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More info on the movie from CMT.com:
http://www.cmt.com/news/articles/148669 ... lines=true

One of the fascinations of watching the movie Festival Express at this week's Nashville Film Festival was being graphically reminded of the pitched battles that were waged more than three decades ago. These were fierce struggles -- that got down to hand-to-hand combat with the police -- over the issue of so-called "free" music. This, of course, was long before computers and the whole notion of downloading music for free. The only ways you could "free" the music back then was by shoplifting records or bootlegging live shows or by gate-crashing concerts.

The matter of "free" music in this case was a radical theory that began materializing around the giant live music festivals that blossomed in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The fans who declared themselves radicalized as members of the "counterculture" decided that music "belonged to the people" and should be free to all. So, gate-crashing became the accepted downloading mode of the time. Promoters and artists and cities and police departments didn't agree, so conflict was inevitable. Festival Express itself stemmed from a very loopy idea. In 1970, some Canadian promoters got the notion to put a big festival on a cross-country train. How cool that would be: Put it on a train and take it across Canada where the artists would get off in cities and play festivals. This ended up being the last of the mammoth rock festivals that began with Monterey Pop and wound through Woodstock. The talent lineup was pretty impressive for the times: the Band, the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, Buddy Guy, Delaney & Bonnie & Friends, Leslie West and Mountain and almost two dozen more.

They ended up having endless backstage (on the train) parties and jam sessions that were occasionally interrupted by getting off the train and playing festivals for fans. At one point the train actually ran out of liquor and stopped at a liquor store next to a train station.

This footage had been locked up in legal proceedings for more than 30 years. What's noteworthy about it now is the lasting quality of much of the music, as well as the gritty depiction of life on the train and the battles between gate-crashers and police. As a music documentary, this serves up offstage footage you seldom saw in those days and will likely never see again in this era of sanitized coverage of the stars and superstars.

It's like being in a time warp seeing otherwise normal looking young hippies shouting, "Off the pigs," and charging and attacking police officers. The mayor of Calgary actually showed up at the festival and demanded that "the children of Calgary be allowed to freely walk through these gates." Concert promoter Ken Walker says in the movie that his conversation with the mayor ended with a dialogue between "my fist and his teeth."

In replying to the issue of gate-crashing, Bob Weir of the Dead, says, "This is how we make a living, man. Fifteen bands for 14 bucks -- what's so wrong with that?" In fact the ticket price was $14 for a two-day music festival with over 20 musical acts.

And some of the music was superb. The Band's Richard Manuel delivers a mesmerizing performance of "I Shall Be Released." Levon Helm's supercharged rendition of "The Weight" is a potent reminder of just how good the Band were.

And Janis Joplin bowls you over with versions of "Cry Baby" and "Tell Mama" that have lost none of their power over the years.

Watching Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead jamming on an acoustic version of "Better Take Jesus' Hand" with Joplin reminded me of how both of them sprang from country roots and never really traveled very far from them in achieving rock stardom. And, of course, the Band were about as country as a rock band can get.

There's some now-heart-wrenching footage of poor doomed Rick Danko of the Band leading a drunken, stoned but joyous sing-along of the old Texas folk-country song "Ain't No More Cane" with Joplin, Garcia and Weir. There was an openness and innocence running through the whole documentary that would soon evaporate in much of the music scene.

Perhaps tellingly, in an audience Q&A session after the Nashville screening, neither Bonnie Bramlett (of Delaney & Bonnie) nor Bernie Leadon (who was in the film as one of the Flying Burrito Brothers) could recall if they actually got paid for taking part in the traveling music festival. Bramlett noted, almost in passing and perhaps jokingly, that neither her marriage to Delaney nor the marriage of Ian and Sylvia Tyson survived the train ride.

Also very tellingly, Bramlett says one reason there's so much drinking in the movie is that the artists were afraid to take drugs into Canada. In the movie, Weir jokes that drinking was a new experience for the Dead. Bramlett said Garcia finally flew in his friend, LSD scientist Owsley, with a supply of acid. Bramlett pointed up at the movie screen behind her and said, "I wasn't joking about drugs, though. Most of the people you saw up there are dead now."

The Festival Express tour ended on July 4, 1970. On August 15, Joplin went back to her hometown of Port Arthur, Texas, for the 10th reunion of her graduating class at Thomas Jefferson High School. I interviewed her at that reunion for Rolling Stone, and Joplin was still raving about her Canadian train trip as the greatest party of her life and one she couldn't wait to repeat. Then, on Oct. 4, Janis Joplin died of a heroin overdose at age 27. (Pink has signed to portray Joplin in Penelope Spheeris' tentatively-titled movie The Gospel According to Janis this year. A second Joplin movie project is reportedly also underway.)

Besides Joplin, other Festival Express fatalities are the Dead's Jerry Garcia and Ron "Pigpen" McKernan and the Band's Rick Danko and Richard Manuel. The music itself remains very much alive, although just how free it is remains open to debate.

Jahfin...Check your Private Messages.

From Billboard.com:
http://www.billboard.com/bb/daily/artic ... 1000521898

Woodstock, Monterey Pop, Altamont and Isle of Wight are famous music festivals of the late '60s/early '70s that have been immortalized on film. But the new documentary "Festival Express" may rank among fans and critics as one of the era's "must see" concert films.

The documentary focuses on an overlooked event in rock history: the five-day, cross-country festival tour of Canada in 1970, where acts including Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead, the Band and Buddy Guy traveled together on a train called the Festival Express.

THINKFilm will release "Festival Express" in select U.S. theaters this summer. The movie opens July 23 in San Francisco and July 30 in New York and Los Angeles. It will have a rollout in other cities in August.

"This just may be the last great rock'n'roll movie of that time," says documentary director Bob Smeaton, who has won two Grammy Awards for directing such longform music videos as "The Beatles Anthology" and "Live at Fillmore East" from Jimi Hendrix's Band Of Gypsys.

Footage of "Festival Express," originally shot by Peter Bizou, had been stored in the Canadian National Archives for nearly 25 years. It then took almost 10 years for the project to be completed for theatrical release. "It was truly a labor of love," says Gavin Poolman, who produced the movie with John Trapman.

When Smeaton came on board for the project, he had to comb through about 40 hours of raw footage, much of which had to be "cleaned up" through digital transfers and audio restoration. "It took about nine months to get the performances' sound and pictures to match," Smeaton tells Billboard.

Joplin is undoubtedly the highlight of the film, with electrifying performances of "Cry Baby" and "Tell Mama" that underscore her legendary status. The movie documents the problems the tour encountered when protesters demanded free admission for concertgoers. It also captures the camaraderie that existed among the musicians as they socialized and performed together on the train. The Dead even wrote a song about the experience, "Might As Well."

The film includes commentary from the festival's participants, who offer their perspectives on the event. The Grateful Dead's Bob Weir, Mickey Hart and Phil Lesh; Guy; and festival co-promoter Ken Walker are among those interviewed.

Poolman theorizes why the tour remained in the shadows of the Woodstock and Monterey Pop festivals. "At the time, the Festival Express tour was not considered a success. It lost money, and the venues weren't that full. But the musicians involved remembered it as a phenomenal event."

-- Carla Hay, N.Y.

From SFGate.com:
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f ... 7JAR91.DTL

Film documenting ill-fated Canadian train tour by Dead, Joplin rumbles to life after decades in purgatory

Joel Selvin, Chronicle Senior Pop Music Critic
Monday, July 12, 2004

Gavin Poolman remembers using the film cans containing the only existing work prints of "Festival Express" for hockey goals. His parents were divorced, and his father, who was the original producer of the film, moved often. Young Poolman never could understand why his father insisted on lugging around this stupid collection of heavy film canisters. At one point, he dragged the cans out of the garage and stacked them in the street to serve as goalposts.

But in the mid-'90s, after he grew up and went into the film business in London, Poolman was contacted by a film researcher from Canada who was trying to find the footage, and Poolman knew exactly where to look.

"He'd found the negatives to this stuff," Poolman said. "Apparently he'd been looking for it for years."

"Festival Express," which will have its world premiere tonight at the UA Galaxy (followed by a party at the Great American Music Hall), is rock's great lost concert film. The movie, which opens its theatrical run July 23 at the Bridge, features a cast of 135 drunken and deranged rock musicians -- including Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead, the Band, Delaney & Bonnie, Buddy Guy, Sha Na Na and others -- rolling across Canada on a train in 1970, partying nonstop in between mini-Woodstock performances at outposts along the way.

The film not only captures extraordinary work by Joplin, only months before her death, and the Band and the Dead at their creative peaks, but comes crackling to life in scenes shot in the train's jam-packed bar car, like Rick Danko of the Band howling in Joplin's amused face while Jerry Garcia noodles along with the drunken fracas.

The festivals proved to be financial disasters from day one. And the film, started by Poolman's father, Toronto film distributor Willem Poolman, disappeared almost before the last musical note stopped ringing. Cameramen took their work home to hold hostage for promised paychecks. The beleaguered festival promoters, who banned Poolman from the train, claimed rights to the footage. A court order was issued to keep Poolman from developing the film. At one point, he was hiding film in a meat locker.

Of the 75 hours of footage shot, Gavin Poolman, who signed on as producer of the movie his father started, eventually recovered 46 hours of 16mm film. Film researcher Garth Douglas, who contacted Poolman about the project, discovered much of the missing footage in the Canadian Film Archive, where it had been deposited by someone associated with the production more than 30 years ago.

What started it all was a little-known footnote to the '60s rock festival era. Canadian concert producers Ken Wallace and Thor Eaton booked stadiums across Canada and transported the rolling rock festival from concert to concert via private railcars. Tickets were priced sky high to cover the extravagance, and protesters who believed that music should be free virtually shut down the concerts. The Toronto opener played to a slender crowd in the stadium, while the cops held back angry demonstrators across the street and the Dead agreed to perform for free later across town. A planned Vancouver show was canceled, but the festival went forward with the five-day train trip to Calgary, playing to half-empty houses along the way.

The train itself was a beehive of endless jamming and much fraternizing. Deprived of their customary refreshments by having to travel across international boundaries, the usually drug-addled musicians turned to alcohol. They quickly drank the train dry, then took up a collection, stopping the locomotive in its tracks across the road from a Saskatchewan liquor store and buying out the store's inventory.

"Drugs arrived when they got to Winnipeg," "Festival Express" director Bob Smeaton said. The event was little noted at the time -- although Rolling Stone chronicled the bacchanal as "The Million Dollar Bash" -- and quickly forgotten. Film researcher Douglas picked up the trail decades later, having heard tales of this "Canadian Woodstock." Gavin Poolman, who also produced the 2000 Balkan civil war drama "The Zookeeper," raised $3 million and hired Smeaton, a rockumentary veteran who served as series director for "The Beatles Anthology."

The original cinematographer, Peter Biziou, went on to win an Oscar for "Mississippi Burning," so there was some native talent behind the lens in the first place, although there was no end to the technical problems on the project. Veteran engineer Eddie Kramer, famous for his work with Jimi Hendrix, was brought in to mix the audio tapes. The film had to be blown up from 16mm. Film and audio were recorded at different speeds; without modern digital technology, the movie probably never could have been made.

"They would have never been able to get this film to work," director Smeaton said of the earlier attempt to make the movie. "The cameramen were so stoned, it was hard to get the film right at all."

The cameramen accidentally break into the scenes. Microphones protrude into the frames. Even with five cameras on the crew, Smeaton still couldn't put together a complete version of Traffic playing a 15-minute version of "Feelin' Alright," captured brilliantly on audio, because all the cameras ran out of film. One cameraman told Smeaton confidently that he remembered shooting a particular scene himself, only for Smeaton to spot the guy in the footage standing in the crowd not filming anything. When Smeaton came to San Francisco to interview the surviving members of the Grateful Dead for the movie, Phil Lesh didn't remember there being cameras at all.

Gavin Poolman, who was a young boy at the time of the festival, remembered the project well. It was not just those film cans his father was forever shuffling around from garage to garage. He associated the abortive movie with his parents' divorce, which coincidentally happened around the same time, and moving out of their nice big home that his father could no longer afford. When his father's basement flooded one winter, he saw the film cans crusted with ice. But, in fact, when the movie was finally made, those work prints supplied some valuable footage the filmmakers couldn't find anywhere else.

Today Willem Poolman is an 80-year-old immigration attorney in Toronto who still goes to the office every day. He got into the film business by accident in the '60s, distributing foreign films and independent releases while still working as an attorney. His success with rock films such as "Monterey Pop" led him to make "Festival Express," although he found himself at odds with the festival producers almost from the start. Banished from the train, Willem Poolman remembers handing film stock to his camera crew from an overpass in Winnipeg as the train passed beneath.

He long ago gave up the film business, but if he had given up the idea that his movie would ever be made, why did he keep all those film tins?

"Until I saw the results, I would have never believed it," he said. "I really had the feeling it needed to be made. That's why we did it. It had to come out. It was fun doing it like this."

Festival Express: YES!!!

Wow, I just came home from the theatre: what a fine movie! What a party! EVERYBODY: go see it!