Festival Express

Bob Smeaton

Overview

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.

Product Details

Release Date:	02/11/2014
UPC:	0826663143584
Original Release:	2003
Source:	Shout Factory
Region Code:	1
Presentation:	[Wide Screen]
Sound:	[Dolby Digital Stereo, Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround]
Language:	English
Time:	1:30:00
Sales rank:	36,068

Special Features

Disc one:; Original feature film; Derailed: the making of Festival Express; Additional & extended interviews; Train hopping: watch the songs from the film, uninterrupted; Theatrical trailer; ; Disc two:; Bonus performances from Buddy Guy, Grateful Dead, Ian & Sylvia and the Great Speckled Bird, Janis Joplin & more

Cast & Crew

Performance Credits

Janis Joplin	Actor
The Band	Actor

Technical Credits

Bob Smeaton	Director
Ann Carli	Executive Producer
Garth Douglas	Executive Producer
Willem Poolman	Executive Producer,Producer
John Trapman	Producer
Eddie Kramer	Sound/Sound Designer

Editorial Reviews

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.