I grew up in a black world filled with soul and reggae music, a world where Bob Marley and Stevie Wonder were kings. But Ace grew up in middle England, where Motörhead and Black Sabbath were his heroes. He’s on beat one, I’m on beat two, and because we’re open to hearing things in different places, that sometimes creates wicked, weird, warped musical ideas. I love that. There have been days all four of us hear a riff in four different places in the groove – that’s when magic happens!

It wasn’t just The Band who wanted to meet us. It was their managers, Albert Grossman and Bennett Glotzer. They were legendary American music business figures, particularly Grossman, a renowned tough guy who’d managed Bob Dylan since the early sixties. He had reacted to another client, Janis Joplin, becoming addicted to heroin not by intervening but by taking a life insurance policy out on her. Word must have reached them that I was currently without a manager. Ray Williams was a lovely man, I owed him a great deal and he was incredibly loyal – he’d even named his daughter Amoreena, after another of the Tumbleweed Connection songs – but after the first American trip, I’d talked it over with the rest of the band, and no one thought he was the right person to look after us. But nor were Grossman and Glotzer, as I realized the moment I met them.

TEN: Resonance

“When Bill Dally wasn’t flying his plane, or applying for a patent, or reinventing the computer, he was riding his bicycle to the point of collapse, or rowing in Lake Tahoe, or competing in a downhill ski race, or sailing nonstop from Grenada to Antigua. Dally’s pace of invention made Kirk and Nickolls look lazy: he was the author of 250 technical papers and 4 textbooks, and he held 120 patents spanning an eclectic range of computing domains, ranging from complex circuit architectures to the chip that ran the power supply.

Jimmy Page and Robert Plant were fortunate that Led Zeppelin generated a lot of economic fuel to do their music. Without question, most of the people in our study made a lot less money over their lives than the Zeppelin guys. Yet the basic pattern is essentially the same: Once people clicked into frame with something that they were encoded for, it lit a fire that burned so hot that they flipped the arrow of money in service of doing it. Even if they made more money than they knew what to do with, like Robert Plant and Jimmy Page, their fire for the work continued to burn within.

7. Fog

Micheal J. Fox and Maurice White emerged on the other side of the fog in very different places because they were very different people with different encodings and different answers to the question of what fed the inner fire. White would have likely been both unhappy and ineffective if he’d tried to do what Fox did, just as Fox would have been unhappy and ineffective trying to do what White did. On the last day of his life, not long after his 74th birthday, White and the writer Herb Powell talked, as they did often while collaborating on White’s compelling and revealing memoir, My Life with Earth, Wind & Fire.