Train Kept A-Rollin'

The story of one of the great lost rock documentaries begins with a phone call from a member of Triumph, the Canadian power trio most notable for its uncanny resemblance to Spinal Tap. About six years ago, that band's singer and drummer, Gil Moore, phoned up Eddie Kramer, the producer and engineer with whom Triumph had recorded long after Kramer had become a legend for his work with, among others, Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones. Moore informed Kramer that a man named Garth Douglas had tracked down the long-lost audio and video--some 80 hours' worth of footage, good Lord--from a little-known concert tour that had taken place in Canada at the end of June 1970. The footage included performances from the Grateful Dead, The Band, Buddy Guy and Janis Joplin, who would die but three months after the tour rolled into its final stop in Calgary.

The tour, a rumor to all but those who actually performed on it or saw one of the three concerts, had been called the Festival Express, the name bestowed upon it by a publicist named Frank Duckworth. According to Barney Hoskyns in his book Across the Great Divide: The Band in America, Duckworth had once worked on the railroad and imagined the tour as a way of reminding people "of the romance of traveling by train in the old days, when trains were still a vital form of communication, and to combine that with rock and roll, which is the most vital form of communication today." So Duckworth, and promoters Ken Walker and Thor Eaton, gathered up several acts--from folkies Ian and Sylvia to the Gram Parsons-less Flying Burrito Brothers to, uh, Sha Na Na--and gave them free rein on a 17-car train that would travel from Toronto to Winnipeg to Calgary.

The Festival Express wasn't a totally underground railroad: Rolling Stone had assigned two writers to cover the event, David Dalton and Jonathan Cott, who would describe Joplin as "a Bacchanalian Little Red Riding Hood with her bag full of tequila and lemons, lurching from car to car like some tropical bird with streaming feathers." And only Joplin, they noted, "could have turned the Dead and other assorted heads into a bunch of 'Goodnight, Irene'-singing drunkards." Their dispatches made the event sound like the dreamy, feel-good convergence Woodstock would be remembered as, especially among those who didn't attend the concert. Kramer, who was there, is fond of calling Woodstock "three days of drugs and hell," and this from a man who recalls the event warmly.

But the tour proved a bust, losing some $350,000 of Walker and Eaton's money after the Toronto show was crashed by protesters outraged at ticket prices (a whole 15 bucks) and the other two shows were pitifully attended by hundreds instead of the expected thousands upon thousands. There were lawsuits and threats, and the footage wound up first in a garage and then in cold storage in the Canadian national archives. When Kramer got to the materials, as raw as a fresh wound, they were out of order and out of sync, an unlabeled mishmash of 30-year-old memories long, long forgotten.

"It was a turn-on, I have to tell you," Kramer says now when recalling the first time he saw the material that would become the rock doc Festival Express, which debuted at the Toronto Film Festival in September 2003 and has begun rolling into theaters across the United States this summer. (It arrives in Dallas on September 3.) "This is a moment in time that will not occur again, as was Woodstock--a definitive moment in time. Woodstock had more impact, with half a million people being there and the news coverage and the dynamic performance by Hendrix and the making of history, etc. I was blown away, stunned. When you hear Janis singing at the top of her form, you go, 'Jeez, this is very special. Where the hell's this stuff been?'"

Kramer was charged with fixing the sound, which was a wreck, having been recorded by newbie filmmakers who had no experience capturing rock and roll on celluloid. For the visuals, and the narrative of these bands on this magical mystery tour by train, he brought in his old friend Bob Smeaton, with whom he'd worked on Hendrix documentaries; Smeaton's also beloved for directing The Beatles Anthology and for his work on the Classic Album Series of rockumentaries.