Festival Express Blu-ray Movie  

Featuring Janis Joplin / The Band / Grateful Dead / Buddy Guy

Shout Factory | 2003 | 89 min | Not rated | Feb 11, 2014 | Jeffrey Kauffman

In the summer of 1970, several of the eras biggest rock stars all took to the rails for Festival Express. The show was a multi-artist, multi-day, multi-city concert tour that captured the spirit and imagination of a generation. What made it unique was that it was portable; for five days, the bands and performers lives, slept, rehearsed and let loose aboard a customized train that traveled from Toronto, to Winnipeg, to Calgary, with each stop culminating in a mega-concert. The entire experience was filmed both off-stage and on, but the extensive footage of the events remained locked away for decades, only recently having been restored. The film Festival Express is a momentous achievement in rock film archeology which combines the long-lost material with contemporary interviews that add important context to the event nearly 35 years after originally being filmed.

Documentary / Music