DVD Review: Bob Smeaton’s Festival Express on New Line Home Entertainment

Rock fans rejoice: Festival Express gets the red-carpet treatment on this two-disc DVD set.

Festival ExpressWoodstock may have been a blast for its audience, but the Festival Express—a five-day rock tour in the summer of 1970 where artists like the Grateful Dead, the Band, Janis Joplin, and Buddy Guy traveled through Canada in a fully loaded locomotive—was where it was at for the artists. Festival Express, a new documentary about this steamrolling circus of sin and scintillating music, was culled from hours of previously unseen footage by Bob Smeaton, and those who enjoy straightforward concert films that focus on the performances rather than the extraneous stuff surrounding it will find much to savor.

While Smeaton doesn’t come close to capturing the spirit of a generation the way that Michael Wadleigh’s Woodstock did, he does attempt to replicate that film’s revolutionary editing techniques via rather dull split-screen effects that visually link the scruffy, unkempt hippie performers with their scruffy, unkempt hippie fans, all of whom seem to have shared a communal love for awkwardly flailing their intoxicated selves around as a form of “dancing.”

Festival Express only exists because the concert clips are frequently dazzling, such as a roaring version of “Money” by Buddy Guy—whose participation alongside predominately white musicians speaks to the film’s underlying theme of music’s power to break down social barriers—and a thrilling, hothouse rendition of “Tell Mama” by Joplin, her vibrantly scraggly Earth-mother aura gorgeously captured by Peter Biziou and Bob Fiore’s longing close-ups.

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Yet despite hearing—in both archival and present-day interviews with tour promoter Ken Walker, Buddy Guy, and the Dead’s Bob Weir and Mickey Hart, among many others—that the Festival Express was an all-out party in which ecstatic musicians drank, smoked, and jammed their way through the unspoiled Canadian countryside, there’s far too little evidence of such debauchery or spontaneous musical collaboration on display.

Smeaton fills out the blank space(s) surrounding the jubilant shows with lackluster vignettes showing the train stopping directly outside a liquor store to restock and fans, exhibiting the worst aspects of hippie extremism, causing a ruckus because the concert isn’t free. The bands may have been, as Jerry Garcia can be heard singing over the title credits, “Driving that train, high on cocaine,” but Festival Express only delivers, at its best, a mild contact high.

Image/Sound

The concert footage used in Festival Express is over 30 years old, but you wouldn’t know it by looks of this two-disc DVD edition of the film by New Line Home Entertainment. Dare I say it, but the old footage is more pleasing to look at than the newer taking-heads interviews interspersed throughout. The studio has included a DTS track on the DVD, but I would actually go with the Dolby Digital 5.1 surround track-though the DTS track improves the sound of several performances, in most cases it unnecessarily augments background noise and hisses on the original soundtrack.

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Extras

Disc One: A “Train Hopping” feature which allows you to jump to your favorite music track uninterrupted, and 50 minutes’ worth of bonus performances from Seatrain, Tom Rush, Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead, and others, with optional interview introductions. Disc Two: 19 minutes of additional interviews from the likes of Ken Walker and Eric Anderson; a strictly talking-heads featurette on the making of the film featuring some excellent contextualizations from the crew; a photo gallery; and the film’s theatrical trailer.

Overall

Rock fans rejoice: Festival Express gets the red-carpet treatment on this two-disc DVD set from New Line Home Entertainment.

Score: 
 Cast: Janis Joplin, The Grateful Dead, The Band, Buddy Guy, Delaney & Bonnie & Friends, The Flying Burrito Bros., Sha Na Na  Director: Bob Smeaton  Distributor: New Line Home Entertainment  Running Time: 90 min  Rating: R  Year: 2004  Release Date: November 2, 2004  Buy: Video

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