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| 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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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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