The Band famously concluded the first act of their unparalleled story with “The Last Waltz,” their much-heralded swan song at San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom on Thanksgiving Day in 1976. By that juncture, they were already the stuff of musical legend, having served as Bob Dylan’s backup group, performing at Woodstock and releasing a pair of time-eclipsing albums in “Music from Big Pink” (1968) and “The Band” (1969).
As Stephen Lewis’ “Richard Manuel: His Life and Music, from the Hawks and Bob Dylan to The Band” powerfully reminds us, they were truly the sum of their parts. The Canadian-American roots rock group was a delicate musical fusion that included Robbie Robertson on guitar, Levon Helm on drums and lead vocals, Rick Danko on bass and violin, Garth Hudson on keyboards and saxophone and Manuel, last but certainly not least, on piano and organ.
Much has been made of Manuel’s March 1986 suicide at age 42. By that point, The Band was playing two-bit theatres and dance halls — a far cry from their stature more than a decade earlier — and Manuel’s alcohol and drug abuse had returned with a vengeance. In his biography, Lewis wisely opts to steer a wide berth around such instances, preferring to devote his book’s precious real estate to stories about how Manuel lived and worked, as opposed to the last tragic hours of his existence in a Winter Park, Florida, motel.
The finest rock-and-roll biographies are defined by their capacity for losing the reader inside the music. With his Manuel biography, Lewis succeeds magnificently in transporting us into the musician’s world. We are treated to the stirring imagery of Manuel taking the microphone behind such Band classics as “I Shall Be Released” from “Music from Big Pink” and, later, “The Shape I’m In” from “Stage Fright” (1970).
In his biography, Lewis devotes his book’s precious real estate to stories about how Manuel lived and worked, as opposed to the last tragic hours of his existence in a Winter Park, Florida, motel.
Lewis sagely places his narrative squarely on Manuel’s shoulders, affording the reader the experience of strolling in the musician’s footsteps at key moments in The Band’s career. In one instance, Lewis trails Manuel as he “walked out the front door of Big Pink, cracked a beer, and strolled down to the pond and followed the game trails around the water’s edge. The area was magical, the days endless. On some heady afternoons, Richard wandered as far as the rocky pine-dotted slopes of Overlook Mountain, climbing while buzzing on Catskill air, fueling his creative hearth. He’d lounge in the sun, dozing, often residing in the space between sleeping and waking, the same place inhabited by the songs bouncing around in his head.”
In the book’s most memorable instances, Lewis takes us into the heart of the studio as the music is being created. Take the section during the recording of “Music from Big Pink” when The Band was bringing the American roots classic “The Weight” to fruition. Lewis focuses his narrative on Manuel’s distinctive backing vocals — lyrical flourishes that, in many ways, make the song. As Lewis writes, “Richard’s “improvised vocals decorat[ed] the song’s periphery: wordless melodic sounds that appear in the moment and then disappear into the song’s framework, an assortment of off-mic falsetto asides, a lacy shawl draped over the three-part-chorus harmonies.”
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But as every student of rock surely knows, it’s the chorus that drives “The Weight” into otherworldly greatness. In that moment, Lewis writes, “Richard’s voice plays the spectral mysterioso, the voice that sounds like everyone’s in the band yet is completely his own.” When the chorus finally lands—“Take a load off, Fanny”—it’s Manuel who punctuates the song’s vocal stylings. “Richard can be heard last and highest in the vocal queue,” Lewis writes. “When the group reaches the word ‘and,’ his falsetto harmony part is distinct. He replies to the line ‘Put the load right on me’ just a second late, with a fervent ‘meeee’ more of a soulful moan. His vocal addendum is a wax stamp finalizing the rough-hewn collection of distinct voices.”
With “Richard Manuel: His Life and Music, from the Hawks and Bob Dylan to The Band,” Lewis affords the musician the epitaph that he has long since deserved, a moving tribute to the group that was always irredeemably the sum of its parts.
Catch Ken Womack in conversation with author Stephen T. Lewis at Rough Trade in NYC on Monday, June 23rd at 6:30 p.m. ET.
