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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