[Unlike] other rock audience members, they tend to come to lots of different shows. We kind of mix it up from night to night. It becomes this sort of long extended thing where people follow the band around, and we're aware of that, and get to know people, and it becomes a real kind of family atmosphere. ... There's a lot of networking that goes on among them. There's the Phish.net [for example]....

What really makes the whole thing exciting and interesting, we get a lot of this, uh a lot  of networking. We have a mailing list that goes out to about 50,000 people and people write in and call in, and ... for instance, the last tour we did, we knew about 125 people who did the entire tour, that's a three-month tour... and what happens is you get to a point where you have to, where everything has to be fresh. You have to be living in the moment. You can't go out on stage and say the same joke that you said the night before or play the same songs.

[Carlos Santana] said, if you think you're making the music, you're wrong. He said that Marvin Gaye told him that, in improvisational music especially, or in any music, it exists and you're basically a vehicle that it passes through and some people are maybe more suited to that than others, but the best thing that you can do is just let it go and not try to control the music.

...we might come to town and the people on the Phish.net will communicate through electronic email and the night of the show, they'll all meet down at a local microbrewery or something...