Festival Express

The Grateful Dead, Festival Express, 1970 From the Toronto International Film Festival, September 2003 In the summer of 1970, a series of music festivals were held across Canada. After the first concert in Toronto, the musicians, roadies and a film crew boarded a private train to travel to the remaining events in Winnipeg and Calgary. The Festival Express was the brainchild of two brash, young promoters named Ken Walker and Thor Eaton. Not satisfied with assembling one of the most incredible travelling concert bills in history (performers included Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead, The Band, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Eric Andersen, Buddy Guy, Great Speckled Bird, and many more) Walker and Eaton decided that "packaging" the tour in the form of a CN railcar moving across the vast landscape would make for good times and good music. How right they were. At the crest of the musical and social explosion that was the sixties, this contrast between the greatest musicians of their day (and, arguably, any day) and a leisurely mode of travel made for a combustible bell jar that vibrated with artistic camaraderie. They rocked, they rolled, they jammed -- all part of a bacchanal that chugged its way across the Canadian Shield and all documented on film. The performers were confronted at every concert stop by protesters angry about the $14 ticket price ("Free the music -- the music should be free!") but this did not prevent them giving their all for the thousands who flocked to see them. This never-before-seen footage (in which Willem Poolman, father of producer Gavin Poolman, captured performances both on stage and onboard the train) reminds us of the sheer electricity performers like Joplin were capable of creating. The footage was lost in legal proceedings for years, but ninety hours of raw negative and forty hours of uncut sound recording fortuitously found their way to the Budge Crawley vault in the National Archives of Canada. With music mixed by Eddie Kramer (producer of Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin and Santana), Bob Smeaton.s documentary immortalizes performances that -- in comparison to those found in the controlled set-ups of most concert films -- are unmistakably raw and immediate. Festival Express is more than the sum of its extraordinary parts; it captures a uniquely Canadian experience and the spirit of an age. --Jane Schoettle