TREY'S SONG: If there's four guys in the band, how come only one of them is on the cover?

The Vermont rock phenomenon Phish just released their documentary Bittersweet Motel on video and DVD.

Full disclosure: I am a Phish fan, the kind who follows the band on tour, has seen concerts all over the map, pours over setlists of shows they couldn't make, and has a tape collection of ridiculous proportions. So of course I was thrilled about Bittersweet Motel, a documentary chronicling a pivotal Phish tour, a gigantic summer festival, and the band's second trip to Europe. It's rare that part of your life is the subject of a movie, and so I braved last week's snowstorm to pick up the DVD on the morning of its release. Unfortunately, the overlap of my life as film and music fan leaves much to be desired.

Rolling Stone called Phish the most important rock band of the 90s, but outside the hard-core fan base, nobody really seems to understand their appeal. Filmmaker Todd Phillips was picked to make this film because he didn't know anything about the band - Phish purposefully didn't want an adoring fan to fawn over them. Unfortunately, Phillips doesn't quite seem to get the fascination the band has to its dedicated followers, and it shows. It's a laudable idea to have an outsider with a fresh point of view make this movie, but how can a documentary filmmaker attempt to explain something he doesn't understand?

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Join the Discussion Bittersweet Motel Let me know if you agree about Bittersweet Motel. Post in the Forum Documentaries "What subjects do you think would be interesting to include in a series about documentaries?" deepcheers Phish "What do you think Phish will play first when they return from the hiatus?" Riled99

Related Resources • Documentaries • Documentary Film Festivals • Documentary Directors • Documentaries A-Z

From Other Guides • Jam Bands: Phish • Jam Bands: Bittersweet Motel • Bittersweet Motel Review

Elsewhere on the Web • Andy Gadiel's Phish • Phish.com • Phish.net • Official Movie Site • etree.org

Consequently, the film is a serious disappointment. Of course, it's compulsively watchable to any Phishhead: I'll gladly pay for any concert footage I can get my hands on, and the backstage scenes are entertaining enough. The scenes from shows I've been to are especially gratifying, and the sound is a hell of a lot better than any of my audience recordings. In the end though, in the light of what it could have been, Bittersweet Motel is a disappointment for fans, and to an outsiders it hardly explains anything - it fails both as music video and as documentary.

The musical selections, of course, are the most difficult. Phillips is not very likely to please a hard-core fan, especially when faced with the task of cutting Phish's trademark jams down to manageable size. So we end up with some of the shorter ballads and cover tunes that don't quite capture what Phish is all about. The film takes its title from one of the least interesting songs in the band's repertoire, and most of the songs that define Phish are absent from the film. (If you want to get obsessive about it: Phillips had footage of the Great Went "Bathtub Gin" and didn't include it, not even as an extra on the DVD. To me that's unforgivable and shows that it was a grave mistake to have an outsider calling the shots in the editing room.)

The variety of Phish's music is sadly underrepresented: too keen on covers and short songs, Phillips misses the bluegrass, the handmade techno, the jazzy tunes, the cow funk, the art rock symphonies, the fourth dimension space jams,the vicious elevator-to-hell sounds, as well as the gracefully building geek rock anthems that together, somehow, form the Phish sound.

The interviews with the band members and backstage scenes are unsatisfactory because lead guitarist Trey Anastasio is completely over-represented. Sure, this helps portraying him as somebody who lets his words flow as freely as his guitar riffs, but some of the outtake material included with the DVD shows that the other band members are equally witty and articulate. As a matter of fact, almost all of the outtakes shed more light than most of the footage that was left in the movie.

It's fine that we see Phish as geeky pranksters, but Phillips seems to have made a conscious decision not to ask any questions that would let Phish show any kind of serious dedication to their art. (Richard Gehr got much better answers out of all of them in his 1998 Phish Book.) Even the movie's cover shows just Anastasio. The richly textured interplay between all four members is precisely what makes Phish what it is, and by concentrating on the band's most garrulous member, Phillips misses a central point.

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