thanks everybody. @dipped well done. Whether the music itself has aged or the universe has just moved away from that point is a question for another day. Man, do I love those context issues, and that was a great reversal at the end there. To say that the present is the background, in this sense of the older shows, and the past is the foreground is an extremely poignant little vignette.

Just wanted to add the ripple that how we have characterized past eras (as you pointed out with Robert Johnson) takes on an ideality of its own. I would argue that this actually changes the music itself as the source artifact can no longer be relevant in the same way it was to the world that created it. The present-moment of creation is the event of the art, but the shows immediate wake is that art's world. So we have our perception of that era laid over the top of the music from then, as well as our current orientation towards music today that informs the perception.

Further, it seems to me that these characterizations of the past eras not only inform our current reception of past shows but also serve as the contexting of the present. As you said, we are no longer in that time so we cannot actually perceive things as if we were, thus we have symbols as placeholders for how those times were. We abstract that time in terms of definable chunks (cowfunk, ambient, etc) and those chunks make up the history of the band as we perceive it. Finally, that perceived abstraction of history itself changes the "narrative" for how shows are received in the present. The past has its necessary narrative, but how can we define the present?

I think as long as the possibility for change exists, there is freedom from definitions. The past is over so we of course seek to define it. For a band that creates art in the moment, this freedom itself is its defining essence. When that freedom demands of us to accept the present, then we can truly live without past and future narratives clouding our now. And to me at least, there is a sense of joy. Just a connection that we are all on the rift of time forever cutting future into past, and when we are reminded of this through the morph juggernauts known as phish, then there is an opening and the clarity of reality shines through. These past shows were truly inspirational to me and a reminder of how I can be instead of who and what.