Ok, I'll say it. To everyone who does not like the fact that someone has reviewed a show he was not at: go read Mr. Miner's blog at http://phishthoughts.com/ . He's always attended the show and he always has something glowingly positive to say.

We live in a different time than the old days of phish.net. The idea of someone reviewing a show (s)he was not at was simply unheard of because it was impossible due to lower sophistication of technology. And if someone did try to go ahead and do that in 96 or 97 or whenever I would have been self-righteously pissed at their audacity. I even disliked the switch from the old ascii review page to this one, like "how dare they??"

Ironically, these blog posts have the least staying power but we all treat them as if they are the place to have one's opinions on phish validated. I immensely appreciate them for what they are, however, a tool to employ when deciding which shows are worth the dload and which I will skip. That's it. The only other site I've found that even describes every phish show regularly is Miner's site. And while I always get a chuckle from his unbridled enthusiasm, he is of absolutely no use to me when it comes to culling the gems from the rough.

So hell yea for these guys who go ahead and tell it like it is even though they are then the immediate lightning rod for party-line phish propagandists. I can't believe I just typed that but I think it fits the situation.

We didn't used to have this problem on the old review site because they had the individual jam reviews and the show reviews. Overall reviews were for people who were there and the jam reviews were generally for people attempting objective analysis afterwards. Again, lots of credit to Dirksen who took the time to show everybody the way even if he *gasp* wasn't always right. If you wanted to hear a snapshot semi-biographical about the scene, the lots, the security, the highs, the lows and the rest then you clicked on the show review. If you wanted to get down to serious business and pay focused attention to the best parts of the shows (the jams) then you went for those specific jam reviews.

Now everything is mixed up in the immediate afterglow of show-dom. I could read 30 posts about how "epic" a show was and it wouldn't tell me a thing because I don't know if the sources are credible. These blog posts are credible sources. It may seem like they are overly negative because they are attempting to give an honest, objective view within the context of a tour and the underlying overall phish history. Kind of like, dare I say it, phish journalists.

Anyway, as I've said before, we could go the old route and have different review sections that cater to different phish interests. I've dabbled with trying to review a jam within the confines of the review page you get to from the setlist section, but I feel like there are a million people who have a higher aptitude for converting a highly visceral and sense-oriented experience into logical chunks of thoughts known as words and sentences. Maybe if people are willing to do them, we could bring back the jam review section so there is a clear dichotomy between the feel of being there and the analytic, nerdy, and gloriously informative cataloguing and ranking.

The caveat with this idea (that is so buried in the comments section that no one will probably read this anyway) is that we are essentially mainly here to hear phish jam. A quick note about the killer roggae in the 1st set and INTO the rocknroll> ghost we go!! I can't think of a better way to read about the true merits of a show then to read someone whose opinion I trust get into it for real and freaking tells us about the jams already! Usually, we get about a sentence or two about it that use the most general descriptors imaginable. Or go to that other site and get a paragraph of thesaurus-laden "interstellar" adjectives.