Now that I've installed my RealAudio driver on my Ultrasparc, I've been listening to lots of Phish and Little Feat bootlegs ... but one thing that I found was an interview with Trey Anastasio and Mike Gordon (members of the band, Phish) and he talked quite a bit about how he and the members of his band are not the originators of the music, but only channelers.

Trey and Mike explained this reference in an NPR radio interview in the Spring of 1994, just after their album, Hoist, was released, and referencing remarks by Santana, who reportedly told them "When you guys were playing, I was picturing the audience as this sea of flowers, the music was the water, and you guys were the hose.":

Trey: We actually have exercises that we do, where we work on improving our improvising as a group. It gets rid of the ego. It's an exercise to get rid of the ego. And the more that we do it the more we find that our improvisations are less concerned with showing off flashy solos or whatever, and more concerned with making a group sound. There's a feeling that we always talk about. When we went out with Santana, he had brought up this thing about the Hose.  … where the music is like water rushing through you and as a musician your function is really like that of a hose. And, and well his thing is that the audience is like a sea of flowers, you know, and you're watering the audience. But the concept of music going through you, that you're not actually creating it, that what you're doing is -- the best thing that you can do is get out of the way. So, when you are in a room full of people, there's this kind of group vibe that seems to get rolling sometimes.

Mike: It gets -- It really starts to seem like It's not the audience or the band. This Thing that gets rolling is It's OWN Thing. When things are going really well, and a jam has taken off, there's this feeling of motion that is created by the rhythm. And at that point my bass that I'm playing feels like this sortof vehicle, or like a hitch for me to hold on to, like someone would hold on to a um … Like if you were on a -- I was thinking if you were on a ski lift, maybe. A chair lift. Or just something that would hook you on to the motion that's going, and pull you along with IT.

This egoless concept contrasts sharply with Ayn Rand's view that Ego is the Mother of Art (from the Fountainhead and just about every other book she has written).

But perhaps there isn't that deep of a chasm between these two views, as Phish's music has never been compromised by money and fame. For while Rand espouses "ego," it is because only the ego can insure "artistic integrity." The noblest human virtue.