'Holy madman' whose genius drowned in drink

It’s hard to overstate the influence that The Band had but less talked about is the effect that Richard Manuel had on The Band. Jim Farber looks beyond human frailties to speak to the author of a book celebrating his contribution to music

- Jim Farber

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.”