Festival Express Review
by Jonathan F. Richards (moviecritic AT prodigy DOT net)October 5th, 2004
IN THE DARK/Jonathan Richards
FESTIVAL EXPRESS
Rated R, 90 minutes
RIDIN' THAT TRAIN
"Your love gives me such a thrill,
"But your love don't pay my bills,
"I need money..."
Buddy Guy in performance in Festival Express
It's thirty-four years later, and the tie-dyed, long-haired rock fans who thronged to the cross-Canada traveling entertainment juggernaut known as the Festival Express in the summer of 1970 are now doctors, lawyers, captains of industry, and accountants; solid citizens who probably think nothing of paying $70 and up for a concert ticket to hear fellow senior citizens like the Rolling Stones. But back then, in that post-Woodstock summer of love and entitlement, they wanted their music for free (this of course was before file-sharing.) So they stormed the gates of the festival venues and demanded that the outrageous ticket price of $14 be waived and the doors be opened to all who wanted in.
"Fourteen dollars," mused Ian Tyson. "That's less than a dollar per super group."
The fans didn't see it that way. So they rioted, and the Festival Express flopped. The promoters took a financial drubbing, while the fans and the cops gave each other a physical one. There were hot tempers and broken heads. There's something almost poetic about the spectacle of members of the Grateful Dead expressing righteous indignation to the media about kids attacking Toronto cops.
The plan was for a rolling festival that would travel by train from Toronto to Winnipeg and Calgary. On board was a roster of some of the greatest musical talent of the times. There were the Grateful Dead, the Band, Janis Joplin, Ian and Sylvia, Delaney and Bonnie, Buddy Guy, the New Riders of the Purple Sage, the Flying Burrito Brothers…and at the other end of the talent spectrum, the ersatz retro stylings of Sha Na Na. In addition to the exorbitant fourteen bucks a head admission, the promoters hoped to make a little extra scratch with a concert documentary. But the idealistic audiences didn't want to pay, and the film got tied up in disputes. The tour fizzled out, and the footage was buried in a vault.
Until now. Documentarian Bob Smeaton (The Beatles Anthology) has dug out the lost film and cut it into 90 minutes of irresistible nostalgia. The movie embraces three main elements. There are the confrontations with the unruly audiences (the Mayor of Calgary pompously demands "Let the children of Calgary pass through these gates free!"), and endless shots of the young people who did get in swaying to the music, stripped to the waist, gyrating flat bellies and lithe hips that by the time this material reached theaters would be larded with fat and replaced with plastic. Then there's the concert footage itself. Smeaton has had the courtesy and taste to let most of the musical numbers play through in their entirety, and there's some wonderful stuff. The Band does the classics "The Weight" and "I Shall Be Released", the Dead's offerings include "Don't East Me In" and "Friend of the Devil", Ian and Sylvia perform "CC Rider", Buddy Guy rocks "Money", and there are impromptu collaborations like Jerry Garcia and Sylvia teaming up on "Better Take Jesus's Hand". But the indisputable topper is Janis Joplin. Standing up on stage within what we now know to be a couple of months of her date with death, she explodes life and primal energy into a transcendent rendition of "Cry Baby", and later on gives the same kind of take-no-prisoners treatment to "Tell Mama", with Jerry Garcia beatifically backing her on guitar.
The third element is the train ride. The movie's most remarkable sequences are of these legendary musicians sprawled in railroad cars jamming and drinking whiskey. "Drinking was a new experience for most of us," says the Dead's Bob Weir. "We were used to pot and LSD." They ran through the stock of booze on the train, and had to make an emergency stop in Saskatoon, where they bought out a liquor store across from the station. But it was a great party. "You didn't want to go to sleep," recalls Buddy Guy, and Sylvia remembers "We left our egos at the station…it was a chance to hang with people you liked and wouldn't normally get a chance to hang with." So they rolled across Canada making informal music for themselves, Rick Danko and Janis cackling through "Ain't No More Cane" with Jerry Garcia strumming his guitar, relaxed musicians making musical discoveries that carried over onto the stage. It's not all great stuff – the quality sometimes falls in the cracks between the polish of studio recording and the visceral excitement of concert presence, there are stretches of monotony, and there's a broad range between Janis and Sha Na Na, but it's a rare moment in time – as one of the musicians reminisces, "Things like that only happen once in a lifetime." And maybe for good reason. As promoter Ken Walker observes with a touch of bitterness at the film's end, "I gave the public too much, and they didn't deserve it."
For all its faults, Festival Express feels like a valedictory for an era. You might find yourself thinking of Hunter Thompson's elegiac line from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: "...with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark – that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."
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