About Me
During "Festival Express", a documentary about a trainload of rock royalty riding the rails from festival to festival in Canada during the summer of 1970, the Grateful Dead's Phil Lesh is called upon to look back 34 years. The now middle-aged musician remembers it as a "train full of insane people careening accross the Canadian countryside, making music night and day. And then, occasionally, we'd get off the train and go play a concert."
The dead bassist's recollections pretty much describe what viewers are treated to in 90 minutes that will leave you hungry for more organic and less polished muiscal magic that defined the hippie era.
First the basics: In that era, when multi-genre rock festivals were in fashion, promoter Ken Walker and some cronies decided to book a trainload of rockers for stops in Toronto, Winnipeg and Calgary. The concerts were plagued by the hippie demands for free concerts and well-publicized battles between the kids and the police (the musicians, by the way, side with the police for the most part). Still, when the concerts are staged, they are fabulous.
If for no other reason than to see The Grateful Dead and Janis Joplin at the peaks of their powers, this movie would STILL be worth watching. The real treat, however, is not the concert footage. It is the fact the promoters kept cameras and recorders rolling in the train cars and caught the musicians jamming, as they apparently did, day and night.
The liquor flowed freely in the bar car, so inhibitions (if such existed) and any sense of competitiveness completely washed away on the rails. As Joplin tells the crowd at the last stop, "I don't know where you've been all week, but we've been at a party!"
