Road Cage

July 22, 2004 - Within the context of classic rock the name Buddy Cage resonates with a certain amount of cachet. As a master of the steel guitar, Cage has lent his signature sound to everyone from the New Riders of the Purple Sage to The Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, and The Band. And as such a pedigree would suggest, Cage has participated in his fair share of legendary concerts.

One such memorable event was The Festival Express, a historic cross-Canada tour that took place in the early ’70s after two enterprising promoters had the brilliant idea of organizing a rock and roll Orient Express. That is to say, they rented a train, stocked it with the most popular musicians of the day—The Grateful Dead, Buddy Guy, Janis Joplin, The Band, and countless others—and steamed across Canada, stopping in the major cities of each province to hold festival sized concerts.

Thankfully the historic events of the Festival Express were captured on film, which was lost for 30-odd years, but recently re-discovered and turned into a wondrous documentary of the same name. Cage was one of the lucky musicians who participated in the tour, an event that surely could not take place in this day and age. “They can’t do it because of the last four years,” Cage muses. “The last four years has been four years of back-to-back recession. You could thank this present administration or not. I could give a sh@t less. That’s not the point. The point is that’s the reality as it ends up with us in the music industry.” Cage pauses, then adds a little side note. “It was the music business when I started this thing, then it became the music industry, courtesy of Don Kirshner.”

The use of the terms music and industry together have always had a strange ring to them, but when Cage juxtaposes the terms “business” and “industry” alongside “music,” they ring all the more stranger. Let’s face it, there is a huge difference between business and industry. “It was a business like anything else,” he states. “Bob Weir said it best when he said ‘What a time it was to play music.’ And he was talking about 1970 [when we were on the Festival Express tour], when people really, really cared how much it meant, where it was part of the fabric of their lives, you know? People cared to discuss music and debate it. You know, everybody was having a personal symposium, they were going on all over the world on music. You know, it started with The Beatles on through that and then we got our psychedelic thing together…” Cage stops, smiles wryly, laughs, then adds “Well, we didn’t get it together, but that was part of psychedelic thing of it. Read More

Check Out A Scene From the Festival Express. I was on the Train touring with Ian & Sylvia at the Time.

More Festival Videos

Trackback URI | Comments RSS