I’ve blathered more than once in these pages of my admiration for Phish. I’m not a true Phan, because I’ve never been to a concert, but that doesn’t stop me from having opinions (imagine that!).
Though I’m a connoisseur I think the overall quality of the songwriting has gone downhill since the golden age of Phish that occurred in the early 1990s. It’s no coincidence that the four members of Phish were all in their late twenties at the time. Let’s look back…
After forming in the mid 1980s, the band released a series of self-produced CDs that features many songs still in the band’s playlist. Many have unusual chords, tempos, keys and arrangements that are interesting and entertaining, but they don’t always work. The songs lurch in spots. The first time I heard them I thought it self-indulgent, but I’ve learned to disregard such foolish thoughts. This is what an artist calls “challenging the listeners”. Bearing in mind here that during this time the drummer would play an Electrolux in concert. Anyway…
The next three CDs, Lawn Boy, A Picture of Nectar, and Rift, keep the same unusual elements but manage to integrate it in such a way that it flows – it’s melodious. It sounds like something you’ve heard before but it’s not. The opening sequence of “Mound”, from Rift, starts as a standard bass drum/snare drum four-beat intro, but morphs two times, and then again as the rest of the band rolls in. “Split Open and Melt” uses brass (unusual for Phish) with harmonic dissonance that absolutely works. The layered vocal harmonies in “Bouncing Around the Room” remind one of a group with a lot more miles on the tour bus. “Chalk Dust Torture” is a rocker that actually got some AOR radio airplay (and served as my introduction to the band, leading to my accidental purchase of Rift instead of Nectar). Tempos, keys, vocals – exciting sounds that don’t sound all that different than anything on rock radio, but it was far from three chords and the truth.
Phish has released seven studio albums since Rift, and there have been some good ones and some mediocre ones, but none has matched the consistent great songwriting of the early 1990s. Yeah, they’re good, and yeah, there are songs that are as good as the ones mentioned above, but the across-the-board creativity and melding of styles do not carry through the entire recordings. On the other hand, the craftsmanship of the later albums is very good, likely better than the classic three. The quality of the musicianship on the 2010 summer tour was outstanding, maybe better than ever. The guys have evolved from college kids having a blast into pros running an organization. (That wasn’t a value statement – just an observation…)
Let’s say we assign Phish’s output to a bell curve. The x-axis is time; the y-axis is quality of created music. The top of the curve is the years 1990-1992 (our curve is skewed to later years, but…). The left side of the curve reflects the surplus of creativity that really wasn’t harnessed – the boys ran amok and the music was spotty. The right side of the curve drops because there was so much less of the elements that made Phish interesting. The boys turned into men, and I suspect their musical aims changed direction (for example, a song from 1998’s Story of the Ghost, “Guyute”, was later arranged by Trey (the guitarist) for symphonies and covered by the New York Philharmonic.) BTW – name your favorite band and I bet they have a long tail of diminishing creativity – some (e.g. Van Halen or Dave Matthews Band) start at the top – their curves are y=1/x…
This is a really long build-up for a creativity premise that applies to organizations. I was going to bring Einstein and Richard Feynman into the discussion but I couldn’t [wouldn’t] edit the Phish stuff much more. Oh well. It may be a reach anyway. It’s definitely an evil, naughty generalization…
I work in a mature organization. We’ve been riding the tail for a long time. Most of the people I work with are older than me. Management laments that we aren’t very creative. We’re not. We’re old. Our best creative days are behind us. We are now professionals. We take the output of creative people and arrange it so that it fits with the rest of the organization, because in its raw form it’s not always useable. It’s confusing until we refine it. We write procedures and memos. We have been refined ourselves.
The truth of the matter is that we do not have any young people working for us. They all quit. Why? Because they don’t know the rules and they rely on their own creativity to make up for the knowledge they have not yet acquired. Instead of being celebrated for their novel responses to ordinary problems, they get whacked by guys like me for doing things incorrectly. How many times have you heard this: “We don’t do it like that around here…” So they get pissed and leave and management laments the fact that they cannot keep any young employees.
The corollary to this is that old folks like me have seen that done that and we don’t need to be creative – we just do what we’ve done before or we ask someone else how they did it. In my organization, the first question that is asked when a new problem occurs is, “Did you ask the other plants what they did to solve this?” Creative problem solving is not encouraged. It’s risky and old folks hate risk.
This is not to say we don’t get better as we gain experience. We evolve, much as Phish evolved from a bunch of guys willing to shoot for the moon musically into an organization making less interesting music but doing it very well. They’re still a great band, but their greatness is in part due to their virtuosity at playing their old creations brilliantly. More and more we’ve become refiners and optimizers and less and less dreamers and thinkers.
The lesson is this: if you are a start-up doing new things, hire young people. If you are a mature organization, don’t. Hire old buggers like me.
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