: Festival Express

DVD Movie Rating and Reviews DVD Movie Rating and Reviews DVD Movie Rating and Reviews DVD Movie Rating and Reviews DVD Movie Rating and Reviews Rating for Festival Express: 5 out of 5 stars

Movie Plot of: Festival Express

Festival Express with performances of: Janis Joplin, The Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin & The Full Tilt Boogie Band, The Band, Buddy Guy, Delaney & Bonnie & Friends, The Flying Burrito Bros, Ian & Sylvia & The Great Speckled Bird, Mash Makan, Sha Na Na, Buddy Guy Blues Band, Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, Mickey Hart, Rick Danko, Ken Pearson, Richard Bell, John Till, Sylvia Tyson, Jerry Mercer, Kenny Gradney, Eric Andersen, David Dalton, James Cullingham, Rob Bowman, Ken Walker

DVD Production Details of: Festival Express

Director: Bob Smeaton
Format: Color, Closed-captioned
Studio: New Line Home Entertainment
DVD Release Date: November 2, 2004
Run Time: 89

DVD Extra Bonus Features

Number of discs: 2

DVD Setlist

Cast of the movie: Festival Express

Photo Gallery of the movie: Festival Express

Janis Joplin in1970

Reviews of the movie: Festival Express

Seeing the film "Festival Express" isn't quite like being there in person, but it's the next best thing! For young folks who weren't even born in 1970, it's a chance to see Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead, the Band, the Fly Burrito Bros, Buddy Guy, Ian & Sylvia, et al... in their prime and find out what the buzz was all about. Janis and Jerry Garcia are in particularly great voice. Janis gives a gut wrenchingly poignant performance, particularly during "Cry Baby". I'm not sure what brought the tears to my eyes, her greatness or the knowledge that she would leave us just a few short months after that performance (followed later by the tragic death's of the Dead's drummer "Pigpen" & guitarist/singer Jerry Garcia and the Band's piano player Richard Manuel & bassist Rick Danko)

The concert footage of Janis Joplin and the Dead alone justify the film's admission price. My biggest gripe was that there should have been far more concert footage included. However, a local newspaper writeup mentioned that much of the concert footage was non-usable (bad sound, out of focus cameras, sound/no pix, pix/no sound....). It was so bad apparently - the fact that anything remotely resembling a cohesive film was wrought from the mounds of botched footage was nothing short of minor miracle! Don't get me wrong - the behind the scenes footage of the band partying and jamming stand on their own merit. Jerry Garcia pops up jamming on stage and off with everyone from Ian & Sylvia and the Great Speckled Bird (on stage in Calgary) to the Band's Rick Danko (on the train along with Janis - quite schwacked - hilarious!) Shots of protesters bitching about "the pigs" and high admissions prices (Fourteen dollars - how outrageous!)are also good for a chuckle and help capture the flavour of the period.

"Festival Express'" split screen camera techniques, the documentary style narrative and band lineups are bound to invite comparisons to the movie "Woodstock." I believe the camera techniques and documentary style are intended to help recapture the time period and mood rather than to ripoff "Woodstock." Further, neither Janis', the Dead's nor the Band's Woodstock performances made it into the original "Woodstock" movie. The experience of trucking a load of monstrously talented - notoriously hard partying rock n'rollers across Canada in a train with a well stocked bar, guitar amps, and a drum kit while the cameras rolled is singularly unique in the annals of rock n'roll - so is this film! Check it out!!

That old hippie mantra "It used to be about the music, man!" gets a swell revival in Festival Express, a marvelous shout-out to the '60s that is remarkable more for its footage than the way that footage is assembled.

As a summer of 1970 concert tour that was meant to be a Canadian Woodstock, crossing the vast Northland by train, it was a financial fiasco. But the musicians had a blast. And judging from the long-hidden concert footage resurrected here, so did the crowds -- when they weren't protesting the $16 (Canadian) ticket prices.

Janis Joplin was captured in shows in Toronto, Winnipeg and Calgary, at her most electric. That's been the calling card of this documentary, pulled together by the fellow who edited The Beatles Anthology for TV. But the fun stuff takes place off-stage and on the Canadian National train that transported the bands and their gear across Canada. With Joplin's killer band, plus The Grateful Dead, The Flying Burrito Brothers, Ian & Silvia, Delaney and Bonnie and others crammed in relatively luxurious, alcohol-soaked surroundings, the tour became one long, glorious jam session.

Fans who picked up on the whole "Deadhead" phenomena in the 1970s or later can see clearly how it started here. Jerry Garcia, looking fit and happy, and his bandmates, just played and played and played -- blues, gospel, bluegrass and everything else in their repertoire. You wonder if their decades as gypsy musicians who didn't sweat having fans tape record their concerts weren't some wistful attempt to recapture the magic of this train.

Joplin, filmed months before her untimely, drug-induced death, is so full of life and joy on the stage that the tragedy of her loss becomes clear all over again. The Band was tight; few of these groups ever sounded better.

Bob Smeaton's sloppy edits and imitations of the famed Woodstock split-screen documentary style, his failure to ID every musician and the fact that he didn't use every second of train-ride jams he could find works against the film. But the bemused and often hazy remembrances of those who were there and survived -- especially bluesman Buddy Guy -- provide wonderful context to this artifact from an almost-forgotten age.

Festival Express is a fascinating, tuneful excursion into the Woodstock Nation, circa 1970.

Some 34 years after it was filmed, Bob Smeaton's documentary has finally surfaced, with appearances and performances by the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, the Band and other iconic musical figures of the '60s and '70s.

The film grew out of an offbeat musical experiment in which several rock acts of the day joined together in a caravan and went from city to city across Canada, performing from Toronto to Vancouver. The film showcases acts in concert, but also in friendly jams and informal conversations on board the so-called festival express. Smoke, booze, hippie philosophy, musical dreams and pragmatic business-planning all swirl about the train cars.

Imagine a Woodstock on the rails, and you'll get the idea.

Some of the on-train scenes are loosey-goosey, with free-form music emerging in fragments from suggestions of fellow performers, mostly played roughhouse style on acoustic guitars. The atmosphere is not unlike life in a college dorm or perhaps backstage. The funniest scene finds the gang running out of booze. They pass the hat, collect $800 bucks and have the train stop literally next door to a liquor store, where they stock up.

The concert scenes offer musical gems, however, with the Band, The Flying Burrito Brothers, Buddy Guy, The Dead and especially Joplin at the top of their game.

The late, lamented Joplin -- a true tragic figure of the period --is the highlight of the film. On the train, she never quite seems comfortable in club-car conversations. But, on stage, she's a soul-drenched dynamo, bursting forth with performances of "Cry Baby," "Tell Mama" and "Me and Bobby McGee."

In the summer of 1970, a rock 'n' roll roadshow hit the rails of Canada, bringing such acts as The Grateful Dead, The Band, Buddy Guy, Janis Joplin and other luminaries from province to province. The plan was to replicate the success of the Woodstock festival on a cross-country scale.

As it turned out, the tour was an immediate financial bust. Fans protested the $16 (!) ticket price, and journalists were only too willing to slam the tour at every turn - pounding a few more nails into the coffin of the Psychedelic '60s. A documentary of the tour was similarly scrapped after concert promoters, the groups and the filmmakers couldn't come to terms.

Now, nearly 35 years later, the footage has been unearthed and assembled - and a priceless artifact of the era now comes to light (and to screens). Bob Smeaton's Festival Express is a delirious time capsule of a time long gone but not forgotten.

Nor should it be. Footage of the actual concerts, replete with angry fans, is included - as are the reactions of tour personnel and performers then and now. There's a great scene of the Grateful Dead's Bob Weir castigating reporters and fans alike while praising the efforts of the local police to keep order.

But the film's real magic is on the train itself, the "Festival Express," as those aboard party hearty and engage in round-the-clock jam sessions. "We achieved lift-off for sure," Weir recalls.

No substances, controlled or otherwise, are necessary to revel in the film's heady haze of musical mastery. The Dead play "Casey Jones" and The Band performs a particularly sharp rendition of "The Weight." The Flying Burrito Brothers, Delaney and Bonnie and Friends, and Sha Na Na are also along for the ride.

There's a pang for Joplin, only a few months shy of her untimely death, as she and Jerry Garcia (who lived another 25 years but died too young nevertheless) appear impossibly young here. Likewise, Ron "Pigpen" McKernan of The Dead would be dead within a few years of the tour. But who could have guessed that The Grateful Dead, in one incarnation or another, would keep on truckin' another 30-odd years? (They're still truckin'!) Both on stage and aboard the train, Festival Express chugs along at a dizzying pace - capturing the music and the musicians with equal ease.

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Last Modified: 10-Jul-2011 12:24