Main Cast: The Band, Delaney & Bonnie & Friends, The Flying Burrito Brothers, The Grateful Dead, Buddy Guy Blues Band
Release Year: 2003
Country: CA
Run Time: 85 minutes
Plot
In 1970, with seemingly every North American city of any size holding a rock festival after the success of Woodstock, Ken Walker and Thor Eaton, a pair of Canadian entrepreneurs and music buffs, had an idea: instead of setting up one massive show with a bunch of top-name acts, why not stage a series of them across the country? With this in mind, Walker (then only 22 years old) and Eaton (whose family owned one of Canada's most successful department store chains) signed up Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead, the Band, Buddy Guy, the Flying Burrito Brothers, and several others and hired out a private train that would carry the musicians in high style for a string of five shows from Toronto to Calgary. The jaunt was called "The Festival Express," and a camera crew tagged along to capture the shows on film, as well as the constant party that took place en route. The tour proved to be a financial bust and, as a result, the footage sat on the shelf for over thirty years until director Bob Smeaton recut the material into Festival Express, which not only documents the glorious folly of the tour, but offers a hindsight look at the events from some of the surviving participants. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
Review
Bob Smeaton -- previously known for his work on rockumentaries such as the Beatles' Anthology -- deserves substantial credit for rescuing the footage shot in 1970 for Festival Express from the vaults, and then somehow making a fairly coherent film out of it several decades later, with the help of newly shot interview segments with many of the event's principals. While it's a notable piece of rock history, however, the film itself isn't of nearly the monumental significance of the era's top festival-generated rockumentaries, such as Woodstock, Monterey Pop, Gimme Shelter, or even Message to Love: The Isle of Wight Festival (the last of which also had to wait more than a quarter-century before it was prepared for general release). It's more a nice, but not essential, supplement to the visual record of rock festivals in general and of some of the featured performers in particular, circa 1970. The footage of the Grateful Dead and Janis Joplin is okay, but not on par with their best film clips from the era; the Band fares better, in part because there's not as much other footage of the group to serve as comparison, playing particularly well on "I Shall Be Released." Other on-stage clips -- of Buddy Guy, Sha Na Na, the Flying Burrito Brothers, and the forgotten Canadian band Mashmakhan -- are entertaining but well short of great, and the blues jam centered around Ian & Sylvia's Great Speckled Bird is disappointingly mundane. A bigger problem, perhaps, is that the non-stage footage of protesters at various venues of this Canadian traveling festival, as well as the scenes of the performers partying and jamming on the train, are a long way from compelling, though they're sporadically amusing. The shots of a train rushing down the tracks, in fact, are the main links of continuity throughout the film, indicating that the event was more interesting than it was truly historic. The more recent interview segments (often shown via a split-screen setup that shows a talking head on one side and footage from the festival on the other) do much to illuminate the proceedings, with comments by festival promoter Ken Walker, Bob Weir and Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead, Sylvia Tyson of Ian & Sylvia, Buddy Guy, Eric Andersen (who's mysteriously not shown performing in the archive footage), and others. ~ Richie Unterberger, All Movie Guide
Cast
The Band
Delaney & Bonnie & Friends
The Flying Burrito Brothers
The Grateful Dead
Buddy Guy Blues Band
Ian and Sylvia and Great Speckled Bird; Janis Joplin; Mashmakhan; Sha Na Na; Eric Andersen
Credit
James Cunningham - Consultant/advisor, Bob Smeaton - Director, Eamonn Power - Editor, Ann Carli - Executive Producer, Garth Douglas - Executive Producer, Willem Poolman - Executive Producer, Peter Biziou - Cinematographer, John Trapman - Producer, Gavin Poolman - Producer, Eddie Kramer - Sound/Sound Designer, Eddie Kramer - Music Producer
Festival Express is a 2003 rockumentary film about the 1970 train tour across Canada taken by some of the world's biggest rock bands, including The Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, The Band and Delaney Bramlett w/ Bonnie.[1][2] The documentary film combines footage shot during the 1970 concerts, as well as the train ride itself, interspersed with present-day interviews with tour participants sharing their often hilarious recollections of the time.
Festival Express was unique among rock festivals - rather than being held in one location, it was staged in three - Toronto, Winnipeg and Calgary (Vancouver was to have been the fourth city, but was cancelled due to "anti-hippie" edicts from Vancouver mayor Tom Campbell). The idea was that rather than flying to each city, the musicians would travel by chartered Canadian National Railwaystrain, fostering an atmosphere of musical creativity and closeness between the performers. The trips between cities were a mix of jam sessions and partying, fueled by excess alcohol. Among the memorable scenes depicted in the film was a drunken and acid-fueled jam with The Band's Rick Danko, the Dead's Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir, and Janis Joplin.
By the time the festival started, there was a movement amongst North American youth that rock concerts should be free. As at Woodstock, many kids showed up with no intention of paying the $14 admission. Despite the financial hardship this caused promoters Ken Walker and Thor Eaton, the train continued on, providing a rich environment in which the traveling bands could jam and interact.
In the film, musician Kenny Gradney, who performed with Delaney & Bonnie, said: "It was better than Woodstock, as great as Woodstock was."
The traveling show highlighted several points in the transitioning effects of music in the post-idealism of the late 60's, as large groups of protesters started riots to get into the shows for free, and the promoters attempted to bring a traveling festival to a host of cities. Even the intervention of various Canadian police forces couldn't reconcile the resulting chaos.
While the promoters took a major financial hit, the shows were still a fantastic success, featuring now legendary performances by the Grateful Dead, The Band, Janis Joplin, and Buddy Guy. The Dead were just transforming their sound from dense, jammed psychedelia to the country/folk harmonies of Workingman's Dead and American Beauty; The Band's performance showed them at the very pinnacle of the their powers; and for Joplin, this would turn out to be one of her last performances.
Because the Festival Express tour turned out to be a complete financial disaster, the film project was shelved soon afterwards, as the promoters sued the film-makers, and the footage mysteriously disappeared. Some of the film's reels turned up in the garage of the original producer Willem Poolman, where they had been stored for decades and used at various times as goal posts for ball hockey games played by his son Gavin. The plan to resurrect the film was started in 1999 by executive producer Garth Douglas and story consultant James Cullingham who found many more reels in the Canadian National Film Archives vault, where it had been kept in pristine condition and unknown to the world. Garth got in touch with Gavin, who had grown up to become a London-based film producer. Gavin produced the film together with his old high-school friend John Trapman (who had played in some of those ball hockey games), and Bob Smeaton, double Grammy Award-winning director of the The Beatles Anthology was brought on board. The music tracks were mixed at Toronto's MetalWorks Studios, and produced by Eddie Kramer, Jimi Hendrix's producer, and engineer for Led Zeppelin, Woodstock, and Derek & The Dominos Live In Concert.
The film was produced by London-based Apollo Films together with PeachTree Films from Amsterdam.
The film was released theatrically on July 23, 2004 in the United States, as well as in Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, The Netherlands, Luxembourg, Belgium, and Scandinavia.
The film earned $1.2 million at the US Box Office, and the DVD went straight in at number 1 on the Music Video & Concert DVD top-sellers charts at Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, Tower Records, etc., and has had an average customer review rating of 4.5 stars out of 5. According to Rotten Tomatoes, Festival Express was the second most critically acclaimed film released in 2004.[3]
“Festival Express is musical nirvana! In fact, if you're into Janis Joplin, Jerry Garcia or The Band stop reading now and run to see this film. If it's not screening in your area Fly to it, Drive to it. Get to this film because Festival Express is by far the most incredible, awe-inspiring - surreal - footage to be "discovered" in decades – Blunt Review.
