Peace, Love & Locomotion.

TORONTO (Ont.); CANADA; WINNIPEG (Man.); MANITOBA; ONTARIO; CALGARY (Alta.); ALBERTA

The article focuses on a documentary film about the Festival Express. In the summer of 1970, Canada played host to an extraordinary rock festival that crossed the country on its own chartered train. Travelling from Toronto to Calgary, and fuelled with psychedelics and booze, Festival Express had a passenger list that included the Band, the Grateful Dead--and Janis Joplin, who gave the performances of her life three months before her death at age 27. It was a weirdly Canadian event, and not just because a railway was involved. Stoked with idealism, and steaming towards insolvency, it was almost derailed by demonstrators who felt the music should be free, like medicare. A leftist group called the May 4th Movement--named after the date when four Ohio students were shot dead by National Guardsmen--branded the event a "rip-off." And as 20,000 fans gathered in Toronto's CNE stadium for the opening concert, outside the gates riot police on horseback waded into a crowd of protestors trying to force their way in. Culled from a buried treasure of footage that sat in archival limbo for 25 years, Festival Express is a big-screen documentary that offers an enchanting trip through an unsung epilogue to the '60s. Organized by two young Toronto promoters, Ken Walker and Thor Eaton, the tour was beset by controversy. It was supposed to begin in Montreal on June 24, Quebec's politically charged St. Jean Baptiste Day, but mayor Jean Drapeau cancelled the show, fearing riots between separatists and Anglo hippies. Vancouver's politicians vetoed the tour's final stop. That left Toronto, Winnipeg and Calgary.