Richard Manuel: His Life and Music, from the Hawks and Bob Dylan to the Band
Stephen T. Lewis
Schiffer Publishing, 2025, $35
The Band was such a complex cast of radically different personalities that it’s a wonder they kept it together as long as they did, during both their initial 16-year run and their 1980s reunion. You had guitarist Robbie Robertson, the ambitious auteur; drummer Levon Helm, the earthy scrapper; bassist Rick Danko, the easy-going kid; organist Garth Hudson, the cerebral genius; and pianist Richard Manuel, the gentle heart. But, as per the title of the 2019 documentary on the group, once they were brothers—brothers united largely by their shared love of making music.
Most groups are lucky enough if they manage to have one amazing vocalist, but the Band had three in Danko, Helm, and Manuel. And the latter’s haunting, angelically soulful voice, steeped in the deepest gospel and rhythm and blues, stood out even among those of his incredibly gifted collaborators; Helm himself considered Manuel to be “the Band’s real lead singer.”
But for the retreating Manuel that gift came at a hard-earned price: a life that swung between the highs of artistic success and the lows of painful sensitivity, with a heartbreaking end. In this lovingly and beautifully assembled book, created with the cooperation and blessing of the late musician’s family, author Stephen T. Lewis explores Manuel’s astonishing life with empathy, reverence, and breathtaking depth.
Born in Stratford, Ontario, Canada, in 1943, Manuel, nicknamed “Beak” as a child for his pronounced nose, was the son of an auto-mechanic father and a home-making mother who’d given up her job as a teacher to raise Richard and his three brothers. Encouraged to learn piano at home and sing in the church choir, he fell hard for the new music called rock ’n’ roll and from there that was it. While still a teenager, he formed his first band, the Revols, with whom he caught the ear and eye of Toronto rockabilly star Ronnie Hawkins, who in 1961 hired him away for his backing band, the Hawks. The Hawks—Robertson, Helm, Danko, Manuel, and eventually Hudson—broke away from their former boss two years later and banged around on their own until the newly electrified Bob Dylan tapped them to accompany him on his groundbreaking 1965-66 world tour. Upon settling in the Woodstock-Saugerties area in 1967 with Dylan they recorded the quietly influential Basement Tapes before re-emerging on their own as the Band via their landmark 1968 debut Music from Big Pink—and, with Manuel’s poignantly quavering lead vocal announcing their presence to the world on “Tears of Rage,” the album’s moving opening track, the course of popular music would be forever altered. The likewise game-changing The Band would follow, along with five more studio albums before the group split in 1976; they’d reunite for a few more, without Robertson, in 1983. Plagued by insurmountable self-doubt and the addiction that it fueled, Manuel, his undeniable potential as songwriter never fully realized (his scant seven released compositional credits, which include Big Pink’s “In a Station” and “Lonesome Suzy” and The Band’s “Whispering Pines” are pure marvels), took his own life in 1986.
What’s striking about Rochester native Lewis’s book, besides its 400-page heft and gorgeous graphics (included within are dozens of rare images, many of them from family members and early bandmates), is his ability to describe the music itself so tangibly and to vividly imagine and recreate scenarios throughout Manuel’s life. A triumphant tribute to the man and his music, it puts you right by his side for the whole ride, from his revelation of hearing Howlin’ Wolf and Ray Charles on the radio as a kid through his road-dogging with the Hawks, alternately peaceful and wild Woodstock era, heady times with the Band, and desperate final days. Without question it belongs on the shelf of every Band fan, but also on those of music fans in general.
This article appears in July 2025.
