***/**** Image A- Sound A (DD)/A+ (DTS) Extras B
directed by Bob Smeaton
by Travis Mackenzie Hoover JULY 30, 2004. We are so inundated with directives to be entertained that we've lost track of those few entertainments that don't smack us hard in the face with their laboured irrelevance. Simple, innocent pleasures have been replaced by exercises in industrial power that make you feel guilty for looking anywhere beyond them or for anything milder than their artificial amplifications. Surrounded as I find myself by these faceless giants (i.e., virtually every studio film released this summer), I find I am thankful for anything that features some fine music, a few good stories, and a wistful memory of a more innocent time before the entertainment industry was totally corrupted–something like the rock documentary Festival Express. If the film boasts of no miracles, neither does it have any pretenses of miracle-making. It asserts the pleasures of pleasure-making instead of the crushing weight of its force.
The year is 1970. A couple of promoters hatch a brilliant plot to round up some top-name musical talent, put them on a train, and make them ride across Canada in a sort of 'Woodstock North' on wheels. Unfortunately, the Woodstock metaphor is uncomfortably apt: after the free ride of that festival, nobody is interested in paying the then-exorbitant sum of fourteen dollars for a ticket. (Little did they know.) Thus irate crowds begin a mini-riot in Toronto (necessitating the implementation of a free second stage), and the promoters lose a big pot of money at the fans' insistence on getting this gratis music fix. But things look different from the vantage point of the train: once you've piled in the musicians (Janis Joplin, The Band, Buddy Guy, and The Grateful Dead among them), liquored them up, and sent them hurtling across the country, you create the perfect environment for a days-long jam session the likes of which would never be seen again.
To be sure, this is not Pennebaker or Maysles territory. The off-stage footage is interesting, but not especially coherent; the decades-later interviews fill in the blanks but lapse into vagueness and hyperbole when not dealing strictly with facts. And there's not quite enough colouring to the machinations surrounding the show (though we do get the unbelievable sight of a Grateful Dead band member chewing out a kid for being unkind to the cops). But the film knows that it's not dealing with a social phenomenon: it's about a bunch of people making music night and day, and as a celebration of that music it does the trick quite nicely. There are some real treasures to be found in the footage shot on the train–the sense of everyone enjoying each other's company and talent is infectious and real enough to touch. (The tragic duet between Jerry Garcia and Janis Joplin is alone worth the price of admission.)
Of course, all this is icing on the cake of the concert performances–which, despite having sat for decades in the National Archive, have aged remarkably well and are now rendered in obscenely rich digital sound. The headliners, of course, acquit themselves with predictable excellence, with some powerful numbers belted by Joplin and The Band giving flawless renditions of "The Weight" and "I Shall Be Released." But there's also a sampling of acts that fell by the wayside, known only to buffs and those with long memories (Ian and Sylvia? Mashmakan? The Flying Burrito Brothers?); Festival Express fleshes out the musical environment peripheral to the big names that defined the common style motivating them all. Watching these earnest, generous performances is more pleasure than a thousand Spider-Mans laid end-to-end–to those with more sensitive ears, here's your chance to indulge.
THE DVD
NOVEMBER 5, 2004. It's been a few months since I first watched Festival Express: my trashed apartment is looking cleaner, the brown acid is out of my system, and my breathless hyperbole about the film has dissipated somewhat–while the line about "a thousand Spider-Mans laid end-to-end" has (rightly) become something of an FFC joke. Still, there's no denying the very real pleasure to be had from this film, and so I'm happy to report that New Line's 2-disc DVD rendering passes with flying colours. True, Festival Express, presented in 1.85:1, 16×9-enhanced widescreen, looks marginally less sharp at home than it did in theatres (given the age of the footage, the projected image was terrifyingly clear), but the transfer is more than serviceable and boasts of gorgeously-saturated colours. The main event is the audio, here offered in beautifully-modulated DTS and Dolby Digital 5.1 flavours. Both mixes are superb blends of surround articulation and unified tone, though the DTS comes up the winner with a fuller, more potent sound. Music lovers, your DVD moment has arrived.
The first platter's supplementary material is as follows:
Off the Tracks
"Over 50 minutes" of bonus music, this is a variable bunch: iffy performances (The Grateful Dead) share space with superb ones (Janis Joplin's "Kozmic Blues"), although only Tom Rush's cover of Murray McLaughlin's "Child's Song" is revelatory. Interspersed interviews are largely off the topic of the train and concert, with the Canadians discussing their jumping on the Americans' publicity bandwagon, members of Mashmakhan relating the tour's importance to their burgeoning career, Grateful Dead survivors pondering the relative merits of indoor and outdoor venues, and veterans of the Full Tilt Boogie Band band remembering poor Janis. Perhaps too brief to be substantial, these talking-heads at least provide interesting punctuation to the performances.
Train Hopping
An option to skip the interviews and play nothing but music–or simply play your favourite tracks.
DISC TWO
Chugging Along: Additional Interviews (19 mins.)
Various participants expand upon matters briefly described in the film. Among the revelations are an extended account of the promoter's scuffle with the mayor of Winnipeg, the last coming-together of some key Haight Ashbury personnel, the rioting throngs in search of freebies, and the star-struckedness of the greener musicians. A little abbreviated, and the grey curtain backdrop gets a little monotonous, but there are some juicy tidbits here.
Derailed: The Making of Festival Express (14 mins.)
Various behind-the-scenes personnel discuss the abyss into which the Festival Express footage had fallen and all the wading through red tape it took to get it back. More grey curtains frame a semi-interesting scenario of initial failure and eventual triumph.
A disappointing gallery of a dozen or so grainy photos and the film's trailer round out the second disc and the set proper, which is packaged in a slim, swing-tray keepcase.
90 minutes; R; 1.85:1 (16×9-enhanced); English DD 5.1, English DTS 5.1, English Dolby Surround; CC; English, Spanish subtitles; 2 DVD-9s; Region One; New Line
