The Invisible Thread - Exploring the mysterious tie that binds a great group together

Recently I was hired to mediate a conflict between the members of a New York rock band. The stakes were high – the group’s major label debut was about to be released, backed by a million-dollar promotional campaign. I took the job before I’d heard the record, but once I did, I got excited. This is a great group, I thought to myself. This is a group that deserves a future.In an email from the group’s manager, I learned that the band faced many serious interpersonal challenges. Among them, a pompous lead singer who refuses to help carry his band mates’ equipment (”because, well, why should I?”), a taskmaster drummer who enforces a rigorous group work ethic through the threat of physical violence, a couple of passive peacekeeping guitarists who fail to stand up to their abusive band mates, and, for good measure, an intractable 4-way argument over a fair distribution of publishing money. When a group faces such serious personal problems, it’s common, and quite understandable, for members to consider quitting, or to lobby for the removal of another member, or for the group to self-destruct. Indeed there are times when the psychological environment of a group is so toxic that the only ethical options are either a change in the line-up or to disband altogether. As I put on my mediation cap, I wondered to myself if this was one of those times. I began the mediation process with a confidential phone call to each band member. In each call, I asked the musician, first, to explain the group’s issues from their personal perspective, and second, to tell me how they would go about improving the situation. The members’ testimonies confirmed the bleak picture their manager had outlined for me. But to my surprise, when it came to solving the group’s problems, no one suggested a personnel change - no one wanted to quit, no one wanted to kick anyone out of the band. Instead, every player believed the only way forward was to figure out a way to keep the band together as it was. As one of the members put it, “This is a great band, man. We all know it is, and we shouldn’t mess with it. We’re more like brothers than friends. We just have to figure out how to keep it together so we can keep on bein’ a great band.” My work with this group reminded me that a musician doesn’t so much choose to be in a great band as he submits to it, the way, say, a comet submits to the indomitable pull of the sun. For years, a player will wander from group to group, session to session, and then one day when he least expects it, Wham!, his musical world comes into focus around few key musicians. When they meet, they may be friends, acquaintances, strangers, or rivals, but creatively they are soul mates – artists with unique creative strengths and opinions that combine in a powerful, sometimes illogical way to complete one another. The result is a mysterious and often contentious relationship that has the potential to lead to the creation of something great and rewarding for the group’s members - that is, as long as they can stand to be around one another. The Concinnitas of Creative Partnerships Every great band possesses a certain something that unifies the group creatively, and elevates its artistry above and beyond that of its individual members. Whatever you call that something – a magnetism, energy, vibe, radiance, resonance - this unique signature connects all the members under single identity, and sets the band apart from all others. You hear it in the group’s music, you sense it in photos, and you feel it when you’re in the group’s presence – there’s something tying the members together and amplifying their individual contributions. More than a vague collective spirit, this something is greater than the simple sum of the group’s separate creative parts. The French are content to call this mysterious aesthetic quality, je ne sais quoi - “I don’t know what.” This is no cop out; it’s simply an acknowledgement that artistic greatness springs from the wholeness of a thing, from the interaction of all its elements, not from a single detail. The artistic genius of Van Gogh is the result of the painter’s whole being – the explosive combination of his mind, body, life experience, and technical skill. The power and beauty of A Starry Night is the combined effect of the painting’s subject matter, colors, and textures. A great band is like a great piece of art – its separate parts fit together to create a complete picture, giving the impression that nothing is missing, and nothing is too much. Renaissance artists called this impression of wholeness concinnitas, a principle they deduced from observing the natural world – plants, animals, the earth, and the heavens. They pointed out that when we watch an enormous tree sway in the wind, we see that every branch and every leaf moves a bit differently, and some seem to move with a mind their own. Yet the whole thing fits together as a unified organism, and we find it beautiful. Far from an antiquated idea, concinnitas continues to be a subconscious standard by which we judge a thing’s beauty. We’re drawn to works of art that appear to be a cohesive whole rather than a ramshackle collection of unconnected elements.Great bands, like all great creative partnerships, have concinnitas. Their greatness rises not from the simple sum of the members’ individual talents, but from the interplay between the members’ unique personalities, artistic sensibilities, and performance styles. Kraftwerk, The Dave Brubeck Quartet, Pink Floyd, Kiss, Black Sabbath, Bob Marley and the Wailers, Lynyrd Skynyrd, The Beach Boys, Metallica, The Grateful Dead, The Band, The Supremes, Metallica – both the music and greater artistic message of all these groups speak with a potent, unified voice that can’t be accounted for by the members’ individual gifts. In a great band, concinnitas is an invisible thread, binding the members together. The Harmony of Discord Inconveniently, great creative partnerships rarely form between like minds. Usually, it’s an implausible marriage of competing perspectives, even explosive differences, that forms the basis of a compelling collaboration. In the second half of the 1930’s, The Benny Goodman Orchestra was the biggest of the big bands. Fans bought the group’s records because of Goodman’s smart, highly disciplined music direction, and they packed ballrooms to watch his flashy, good-looking drummer, Gene Krupa. Goodman wanted desperately to be viewed as a serious artist, and he scolded Krupa for what he saw as the drummer’s inappropriately flamboyant, spotlight-stealing performance style. The dispute was ongoing and, to their fans’ great dismay, led to the pair’s split after the four most successful years of either musician’s career. The clash between Goodman and Krupa exemplifies a classic tension in the creative structure of almost every great group. On one hill is the artistic purist, and on the other is the people-pleasing entertainer. Keith Richards vs. Mick Jagger, Pete Townshend vs. Roger Daltry, John Lennon vs. Paul McCartney, Sting vs. Stewart Copeland, Eddie Van Halen vs. David Lee Roth: in every one of these protracted contests, each side believes that the success of the group relies on keeping their opposition’s creative instincts in check. In reality, the success of these creative partnerships relies on both sides continuing to contribute their different strengths to the cause.Whenever a great band breaks up, we often say, “Man, they broke up too soon.” In fact, what we should be saying instead is “they’re lucky to have stayed together as long as they did.” Because for every great group that lasts long enough to make it big, dozens of potentially groundbreaking bands break up before gaining enough momentum to break out. Maybe you’ve played in one of these groups. Maybe you’ve played in more than one. If so, you probably witnessed how the same rich mix of people and personalities that fuel a group’s creative fire can, if a group’s not vigilant, also cause it to crash and burn. Next time we’ll consider ways a great band can help to preserve the invisible thread that unites its members.