Yesterday, in honor of the 2009 SXSW Festival (which starts today and runs through March 22), we posted our tribute to some our favorite music documentaries. Inevitably, a few choice items slipped through the cracks, one of which was Festival Express, a 2003 film that documents a traveling road show that shot through Canada in 1970. The idea was to stage rock shows in four locations: Toronto, Winnipeg, Calgary, and unlucky Vancouver, which got scratched off the bill as a result of the city's Mayor and professional jackass Tom Campbell's fiery campaign against "hippies." But instead of subjecting the stars to the rigors of jet lag, the promoters, Ken Walker and Thor Eaton, decided to have them travel aboard a chartered train. This meant that the festival's core lineup, which included the Band, the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, and the Flying Burrito Brothers, were allowed to kick back and hang loose, spending the time between shows enjoying each other's company and the Canadian scenery as it sped past their windows. The promoters subscribed to the idea that a well cared-for musician is a happy musician and that happy musicians are good box office, so when it looked as if the contents of the train's liquor cupboard had been drained dry, this horrible development was treated as the code-red occasion that it clearly was. One of the movie's highlights is seeing the survivors' teary-eyed recollections of the moment when the train made an emergency pit stop at a liquor store to refuel. One gets the feeling that they were used to dealing with employers who would have handed them each a Diet Coke and told them to suck it up.
Festival Express includes some terrific musical performances, but its true glory is in the footage (shot by Frank Cvitanovich) that records the overflow of good vibes and camaraderie aboard the train itself. All this happened at a time when the hippie dream was dying, or at least being met with violent resistance, yet the movie is perhaps the most convincing advertisement caught on film for the utopian hopes of that moment. At Woodstock, the promoters failed to provide proper security and facilities and then were lauded for having created a great moment in the history of their generation because most of the people there made it out alive. Here, the repositories of talent and charisma are given a down-to-earth version of the royal treatment, in exchange for their doing a few shows in the course of their rail vacation, inspiring one musician to declare that this experience was for the performers what Woodstock supposedly was for the audience. The backstage scenes include one of the most rarest and gratifying sights imaginable and one that nobody expected to be included in a movie released in this decade: a happy Janis Joplin. Whether toasting the camera with the declaration that the promoters sure do know how to throw a train or participating in an impromptu jam session and gazing at the Band's Rick Danko with the dreamy smile of a woman trying to figure out whether the man she's looking at is too goofy to fuck, Joplin is screen magic here, and she tears into her musical numbers with a focused ferocity unmatched by any of her other filmed performances, including Monterey Pop. Two months later, she'd be dead.
Falling through the cracks is nothing new for Festival Express. The promoters wound up losing their shirts, in part because the kind of hippies who were put on Earth to make it look as if Tom Campbell had a point after all protested the ticket prices, arguing that they shouldn't have to pay to hear "the people's music." Instead of calling the Rolling Stones to ask if they could have the phone number for the Hells Angels' clubhouse, the Grateful Dead actually volunteered to do extra, off-site performances, for free, to keep these sapheads pacified; there is no indication that the complainers, in turn, offered to pitch in to help cover the Dead's bar bills. By that time, it was clear that the tour was going to be a wash financially, but Walker and Eaton opted to go out in style, continued to pamper the stars and keep the cameras rolling. After the last show, the lawsuits started flying, and the footage was consigned to the Canadian National Film Archives Vault, with a few cans of film reportedly stashed in producer Willem Poolman's garage. Eventually, Poolman's son Gavin and his co-producer John Trapman hired director Bob Smeaton to shape the untouched footage, along with new interviews, into final shape. The movie that Smeaton created is a genuine time capsule, and an invaluable corrective to the efforts of tightasses everywhere to beat all the fun out of the collective memory of the '60s. It's just too bad that some of the people having, and spreading around, the fun wouldn't live long enough to see the surprise present waiting at the end of the long, strange trip.
