Festival Express -
The Movie
(Filmed in 1970)
With Breathtaking Scenes of
the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin,
The Band,
Buddy Guy, and other Musicians, all Jamming Together
On a Train!
These
Films were been in a Vault for 25 years and are now
being shown to the
public for the first time!
FESTIVAL EXPRESS is a rousing
record of a little-known, but monumental, moment in rock n’ roll history,
starring such music legends as Janis Joplin, The Band, and the Grateful Dead.
Set in 1970, 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 but the extensive footage remained locked away -- until now. A
momentous achievement in rock film archeology, FESTIVAL EXPRESS combines
this long-lost material with contemporary interviews nearly 35 years after
it was first filmed.
FESTIVAL EXPRESS has been described as the
greatest and longest non-stop party in the history of rock n’ roll,
and that is exactly what promoters Ken Walker and Thor Eaton imagined when
they first conceived the event. They wanted to create a setting that
would be irresistible to the talent they hoped to attract. They rented
a train, named it the “Festival Express,” and, using the Orient Express as
their model, stocked the dining car with food and drink that would be
available to night owl musicians twenty-four hours a day.
Participating musicians thought the novel
idea of the train ride sounded like “the party to end all parties” and many
signed on at fees far below their going rate just to join the ride.
Once they boarded the train, they never wanted to get off. Phil Lesh
of the Grateful Dead described the FESTIVAL EXPRESS as “a train of insane
people careening across the Canadian countryside, making music night and day
and then occasionally we’d get off the train to go play a concert.”
As the train rambled along for five days,
it presented a unique opportunity for musicians such as Joplin, Jerry
Garcia of the Grateful Dead, Rick Danko of The Band, Delaney and Bonnie and
Ian and Sylvia, Buddy Guy, and New Riders of the Purple Sage to
collaborate. When they played traditional concerts, musical acts would
rarely overlap because they were on staggered schedules. The train
ride gave them a chance to party, and more importantly, to play music,
together. Mickey Hart, drummer for the Grateful Dead, recalls that,
“Everything was constantly revolving. There was a blues car, a country
car, a rock and roll car. It was like musical chairs. There was
never anything like that level of talent and musicianship encapsulated in
such close quarters for that length of time.” As the trip progressed
and the jam sessions lasted until the wee hours of the morning, the
musicians began playing each other’s music. There was so much
going on all the time that Buddy Guy admitted, “Every time I went to bed I
was afraid I would miss something.” “It was fusion,” says Hart, “all
these different kinds of players playing each other’s music. Here’s
Buddy Guy playing country, Janis singing Canadian folk…” The
trip even resulted in at least one famous song about the FESTIVAL EXPRESS,
the Grateful Dead’s “Might As Well.”
FESTIVAL EXPRESS provides an unusually
intimate look at two of the film’s most legendary musicians, Jerry Garcia
and Janis Joplin. There would be no “next time” for Joplin. Her life
ended tragically just two months later. But while she is on the
“Festival Express,” Joplin is relaxed and at the top of her game.
Her performances, as documented by Peter Biziou, have never been
shown in their entirety, or blown-up digitally with Dolby digital sound,
making FESTIVAL EXPRESS a rare and powerful experience for
Joplin fans. The Village Voice said,
“This is by far the most vivid evidence of her presence ever committed to
film.”
The film offers a remarkably personal look
at Jerry Garcia, too. His
delight in playing music -- any kind of music -- becomes apparent as
he is photographed jamming with one group after another. “Jerry was
the natural-born ringmaster of that three-ringed dream train,” recalls Buddy
Guy. When asked about his experiences on the train, Garcia said “That was
the best time I’ve had in rock and roll. It was the musicians’ train.
There wasn’t any showbiz bullshit. It was like a musicians’ convention
with no public allowed.”
There were times when it made sense to
keep the public at bay. Ironically, most of the performers were not
big drinkers: they were more experienced with other recreational substances
that were impossible to import to
Canada. Alcohol became the “high” of
choice and a few days into the cross-country trip, the FESTIVAL EXPRESS ran
out of supplies. The
non-stop party -- dubbed the “Million Dollar Bash” by Rolling Stone
magazine -- threatened to come to a grinding halt. But festival
organizers came up with a quick and effective solution that has been
described as a cross between the Marx Brothers and “Spinal Tap”, with a
touch of “A Hard Day’s Night”. They literally stopped the train at
a liquor store and reloaded, even walking off with a giant display
bottle of Canadian Club. Erik Andersen, who was part of the FESTIVAL
EXPRESS tour, is still somewhat incredulous as he recalls the moment. “They
just stopped in Saskatoon,” he said. “The whole damn train just stopped
like, in front of a liquor store.” Anything to keep the talent happy.
And happy they were., Calgary, the last stop, the artists knew that they had
shared a once-in-a-lifetime experience. One musician said, “It was a
brief moment in time when everybody came together for one last time to
celebrate that utopian vision we all started with.” And amazingly,
that “brief moment” was captured on film. But, adding even more value
to the experience, the footage -- 75 hours of negative -- was lost or
overlooked for decades.
By the time the traveling concert came to
an end, the promoters were feuding with Willem Poolman, the principal
producer of the original planned film, and there was no one in charge of
the production. The footage was scattered across parts of
Canada and beyond, with unpaid cameramen
taking portions as leverage and promoters taking reels as mementos.
Work prints were stored in Poolman’s garage, where they survived severe
Canadian winters, a fire, and being used as ice hockey goals by young Gavin
Poolman and his friend, John Trapman. Bill O’Farrell, a young man
involved with the original production, took whatever reels he could gather
from various sources and drove them to the doorstep of the Canadian National
Archives in Ottawa, with the caveat that they should hold on to them as
“they will be worth something one day.”
The reels remained at the Archives for
nearly 25 years, until a young music aficionado and documentary filmmaker
named Garth Douglas and his friend James Cullingham – who long heard rumors
of a filmed “Canadian Woodstock” – put out feelers to anyone and everyone
who had information about the lost film. After some initial false
leads, Douglas tracked down
the footage at the Canadian National Archives. However, it took almost
another ten years to finish the film,
sync the audio, clear the performance
rights, and shoot contemporary interviews to accompany the historic footage
and fuse it together to create a truly amazing piece of rock n’ roll
history.
“Making FESTIVAL EXPRESS was like being
handed a giant jigsaw puzzle, minus the lid to the box that shows the
picture of how the film was meant to look,” says director Bob Smeaton. As
each piece was put in place, the picture became clearer. Fortunately,
he was working with remarkable raw material that was in excellent condition.
FESTIVAL EXPRESS was shot in cinema verite style and edited in keeping with
the time period in which it was filmed. This includes the use of
split-screens, allowing the best possible use of so many hours of footage.
Of the 75 hours of negative
shot, 46 hours remained, of which 15 hours had never been printed. “One of
the interesting things for me technically was the negative had been printed
only once in 1971, and then it just sat in a film vault -- perfectly stored
at the right temperature and humidity,” producer Gavin Poolman explains.
“What we had was the perfect negative.”
The producers’ first impulse was to try to
make the film look modern. They changed their minds after seeing some
tests. “We decided that this approach made the film lose its magic,”
exlplains Poolman. “What we have on this negative is something nobody else
can get. People pay a fortune to try to get their films to look like this
and we actually have it. The colors are perfect, but they are the colors of
the time.” Smeaton adds, “The original 16mm footage was blown up to 35mm.
Peter Biziou, who had been the director of photography on the film, was a
great help during the blow up and grading stage of the process. He
insisted, and rightly so, that we retain the original look of the old 16mm
stock and not try to make it appear too modern. This way, we were able
to create a film that looked exactly the way it would have had it been
completed in 1970.”
The footage is among the very first to
document musicians’ lives, both on and off stage, for such an extended and
continuous period of time, and
offers glimpses of a lifestyle perhaps never to be seen again. Contemporary,
first-person interviews with a selection of the musicians, crew, and even
some of the music lovers who were there, provide a unique insight into what
may have been the last great rock n’ roll ride.
According to Bob Weir of the
Grateful Dead, “That train was buzzing down the rails. We achieved
lift off for sure.”
This article is
shortened and from the website
http://www.festivalexpress.com/
