The forgotten genius of The Band’s Richard Manuel – UK Times

When The Band filmed their final live performance for the classic concert film The Last Waltz in 1976, they meant to sum up a career so consequential that it altered the course of rock history. Yet, one of the musicians most responsible for that impact, Richard Manuel, is barely found on screen. Other than the lone lead vocal he’s allowed, and a few strange interview bits, Manuel is reduced to a tiny figure on the lower left corner of the screen, literally sidelining him.

“If you watched the film and weren’t a hardcore Band fan, you’d have no idea about the depth of this guy’s contributions to the music,” says Stephen T Lewis, who has written the first book to fully examine Manuel’s life and art. “The fact that The Band didn’t play one Richard-penned song on the most important night of their career says it all. He was marginalised.”

Countering that narrative was Lewis’s main motive for penning his elegantly written and well-argued book. Not only does Lewis believe that Manuel has been grossly underrepresented in The Band, he thinks the most troubled aspects of his life – his extreme alcoholism and the fact that he killed himself at age 42 – wound up defining him for many. “It’s easy to see those things as the driving force in his life,” Lewis says. “But Richard was also a joyous and brilliant person who deserves to have his own story told amid all the other stories that make up The Band.”

Complicating matters further are the uncommon number of stories within The Band, necessitated by the great talent of all five members, as well as the pitched battles between some of them. Much of the noise has surrounded the corrosive relationship between guitarist Robbie Robertson, who’s commonly perceived as the group’s leader, and Levon Helm, the drummer and soulful singer who contended to anyone who’d hear that Robertson took far too much credit (and publishing dollars) than he deserved. “Richard got lost in the wars between those two alpha males,” Lewis says.

Regardless of who you believe, there’s no denying that The Band’s work, starting with Music from Big Pink in 1968, reoriented the sound and values of popular music. Much like Nirvana, who, with just one album, Nevermind, murdered the slickness of 1980s pop to make the sound and values of grunge the new norm, Music from Big Pink rebuked the excesses of psychedelia to inspire a rustic new sound everyone wanted to imitate. The rawness and pith of Big Pink helped inspire a plethora of classic albums, from the Stones’ Beggars Banquet to The Beatles’ Let It Be to Elton John’s Tumbleweed Connection. Bob Dylan was foundational to that change as well, having nurtured The Band at the home studio where they worked in Woodstock, New York, at an ugly house they dubbed Big Pink.

open image in gallery

Eric Clapton was so besotted with their sound, he famously, and futilely, tried to join The Band during that era. In a 1989 interview, he singled out Manuel as his lodestar. “He was the one I thought was the light of The Band,” Clapton said. “There was something of the holy madman about Richard. He was raw. When he sang in that falsetto, the hair on my neck would stand up on end. Not many people can do that.”

Clapton identified with Manuel’s problems as well. “We were going through the same difficulties, screwing around with drugs and drink, getting pretty crazy down deep,” he said. “He was finding it difficult to cope with his talent.”

Manuel’s story started with nothing but promise. Born in Stratford, Ontario, Canada, he came from a solid family with a musical and religious bent. He and his three brothers all sang in church, and while that bred a certain competitiveness, his mother couldn’t have been more encouraging of his talent. He was most inspired by the Black blues he heard on radio stations emanating from the US, specifically by Ray Charles and Bobby Bland.

open image in gallery

The improbable ability of this wiry white teen to channel the emotions in those songs is what drew people in. People also loved that he drank with joyous abandon and took risks without the slightest sense of consequence. The first story in Lewis’s book captures a teenage Manuel blissfully walking on a rickety plank between two sky-high silos. “Richard never had the slightest sense of his mortality,” Lewis says. “The only way he knew to go was all the way. Levon once said, ‘Nobody had bigger ones than Richard.’”

Surely no one in their circle drank more, which was saying something. His drink of choice was the sticky-sweet liqueur Grand Marnier. “He said it was to fight off the smell of smoke in the clubs,” Lewis says. “But it also became something he needed to quiet his nerves. Richard never got his self-confidence to a level where he felt fully comfortable performing without a drink.”

Far from marring his performances, though, drinking initially seemed to enhance them to the point where his first band, The Revols, earned a significant following and toured widely. It helped that they were one of the only groups of white kids in the late Fifties who could play Black blues with credible depth. At that time, Manuel was their flashy frontman. “He was like Jerry Lee Lewis,” the author says, “a great showman.”

That quality, along with his improbably soulful voice and fine piano playing, is why Canadian R&B star Ronnie Hawkins hired Manuel at 18 to be part of his band The Hawks. By then, the group already featured the four other players who would go on to become The Band. After they left The Hawks in 1964, Helm became their leader, but Manuel still took most of the vocal leads.

While they had vowed never to back another star, they could hardly turn down the offer to work with Dylan when he asked them to help flesh out his fully electric sound in 1966. Their historic tour that year famously drew ferocious boos, something that infuriated Helm. But Manuel loved it. “He always thought, ‘I’m going to go down any path, have as much fun and experience as much danger as I possibly can,’” says Lewis.

Luckily, he had an equal zest for creativity, amped by the revolutionary path the newly christened Band and Dylan were forging. Their sound was flinty, raw, and deep, recasting old American genres like country, blues, and folk into something that felt oddly new. Decades later, the result would birth the Americana genre. On The Band’s debut album, Music from Big Pink, Manuel’s voice was the first sound listeners heard: a strange, pained, cri de coeur on the song “Tears of Rage” that matched Manuel’s music to Dylan’s lyrics. “What’s notable is that Dylan hadn’t collaborated at that point,” Lewis says.

open image in gallery

Manuel wrote three others on that classic album and sang lead on seven of its 11 tracks, including “I Shall Be Released,” the Dylan standard its author had recorded but hadn’t yet released. Manuel’s vocal, a quavering falsetto, seemed at once shattered and hopeful, wounded yet pure. “That song became Richard’s,” Lewis says.

He got far less favourable attention for his recklessness, whether that concerned drink, drugs, sex or driving. You could fill an entire city’s junk yard with the cars Manuel wrecked in those years. One time, Manuel nearly killed Van Morrison by almost driving over his dozing body. Another time, he destroyed a car that was a present from Robertson to his wife. After the vehicle flipped and the two emerged unscathed, Manuel lit a match as the gas tank was leaking. “She was terrified they were going to die, but Richard didn’t give it a thought,” Lewis says. “That put a real dent in his relationship with Robbie.”

The dent deepened with the second Band record, 1969’s self-titled album, on which Helm arose as an equally prominent vocalist featured on hit songs including “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” and “Up on Cripple Creek”. (The group featured a third wonderful singer in bassist Rick Danko). Friction began to build in the group over the credits on the album, which went overwhelmingly to Robertson. “Richard was responsible for a lot of the arrangements and the piano changes on that second album,” Lewis says. “But he didn’t make a thing of it. His focus was always to pitch in to make the song the best it could be.”

While Manuel still had writing credits on the album, including “Whispering Pines”, which he wrote with Robertson, by their third album, 1970’s Stage Fright, his credits waned. Robertson and others have said Manuel’s writing tapered off due to his alcoholism, but Lewis insists that’s a false narrative, asserting that he consistently wrote strong songs that The Band never recorded. Manuel himself was partly to blame, Lewis says, because he never had the drive to push his work. Robertson had ambition in abundance, which only encouraged their manager to position him as the leader.

Lewis believes that Manuel’s sidelining inspired even more drinking. As his input began to recede, Lewis says, “you could hear that something was missing in the music. It had a different personality.” The fame The Band had achieved by then, including several top 10 gold and platinum albums, brought around scores of enablers who encouraged Manuel’s most excessive behaviour. At one point in his descent, friends found hundreds of empty bottles of Grand Marnier where he was living. Eventually, his liver swelled to the point where it visibly protruded from underneath his stomach.

In 1976, when Robertson finally made the decision to break up The Band, the reason he gave was getting off the road. Another reason, he said, was to save Manuel from its deadly lures. Unfortunately, losing the group left Manuel more adrift than ever. The Band were supposed to keep working in the studio regardless, but that never happened. “The big question in Richard’s head always was, ‘Why aren’t we still recording?’” Lewis says.

At a new low, Manuel bonded with Clapton, who was also struggling with extreme alcoholism at the time. For the guitarist’s 1976 album No Reason to Cry, Manuel co-wrote the opening song, “Beautiful Thing”. For a while, Manuel managed to stop drinking, though the shock of sobriety nearly killed him.

open image in gallery

John Sebastian, the songwriter and leader of the Lovin’ Spoonful, who became friendly with Manuel in this period, said that while he was no longer drinking heavily, they were both avidly smoking. “Pot and music drew us together,” he tells me with a laugh. They jammed often, which brought Sebastian’s view of Manuel’s talent to a new level. “Richard had that genuine angst that constitutes true blues.”

Larry Campbell, a prolific side man who worked with Helm and played in Dylan’s band for years, also knew Manuel in that era. “What made Richard stand out was that he wasn’t trying to be anything when he sang,” Campbell says. “He was just singing who he was. His voice was nothing but emotion.” Campbell admired Manuel’s songwriting as deeply. “All of his songs go in expected directions. It felt like he was inventing a path that was never there before.”

Given Manuel’s undimmed joie de vivre, both Campbell and Sebastian said they were blindsided by his suicide. Helm had often said he thought his death wasn’t intentional but, instead, a cry for help. Lewis feels sure, however, that his final act was wilful. At roughly 3am on 4 March 1986, Manuel ended his life in a hotel.

At the show Manuel played earlier that night, people slipped him drinks, which he had swallowed down, leading to his belief that if he tried to go cold turkey again, it would kill him anyway. Moreover, he had recently lost his management, faced tax issues, felt guilt about his children whom he felt he had let down and so, says Lewis, “reached a point where he felt there was no way out”.

One particularly haunting aspect of the story, Lewis says, is that Manuel and Robertson didn’t continue the fruitful songwriting partnership they started in 1968, a union he feels might’ve changed the course of Manuel’s life. Even so, he doesn’t see the singer’s legacy as pure tragedy. “We can’t change the end of Richard’s story,” Lewis says, “but it’s important to know about all the joy and accomplishment in his life. People should know that for The Band, and for music in general, Richard was crucial.”

‘Richard Manuel: His Life and Music, from The Hawks and Bob Dylan to The Band’ is published on 28 August by Schiffer

If you are experiencing feelings of distress, or are struggling to cope, you can speak to the Samaritans, in confidence, on 116 123 (UK and ROI), email [email protected], or visit the Samaritans website to find details of your nearest branch.