Festival Express DVD

Festival Express

This is a movie, with 50 minutes of added material, about three concerts that took place in Canada in 1970 that were supposed to be Canada’s Woodstock.

Because of legal issues, it was not released until late 2004.

I had never heard of it until I ran acorss the movie about 6 months ago and finally watched it over the last two days…

The offical quotage goes like:

“In the summer of 1970, a chartered train crossed Canada carrying some of the world’s greatest rock bands. The Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, The Band, Buddy Guy, and others lived (and partied) together for five days, stopping in major cities along the way to play live concerts. Their journey was filmed.”

Some of the performances are pretty good. Janis was just awe inspiring and makes the current crop of musicians these days seem like … pretenders… No, not THE pretenders! Like business people who sing songs instead of musicans who happen to make money.

Jerry and Buddy Guy (in the extra footage, especially) also show off their stuff pretty well.

But this is not the fun part about this movie, and I cannot say all that much about the sound quality [from what I can hear of it, it is pretty good], as it was played through a couple of little active speakers, our A/V system being kind of given the Supreme push into a corner for the moment.

What is great about this movie is the footage of all of these musicans partying together. Jerry and Janis singing together is most memorable. And the bunch of them discovering a new drug that they all like… alcohol.

It is the realization that they all decided to play music for a week straight on this train together (stopping once in a while to play at a concert), instead of retiring to their rooms to check the stock portfolios [I exaggerate, I hope, but trying to emphasize a point here], that shows how much into the music they were. That they were like most of us! How cool is that?