Festival Express

Festival Express was part of music lore, the last hurrah of some of the counterculture’s most iconic musicians—The Band, Janis Joplin, The Grateful Dead, Buddy Guy and The Flying Burrito Brothers all holed up in a luxury locomotive, barreling across the Canadian countryside; an insulated rock ’n’ roll utopia. If Woodstock was for the fans, Festival Express was for the performers.

But only three months after the would-be-epic train tour fell apart in a sea of riots, protest and crumbling finances, Joplin would be dead, and—after a string of scene-shaking events (the Manson family murders, Altamont, the Kent State shootings) combined with fallout from Vietnam—some would say the ’60s dream was buried with her. Tellingly, director Bob Smeaton’s documentary, put together from a mix of 1970 footage and current interviews, ends with the words, “and then we had to stop.”

“I think it captures that era,” Smeaton says of his film. “It shows music was changing, you know, and the kids were getting disenchanted, the cops were beating them up, the kids were fighting the cops … It shows that sort of change in the counterculture … that the ’60s dream had died. That’s probably what a lot of the bands were hanging on to.

“They thought, ‘Hey, we can get on a train, let’s do this show right here, have a great time, hang out.’ At the time, you thought that would last forever, right? But having gone back and interviewed them, they all realized you could never do it again. That was the end. Now it’s all big business. And to try and get a train like that with those sorts of artists on, now you’d have publicists, makeup artists, management. You’d need six trains just for the entourage. So I think it was the end of an era.”

The project wasn’t an easy undertaking for the Grammy-winning Smeaton, whose résumé includes The Beatles Anthology. When the Festival Express tour went belly-up, the cameramen realized they wouldn’t be getting paid, so the footage went mysteriously missing. But Festival Express’ original producer, Willem Poolman had the work prints in his garage. After surviving several Canadian winters, a fire and use as hockey goals by Poolman’s son, the reels were handed over to the Canadian National Archives where they sat in storage for 25 years until they were discovered by filmmaker Garth Douglas. Douglas called famed Jimi Hendrix engineer Eddie Kramer about running the film’s sound, and since Kramer had worked with Smeaton on the documentary Hendrix: Band of Gypsies, he recommended the director for Festival Express.

“It was almost like being handed a jigsaw puzzle,” says Smeaton, “but without having the lid on the box. … There was a lot of trial and error just getting the performances cut and also going through the same process for this stuff on the train before I even started to try and assemble it like a film. I just thought, ‘we’ll keep it linear as possible, follow the train up—Toronto, Winnipeg, Calgary—and break it up with the stuff on the train,’ not trying to come at it with a 2003 perspective, let’s keep it in the spirit of the times it was shot, very much Cinema Verité style. And I put a bit of split screen in there, just to show as much of the footage as we could, and also as an homage to the Woodstock movie.”