@waxbanks said:

What confuses me in Charlie's case is that most of my other geek-reads are produced by folks who are *expert in their fields.* When I disagree with Charlie about a given show, his reviews have absolutely *zero value* for me; they don't teach. I admit to egotism, i.e. I want to be a 'good writer,' but far more importantly, I value broadly-useful reviews, the stuff that both denotes and *evokes*.

This is very well-put and I agree with you 100%. My primary goal is, simply, to alert other experienced Phish fans to what I think is worth hearing/downloading from each show, based on what I've heard Phish do over the years (pretty much everything). My opinions about jams are also very prejudiced, in that I work on the Jamming Charts on this website, and so I *routinely* listen to the finest versions of Phish's jamming songs ever performed. I listen to an absurd, even embarrassing, amount of Phish.

My favorite Phish writers' reviews do exactly what you suggest -- they denote and evoke. I am a big fan of the Phish writing of Chris Bertolet, Jeremy Goodwin, and Dan Purcell, for example. But they do other things, of course, in their lives, as I do, and unfortunately they don't write about Phish as often as I'd like them to. Of course, we don't always see eye-to-eye on Phish's music, but it'd be weird and boring if we did.