Richard Manuel

Richard George Manuel (April 3, 1943 – March 4, 1986) was a Canadian composer, singer, and multi-instrumentalist, best known for his contributions to and membership in The Band.

Richard Manuel was born in Stratford, Ontario, Canada. His father Ed was a mechanic employed at a Chrysler dealership, and his mother was a schoolteacher. He was raised with his three brothers, and the four sang in the church choir. Manuel took piano lessons beginning when he was nine, and enjoyed playing piano and rehearsing with friends at his home. Some of his childhood influences were Ray Charles, Bobby Bland, Jimmy Reed and Otis Rush. He was given the nickname “The Beak” by his friends because of his prominent nose.

He and three friends started a band when he was fifteen, originally named the Rebels but later changed to The Revols, in deference to Duane Eddy and the Rebels. The group also included Ken Kalmusky, a founding member of Great Speckled Bird, and John Till, a founding member of the Full Tilt Boogie Band. Manuel developed a rhythmic style of piano unique in its usage of inverted chord structures. He was also a naturally talented vocalist, with a soulful rhythm and blues style, and a rich timbre, often compared to that of Ray Charles. These talents were showcased in The Revols.

Manuel first became acquainted with Ronnie Hawkins and The Hawks when The Revols opened for them in Port Dover, Ontario. According to Levon Helm, Hawkins remarked to him about Manuel: “See that kid playing piano? He’s got more talent than Van Cliburn.” The two bands once again connected at the Stratford Coliseum in 1961 when The Revols ended a show featuring The Hawks as headliners. After hearing Manuel singing “Georgia on My Mind”, Hawkins hired The Revols’ pianist rather than competing with them.

Manuel was eighteen when he joined Ronnie Hawkins’ backing group The Hawks. At this time the band already consisted of 21-year-old Levon Helm on drums, 17-year-old Robbie Robertson on guitar and 18-year-old Rick Danko on bass. Garth Hudson, at 24 years old, joined that Christmas. After two years, Manuel left the Hawks and joined with Helm, Robertson, Danko, Hudson and saxophonist Jerry Penfound to form their own band. Singer Bruce Bruno[who?] also joined them upon occasion. Initially, they were known as the Levon Helm Sextet (as Helm had accumulated the most time with Hawkins), then later changed their name to the Canadian Squires and then to Levon and the Hawks. With Helm serving as nominal leader due to his longevity with the Hawkins group, it was in fact Manuel who sang most of the songs in the group’s repertoire. Manuel was easily the most accomplished vocalist from a technical standpoint. It was as Levon and the Hawks, after the departure of Penfound and Bruno, that they introduced themselves to their blues hero, Sonny Boy Williamson. They soon planned a collaboration with Williamson but it never happened due to Williamson’s untimely death soon after. In 1965 Helm, Hudson and Robertson helped back American bluesman John P. Hammond on his album So Many Roads. Hammond recommended The Hawks to Bob Dylan, who tapped them to serve as his backing band while he switched to an electric sound. In 1966, they toured Europe and the U.S. with Dylan and were known for enduring the ire of Dylan’s folk fans, and were subjected to much unpleasant hissing and booing. While they continued to believe in their ultimate goal to play and record their own music, Dylan opened doors for them in the music business by introducing them to his manager, Albert Grossman, and taught them by example about writing their own material.

In 1967, while Dylan recovered from a motorcycle accident in Woodstock, New York, the group moved there also, renting a pink house on 100 acres (0.40 km2) and were paid a retainer by Dylan. Not having to be constantly working and traveling allowed them to experiment with a new sound garnered from the country, soul, rhythm and blues, gospel and rockabilly music that they loved. During this time, while Helm had been on a hiatus from the Dylan tour, Manuel taught himself to play drums in a technically irreverent, “loosey-goosey” style, a little behind the beat similar to jazz drumming. In the Band era he would frequently assume the drummer’s stool when Helm played mandolin or guitar. Examples of this are the songs “Rag Mama Rag” and “Evangeline”. Manuel’s drumming is predominant on the album Cahoots.

The early months in Woodstock also allowed Manuel and Robertson to develop as songwriters. After recording numerous demos, and signing with Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman, they secured a 10-album contract with Capitol Records in early 1968. They originally signed as “The Crackers” (although “The Honkies” had also been considered). Helm rejoined the fold, as sessions got under way for the recording of their debut album Music from Big Pink. The group proceeded to take what they had learned with Dylan and used one of his songs in the process. They combined it with their idea of the perfect album, switching solos, and singing harmony modeled after the gospel sound of musical heroes, The Staple Singers. Manuel contributed four songs, including the oft-covered “Tears of Rage” which he co-wrote with Dylan. Robertson contributed the same number of his own songs. A cover of “Long Black Veil” and a Danko-Dylan collaboration, “This Wheel’s on Fire” rounded out the album, which was released with the group name as simply The Band, and this would be their name for the rest of the group’s existence. While only reaching #30 on the Billboard charts, the album would be profoundly influential upon the nascent country-rock movement; “Tears of Rage” and Robertson’s “The Weight” would rank among the most covered songs of the epoch. Shortly after the release of the album, the newly financially secure Manuel married his girlfriend, a young model from Toronto named Jane Kristiansen, whom he had dated intermittently since the Hawks days. They would become the parents of two children.

In 1970, Manuel acted in the Warner Bros. film Eliza’s Horoscope, an independent Canadian drama written and directed by Gordon Sheppard. He portrayed “the Bearded composer,” performing with stars Tommy Lee Jones, former Playboy Bunny Elizabeth Moorman and Lila Kedrova.

By mid-1973, the group had once again followed the lead of Dylan who had relocated to Malibu. They commenced work on an album of vintage rock and roll cover songs entitled Moondog Matinee, in homage to Alan Freed’s radio show. While he was initially reluctant to perform, the album managed to elicit some of Manuel’s finest vocal performances, including renditions of the Bobby Blue Bland R&B standard “Share Your Love With Me” and the Platters’ “The Great Pretender”. Another highlight was his clearly tongue-in-cheek version of the obscure Leiber and Stoller song “Saved.” Levon Helm had this to say about Manuel during this period: “…he was drinking pretty hard, but once he got started, man: drums, piano, play it all, sing, do a lead in one of them high, hard-assed keys to sing in. Richard just knew how a song was supposed to go. Structure, melody; he understood it.”

The Band played to receptive audiences in the summer of 1973 at the Summer Jam at Watkins Glen and on a double bill with the Grateful Dead at Jersey City’s Roosevelt Stadium. That fall the group backed up Dylan on his first proper release in three years, Planet Waves and were tapped to serve as his backup group once more on his first tour in eight years.

The concerts of the Bob Dylan and The Band 1974 Tour, lasting from January 3 to February 14, 1974, were meandering musical marathons featuring two sets of Dylan backed by The Band, two Band sets, and a Dylan acoustic set. The ensuing live album from the tour, Before the Flood, reveals that Manuel was still capable of reaching the breathtaking falsetto on “I Shall Be Released”.

The Band continued touring throughout 1974, supporting Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young alongside Joni Mitchell and The Beach Boys on a grueling summer stadium tour. By 1975, Robertson had expressed his dissatisfaction with touring and acting in an increasingly parental capacity, as the move to Malibu had seen him take the managerial reins on a de facto basis from an increasingly diffident Grossman. According to Levon Helm, Manuel was now consuming eight bottles of Grand Marnier every day on top of a prodigious cocaine addiction. After a brief reconciliation that resulted in the birth of a son, the Manuels divorced in 1976. During that period, he developed a kinship with the similarly despondent Eric Clapton and was a driving force behind the boozy sessions that make up the guitarist’s 1976 release No Reason To Cry (recorded at The Band’s new Shangri-La Studios).

On the group’s final full fledged tour, Manuel was still recovering from a car accident earlier in the year; several tour dates were scrapped after a power-boating accident in the Austin, Texas area that summer which necessitated the hiring of Tibetan healers in a scenario reminiscent of Robertson’s pre-show hypnosis before their first concert as The Band. The quality of shows was frequently contingent upon Manuel’s relative sobriety (or lack thereof), as he was more often than not too drunk to play effectively. As he was unable to sustain the high vocal register of “Tears of Rage” or “In a Station”, his most notable contributions were confined to impassioned, raging versions of the prophetic “The Shape I’m In”, “Rockin’ Chair” and “King Harvest (Has Surely Come)”, propelled by his hoarse (though still very expressive) voice.

The Band played its final show at Winterland Arena in San Francisco on Thanksgiving Day in 1976 with several guests; it was filmed in 35 mm by Robertson cohort and longtime Band fan Martin Scorsese for the documentary, The Last Waltz. Manuel can be heard, but hardly seen, singing ‘I Shall Be Released’, surrounded by various guest stars. While Manuel’s famed sense of humor and warm, congenial nature emerged in the interview segments, so did his shyness, deferential attitude – and inebriation. Initially the group intended to end live performances as The Band, but each member was kept on a $2,500 a week retainer by a prospective record company. However, by 1978, the group had drifted apart.

Taking advantage of this new solace, Manuel moved to Garth Hudson’s ranch outside Malibu. He entered an alcohol and drug rehabilitation program, became sober for the first time in years and eventually remarried. Along with Hudson and Robertson, he contributed to the soundtrack of Raging Bull and played little-publicized gigs in L.A.-area clubs as leader of The Pencils (with Terry Danko on lead guitar). By 1980, Rick Danko and Manuel had begun to tour regularly as an acoustic duo.

The Band reformed in 1983 with The Cate Brothers and Jim Weider augmenting the four returning members of the group – Manuel, Helm, Hudson, and Danko. Freed from his addictions, Manuel was initially in his best shape since the “Big Pink” era. Having reclaimed some of his vocal range lost in the years of drug abuse, Manuel performed old hits such as “The Shape I’m In”, “Chest Fever”, and “I Shall Be Released” alongside favorites such as Cindy Walker and Eddy Arnold’s “You Don’t Know Me” and “She Knows”. All of that changed when former Band manager Albert Grossman—a father figure and confidant to the singer, not to mention an instrumental figure in any possible solo career—suddenly died in late January 1986. Depressed by Grossman’s death, dwindling access to prestigious concert venues and the perception that The Band had stagnated and had become a traveling jukebox, Manuel returned to his alcohol and cocaine addictions.

On March 4, 1986, after a gig at the Cheek to Cheek Lounge outside Orlando, in Winter Park, Florida, Manuel committed suicide. He had appeared to be in relatively good spirits but ominously thanked Hudson for “twenty-five years of incredible music”. The Band returned to the Quality Inn, down the block from the Cheek to Cheek Lounge, and Manuel talked with Levon Helm about music, film, etc., in Helm’s room. According to Helm, at around 2:30 Manuel said he needed to get something from his room. Upon returning to his motel room, it is believed that he finished one last bottle of Grand Marnier before hanging himself. Manuel’s wife Arlie—also intoxicated at the time—discovered his body along with the depleted bottle and a small amount of cocaine the following morning. He was buried a week later in his hometown of Stratford, Ontario.

On the end of March, Rick Danko declared: “I can’t believe in a million years that he meant for that to happen. There was just no sign (…) I have to think this was just a goddamned silly accident.” A blood toxicology report indicated that Manuel was drunk and had ingested cocaine the day he died. —Wikipedia