Films with: Joplin, Janis

Festival express

During the summer of 1970, a series of music festivals took place across Canada. After the first festival in Toronto, the musicians, their roadies and a film crew traveled by private train to the remaining festivals in Winnipeg and Calgary. This is the story of the Festival Express. The tour was a financial flop, and thanks of a fight between the festival promoters and the film producers, no film was edited or exhibited. So this film is, in effect, a brand new film from 1970. If the tour itself was not a success, the party that accompanied it became legend: take one private train, add eight bands full of talented musicians get impromptu jams fueled by drugs and liquor in every car. The main attraction is two now deceased headliners, Janis Joplin and Jerry Garcia, seen both on stage and off. Filmed only two months before Joplin's death, the sequences involving her are truly electrifying and capture her at the height of her self-consuming talent. The Grateful Dead are captured while in the midst of recording and releasing its two essential albums (Workingman's Dead and American Beauty). It captures a pure moment in time when musical hearts and minds beat as one, when musicians of all stripes--without benefit of publicists, handlers, or security goons--came together to work and play hard and leave behind one damn fine-looking corpse.

DVD 4187

Woodstock 3 days of peace & music /

This documentary film captures the unique communal experience and many of the performances of the most famous of outdoor rock concerts.

DVD 597