@hrc333 said:

First, thanks to all the Phish.netters for all you do. This is a great site for the community.

Secondly, I love reading the recaps and reviews on all sites. I'm lucky enough to attend most shows and love reading about other people's experience at the show.

Thus, this article is very strange to me. It seems that the author is arguing that somehow that copies of the original experience is more genuine than that actual experience. This is surprising to me that anyone who loves improvisational music as much as clearly the author does, would make such an argument. A show is more than the recording. It is the lights, the crowd, the feeling both the people in attendance and the band are feeling. I doubt anyone would argue that the band does not clearly feed off the energy in the room. Sometimes this energy is captured on tape and other times it is not. Thus to make an argument that the authentic experience is somehow less authentic than a video or a recording just does not make sense to me.

It doesn't make any sense to me either, which is why I didn't write that.

Let me come at this from a slightly different angle.

Everybody's experience of the show is subjective. It is a function of not only the music, but countless factors including but not limited to the reviewer's age, relative health, mood, experience with Phish, seats, sound in his/her seats, appreciation for the setlist, substance intake or lack thereof, neighbors, and attitude. Anybody who has seen Phish 20+ times knows that sometimes you float on air out of a show convinced it was the Best Ever Ever and when you listen again it's... not. Anybody who has seen Phish 20+ times knows that sometimes you leave a show thinking it was lacking in one way or another and when you listen again it's better than you thought it was.

In no way does that phenomenon invalidate what you experienced. At least it shouldn't, because that certainly isn't our aim. I'm also not trying to pretend that we or anybody else are capable of being 100% objective. But we feel we do a greater service by trying to get as close as possible to that mark, for a variety of reasons, but primarily because if we review our subjective experience, every show is going to be a 9 out of 10 or a 10 out of 10 and then we have wrung all of the value out of our words.

Let's take BGCA as an example. I had an 8/10 personal experience on night two. I had a 9.5/10 personal experience on night three. But from a pure musical perspective, those shows were night and day. I assume nobody cares about where I sat, who I was dancing with, or what I had for dinner. Do you?