Members / Richard Manuel

Richard Manuel

Manuel grew up in Stratford, Ontario, and joined the Hawks at eighteen, recruited the way most of the others were: his own band, the Rockin' Revols, opened for Hawkins, who heard him sing a Ray Charles song and decided he needed him immediately. Of the whole group, Manuel had the voice most people singled out first, a soulful, aching instrument that made him the de facto lead singer of the Hawks even before Robertson had established himself as the group's writer.

He played piano primarily, but he could also sit behind the drum kit when Helm switched to other instruments, which happened often enough during recording that Manuel ended up a more versatile player than his billing usually suggested. On the Band's early records he sang some of the most emotionally raw material in the catalog: "Tears of Rage," "I Shall Be Released," "Whispering Pines," "Lonesome Suzie." Robertson wrote almost all of it, but it was Manuel's voice that made the songs land the way they did.

He also never released a solo album, in a group where three of the five members eventually did. What he had instead, for most of his adult life, was alcoholism, and later drug addiction on top of it, both of which worsened as the years went on. He got clean in August 1978, after moving to Garth Hudson's ranch outside Malibu and entering a rehabilitation program, and stayed sober long enough to remarry his longtime girlfriend, Arlie Litvak. During this period he contributed instrumental work to Robertson's film scoring, playing on cues for Raging Bull and The King of Comedy alongside Hudson. The sobriety didn't hold. By 1984 he was drinking heavily again.

On March 4, 1986, after a show by the reunited Band (without Robertson) at the Cheek to Cheek Lounge in Winter Park, Florida, Manuel returned to his motel room. He'd seemed in good spirits at the gig, thanking Hudson, according to Helm's later account, "profusely for twenty-five years of good music and appreciation" as Hudson packed up his gear. Later that night Danko confronted him about his drinking. Manuel talked with Helm in Helm's room into the early morning, then went back to his own room, woke his wife, and complained that the venue's piano had been badly out of tune. He was found dead by suicide later that night, at forty-two.

Eric Clapton wrote a tribute song for him, "Holy Mother," on his 1986 album August. Musicians have kept writing about Manuel in the decades since, from the Drive-By Truckers' "Danko/Manuel" to Counting Crows' "If I Could Give All My Love (Richard Manuel Is Dead)." His seat at the piano went to an old friend, Stan Szelest, and then to Richard Bell, but nobody who heard Manuel sing has ever described either replacement as filling the same role.