Prior to setting out on a Canadian cross-country tour in a train they dubbed Festival Express', the rock band Grateful Dead had endured a series of ill-fated appearances at various major concerts.

At Woodstock, since the atrocious weather affected their sound equipment and blew the stage over, they ruled out any filmed record of their contribution to the event, save a six-second backstage glimpse of guitarist Jerry Garcia.

Also in 1969, they were the supporting act for The Rolling Stones at another outdoor music festival, Altamont. Although the event was memorialised in the feature film, 'Gimme Shelter', again it was merely a glimpse of Garcia agreeing with bass player Phil Lesh that the scene was far from good. In fact, the event ended in one death and general mayhem among the hippie audience.

Scheduled inclusion in a film of the Monterey Film Festival, at which they appeared, was cancelled due to a contractual disagreement.

In the summer of 1970, however, the Grateful Dead accepted an invitation to play in a series of outdoor concerts across Canada, joining some of the greatest rock bands of the time - Janis Joplin, The Band, Delaney & Bonnie, Buddy Guy, Ian & Sylvia and many more - on a train for what was, according to some, "the greatest, and certainly the longest, non-stop rock 'n' roll party ever".

'Festival Express' was planned as a portable festival, with the chartered train stopping at sites from Toronto to Calgary. It proved to be a stroke of genius, indelibly stamping the event with an aura of magic as a large number of performers signed on at reduced fees because they thought the train sounded like "the party to end all parties". They were right: the five-day ride provided a unique vehicle for disparate artists to relax with one another. Wholly unsupervised, the famous musicians indulged in copious amounts of drugs and alcohol, amazing musical jamming, and of course heavily psychedelic conversation.

Like Woodstock, Festival Express was also caught up in the counter-culture of the day. The opening days in Toronto set the tone for the craziness that would follow, much of the highly photogenic chaos captured by producer Willem Poolman and his photographer Peter Biziou. The footage from the train was shot in cinema v?rit.? style with one or two cameras, offering a glimpse of a lifestyle perhaps never to be seen again. Footage includes a surreal shopping spree in Saskatoon interspersed with footage of Janis Joplin singing with Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir and Rick Danko, Delaney Bramlett jamming with members of Mountain, Buddy Guy's bass player singing old soul tunes, and more.

Financially, the tour proved a disaster for the promoters, who threw in the towel before the train reached Vancouver.

Photographer Biziou went on to great success, with film credits such as 'Mississippi Burning', but for Poolman his work led to nothing but grief. With the collapse of the tour, and shortly afterwards the death of Janis Joplin, the original film was not completed as planned. Eventually, it wound up in the Canadian National Film Archive where it remained for years until it was retrieved by John Trapman and Gavin Poolman.