Calgary, Canada. June 27th, 1970. This is the last concert in a maniacally booze-driven sleep-deprived five-day tour across the continent. Janis Joplin gets up and says to the crowd, "I tell ya man, I don’t know where you been all week, but I’ve been at a party!" She calls the festival organizers onstage to thank them for an all-round good time, presents them with a small model train signed by all the musicians aboard the ‘festival express’ and, last but not least, a case of tequila. "The train is for remembering", Joplin says in explanation, and "the tequila’s for continuing". These two words, "remembering" and "continuing", sum up Bob Smeaton’s documentary, Festival Express. Smeaton found a treasure trove of forgotten footage filmed aboard the train which carried the likes of Joplin, The Grateful Dead, The Band, The Flying Burrito Bros, Sha-Na-Na, and now-legendary others to a series of joint-concerts across Canada. And while the concert footage is ample, there were also several cameramen aboard the train who filmed what went on between concerts. Equipped with mikes and amps, so that the musicians could play while traveling, each different carriage was set aside for a particular musical style: there was the blues car, the country car, the folk car. It was one long crowded-in musical jam for the entire journey. Mickey Hart of The Grateful Dead says of this unique set-up, "This is really in the spirit of the music and the times". Another Grateful Dead member, Phil Lesh, describes it as, "A train full of crazy people making music day and night." The performers were enjoying themselves so much they didn’t want it to end. Buddy Guy talks of how tired he became and how he fought off sleep for fear of missing what he guessed would be a once-in-a-lifetime trip. The footage of this event constitutes a testament and a record which allows us to look back at what happened and to remember the urgency and importance that these musicians and this music had at this time in history. But because financial problems halted the production of this film in 1970 when it was originally shot, and because the footage managed to survive intact, Smeaton is able to make a doco that doesn’t just look back and remember, but that acts as a continuation of this event. Instead of being something ‘old’ from that period, this footage constitutes something ‘new’. It has the same status as a discovery of say, a Hendrix song never before heard -- it does not provide a simple re-visiting of a period past but brings with it the quality of something just born, just kindled, just created. As such this footage is not just archival, not just something that has had the dust brushed off, but something that smells as fresh as paint that hasn’t yet had time to dry.

It is hard to resist asking the question: in what way has this 30 year buffer period changed the way Smeaton had conceptualized this footage and executed the editing? For a start, while concert films of the period -- Woodstock (1970) and Gimme Shelter (1970) -- were attempting to forge new cinematic ground in their presentation of both the music and the event, Smeaton has no such intentions, and instead tries to emulate the look and feel of these earlier films, and forgoes any MTV-style music-video/concert-doco editing techniques. Smeaton’s retro-style includes split-screens showing the onstage performers from two or three angles simultaneously, (a popular 70’s strategy), long shots that focus on a performer for several minutes in close-up without resorting to cut-aways, and a marked interest in what the audiences were up to, both before and during the concert, (and they were usually up to quite a bit). Smeaton also gives special attention to performances which in 1970 were only one of many, but which in 2004 are, in the light of our retrospective knowledge, revealed as significant -- such is Joplin’s skin-tingling performance of Cry Baby, sung only a few months before her death from drug overdose -- a posthumously poignant performance which is one of the last that we have of her.

One performer tells us as the end of the journey, "We were happy until this train stopped -- we haven’t had a bath or a newspaper -- but we were happy." I felt the same at the end of this film. Ninety minutes of footage is precious little from five days of non-stop music and partying, specially as so many of the performers involved were at their peaks. But this concision is also the film’s strength. Smeaton has taken the best of the performances, and the best of the train ride -- moments that were the funniest, the most insightful, or the most revealing -- and the result is a sharply focused picture of a time that was, and of the people and the music that made it.