Festival Express

‘Festival Express’ is a documentary film about the legendary train that toured across Canada in 1979 featuring some of the great rock bands, including Janis Joplin, The Grateful Dead and The Band. It features candid footage of the bands’ living, playing, and partying together for five days as well as the train ride plus interviews with tour participants.

The documentary was conceptualised by a young promoter named Ken Walker, who gets the unusual idea of creating a Canadian travelling version of a rock concert that will bring shows to people instead of forcing them all to meet in one place for a concert. The idea of that huge festival is to transport a trainload of rock, folk, country and blues musicians across Canada for a series of five concerts. He lures top names with the promise of “a party to end all parties” in a series of 24-hour rolling bar cars. In the summer of 1970, the year after Woodstock and Altamont, a train loaded with the future legends of rock and roll crosses Canada, playing, as well as stopping for concerts in Toronto, Winnipeg, and Calgary. The trip is not all sweetness and light. The tour runs into trouble immediately as fans at the Toronto concert protest because they demand that the show be free. In order for the crowd to calm down, Jerry Garcia of The Dead stages an impromptu convert in a nearby park for half an hour.. The performers got very little sleep because, as Buddy Guy said, every time he went to bed, he was afraid that he would miss something. The second major stop for ‘Festival Express’ is in Winnipeg, where Joplin sings “Cry Baby” with a scream that most singers would have saved for the climax of their set. She wears no make-up and unselfconsciously scratches her head onstage. The blue lights on the stage give her pupils a strange glow. Their final stop is in Calgary where Joplin tears into “Tell Mama,” after giving Walker and Eaton a model train mounted on a board and signed by all the musicians. It is a memento for them so they will remember the concert. She also gives them a case of tequila. There are also some fine sets of ‘The Band’ doing “I Shall Be Released” and “The Weight,” Buddy Guy’s hot version of “Money -That’s What I Want,” and the Dead blending from “New Speedway Boogie,” “Don’t Ease Me In” to “Friend of the Devil.”

This film showcases some genuinely thrilling, never-before-seen performances, and proves to be a far more revealing film about the stresses and strains affecting the counter-culture than is the comparatively rosy-eyed Woodstock. It was nicknamed by ‘Rolling Stone Magazine’ as The Million Dollar Bash. It proves a terrific bonding experience for the musicians who were accustomed to jumping in and out of a venue without getting much hang time with the other performers. To sum up, ‘Festival Express’ is not a deep or particularly illuminating documentary. However, it does a fine job saving some good performances from nothingness. It gives Baby Boomers another great opportunity to relive a certain special period of their lives, and offers the rest of us an experience of what it might have been like to be young and alive then.