June 29th, 1970. Toronto. A train pulled out of Union Station heading west. It was a chartered Canadian National Railways train. 14 cars, two engines, a diner, five sleepers, two lounge cars, flat cars, a baggage car, and a bar car. The bar car was the important one. On board, Janis Joplin and her Full Tilt Boogie Band, the Grateful Dead, the Band’s Rick Danko, Delaney and Bonnie, Buddy Guy, Ian and Sylvia, the Flying Burrito Brothers, 140 musicians and friends.
They would travel from Toronto to Winnipeg to Saskatoon to Calgary over five days playing festival concerts at each city. What happened between the cities is the story. Janis Joplin said it herself, “It’s the best time I’ve had since I left Port Arthur. Not since Monterey. Not since Cheap Thrills went to number one. Not since any of the things the world considered to be her greatest triumphs.
Since Port Arthur. The train gave her back something that Port Arthur had taken. Three months after the last show, she was dead. This is the story of those five days. The best party she ever went to. The last time she was simply and completely happy. Mickey Hart, the Grateful Dead’s drummer, said it best. “Woodstock was a treat for the audience.
The Festival Express was a treat for the performers.” Buddy Guy, “I couldn’t go to sleep because I thought I’d miss something.” Eric Anderson, “There was no escape. The only place you could go was your room. It was 24 hours a day. It was non-stop. The train was equipped with electricity outlets in the lounge cars.
Instruments could be plugged in. Jerry Garcia had arranged for a sound system. At any hour of the day or night, somewhere on the train, someone was playing. There was a blues car, a rock car, a folk and country car. Genre boundaries dissolved at about mile 40, somewhere in the flat fields of Ontario. Janis sat cross-legged on an amplifier in the bar car.
She was wearing what a Rolling Stone journalist later described as a ’30s hustler dress with a slit up to her thighs, her $4.95 hooker shoes covered with beads, a cigarette holder, feathers, and an American flag wrapped around her neck as a scarf. She looked, the journalist wrote, like the personification of a national holiday being celebrated by a display of fireworks.
Jerry Garcia walked down the corridor and stuck his head in. His long, lean face made him look like an Ozark Lincoln. “Hey, is that my guitar, man?” asked Janis. Someone handed her a Gibson Hummingbird. She looked at it. “I only know one song, honey,” she said, “but I’m going to sing it anyhow.” And she began singing “Me and Bobby McGee.
” Garcia picked up and played steel guitar lines that danced around her voice. The two of them, in the bar car, moving through Ontario at 60 miles an hour, playing the song that would go to number one after she died. That was Tuesday. There were four more days. Somewhere west of Lake Superior, approaching the Manitoba border, the bar car ran dry.
This was a crisis. The musicians passed a hat, collected cash. The promoter, Ken Walker, demanded the train stop. The train stopped in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. The musicians walked into a liquor store. The owner stared. 140 musicians from the most famous bands in North America were standing in his store at an unexpected hour asking for everything he had.
They bought most of the contents of the store including a giant display bottle of Canadian Club. Ian Tyson I recall getting into a drinking contest with Janis Joplin. I was seriously outmatched. Garcia looked at the speed being offered by someone’s crew member and said, “Speed kills. Don’t take it. I know, I’ve done it.
” Garcia himself was by his own later admission so blisteringly drunk for most of the tour that he could barely remember it. The train got back on the track. The party resumed. Late one night, it’s impossible to say which night, they all blurred together. Rick Danko of The Band led Janis, Garcia, Bob Weir, John Dawson, and Ian Tyson through a drunken, romantic, completely unhinged rendition of Lead Belly’s Ain’t No More Cane.
They held hands. They howled. The Canadian prairies moved past the windows in the dark. Buddy Guy said, “You could walk in and you wouldn’t ask me what I was playing. You just looked at me and I looked at you. I nodded my head or vice versa and you just played. The music was happening the way music is supposed to happen.
Not for an audience, not for a camera, not for money. Just because there were musicians on a train and there was nothing else to do and it felt good.” For Janis Joplin, who had been performing professionally for 3 years and who had been famous for two of them, this was a revelation. She had forgotten this was possible, that music could just be this.
The concerts themselves were good, sometimes great. Janis’s first performance in Winnipeg, Cry Baby, was, according to one reviewer, underlaid with a weariness of heart. But by Calgary, 3 days later, something had changed. She walked onto the Calgary stage and looked out at the crowd. “I don’t know where you’ve been for the last 2 days,” she said. She paused.
“But I’ve been at a party.” And then she launched into Tell Mama, an elemental transformed performance that left the Calgary crowd stunned. The weariness was gone. The party had put something back. When the tour ended in Calgary on July 4th, 1970, Janis didn’t want to leave. She told the crowd, “Next time you throw a train, man, call me.” She meant it.
The train had given her something she couldn’t name, but recognized, the same thing Brazil had given her, the ability to be just a person, not a legend, to play music for the love of it, to hold hands with Rick Danko and howl at the prairie, to be in a room or a bar car where people loved her for what she did, not what she represented.
The tour ended. She flew back to Los Angeles, back to Sunset Sound, back to Pearl, back to the Landmark Motor Hotel. 3 months later, she was gone. The film footage from the Festival Express disappeared almost immediately after the tour. The promoters sued the filmmakers. The reels ended up in a garage in Canada, where they were used as goal posts for a teenager’s ball hockey games for decades.
The footage was finally recovered in 1999 and the documentary came out in 2003. 33 years after the train rolled out of Toronto, people finally got to see what had happened on it. Janis and Garcia in the bar car, Rick Danko crying and laughing and singing Lead Belly at 2:00 in the morning, the giant display bottle of Canadian Club, the prairies in the dark.
What the film captures, what every person who was on the train has said in the 50 years since, is a specific quality of human happiness that is almost impossible to manufacture. The happiness that comes from being fully present with people you love, doing the thing you were made to do, with nowhere else to be and nothing to prove.
Buddy Guy said it in 2003, “I’ll carry the rest of my life that I’ll never get the chance to meet with Jerry and Janis again. Things like that only happen once in a lifetime.” Here is what this story asks you. Have you ever had a train? Not literally, but a period, a week, a few days, a single night where you were surrounded by the right people doing the right thing and you were so completely present that afterward you couldn’t believe it had been real? Janis Joplin had Brazil and she had the Festival Express.
Two pockets of freedom in a life that was mostly the performance and the room after. The train was better. Brazil was solitude. The train was community. The thing she had been looking for since Port Arthur, a room full of people who loved her for who she was, was a bar car on a Canadian National Railways train rolling through Saskatchewan at 60 miles an hour.
She said it was the best time she’d had since she left Port Arthur. She said, “Next time you throw a train, call me.” There was no next time. There was just the footage in a garage in Canada used as goalposts waiting 30 years to be found. And when it was found, there she was, cross-legged on an amp holding a Gibson Hummingbird singing Bobby McGee with Jerry Garcia while the prairies went dark outside the window.
The best time she had since she left Port Arthur. Subscribe. The next story goes somewhere nobody has taken you before.
