@bertoletdown said:

@waxbanks said:

@NigelTufnel said:

We don't need to hear about Mike's scarf or the beer spilled in your row...but about the music, because that's the only element of the experience that lives on and what we truly care about in the end.

Really? Nothing else about the experience 'lives on,' regardless of how it's communicated to you, how vividly, how expansively...whether in person or secondhand? The only thing that matters about last night's Phish show is deciding whether or not to download 300Mb of mp3 files?

I'm exaggerating what I take to be your position in the quoted comment, but not by much...

I think you are exaggerating it by a lot.

I don't think it was Nigel's point and it certainly wasn't mine.

Cut out my last sentence (the aforementioned exaggeration) and the rest is directly implied by what Nigel said, yes. But I don't care enough to keep talking about this particular point. What YOU said, Chris, is just this...

Generally, what we attempt to deliver is a quick read on the music and its likely durability. In other words, is the show that Phish just delivered likely to be taking up lots of hard drive and cloud storage space a year from now, played back frequently on road trips, and spoken of in hushed, reverential tones?

...and I diplomatically asked whether other forms mightn't work better at this task, and suggested some such forms, rather than undiplomatically suggesting that the average Phish fan would be better off listening to a random selection of shows, even 'average-great' ones, rather than reading a next-day play-by-play of 'this version was awesome, this version was average, this is nothing new if you've listened to this one specific show from 1994,' etc.

As to the subject of this particular post, whether these recaps should be written by folks in attendance or not, it obviously doesn't matter -- everyone sane knows the tape isn't the show -- and this weird talk of whether a show will 'objectively endure' is happily unnecessary in any case.