Despite his quintessential vocals, the Band’s Richard Manuel has often been relegated to the margins of rock history. Starting his career with the Revols in Canada in the late 1950s, he later joined Ronnie Hawkins’s band, where he was introduced to his future bandmates Levon Helm, Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko, and Garth Hudson. They eventually split from Hawkins and joined Bob Dylan after Dylan went electric in 1965, following Dylan to Woodstock a year later after Dylan was in a motorcycle accident. Residing in a house dubbed “Big Pink,” they cultivated their own unique sound. Now called The Band, they released their debut album, Music from Big Pink, in 1968, influencing Eric Clapton and the biggest band in the world at that point, the Beatles. Success and fame proved to be too much for Manuel, however, and he began a slow dive into self-destruction that eroded his confidence, culminating in him taking his own life in 1986 at the age of forty-two.
A new biography, Richard Manuel: His Life and Music from the Hawks to Bob Dylan to the Band, written by Rochester author Stephen T. Lewis, aims to rehabilitate Manuel’s reputation and features some high-profile interviewees like Clapton and Van Morrison. Lewis first became a fan of the Band after renting The Last Waltz from a video store in his native Palmyra in the early 1990s and became especially enamored of Manuel. “Richard was such a powerhouse and had such an effect on me,” he remembers. He missed his opportunity to see a reconstituted version of the Band when they came through Rochester in 1995, but he saw Levon Helm perform several times before his passing in 2012, and he met the late Garth Hudson and his wife Maud at the Colony Cafe in Woodstock on a few occasions. “He and Maud were very kind to me,” Lewis recalls.
After graduating from SUNY Brockport in 2007 with a degree in English, he began contributing to websites such as Ultimate Classic Rock (where he published a piece on Manuel), NYSMusic.com, and Something Else Reviews. Since 2012, he’s maintained a blog, Talk from the Rock Room (talkfromtherockroom.com), where he’s done the bulk of his music writing, and it was through that website that he was given the suggestion from a reader to write a biography of Manuel. But it was seeing Once Were Brothers, the 2019 documentary based on Robertson’s 2016 autobiography Testimony, that served as the real push-comes-to-shove moment. “That film gave me a kick because of the lack of Richard in it,” he says. “It was one of those things. I’ve talked with a couple of my other friends who were Band fans. I was like, ‘You know, something that has always bothered me is Richard’s representation in the overall view of the group and in the lexicon of music.’”
The COVID-19 pandemic and a layoff allowed Lewis additional time to pursue the book. The first person he reached out to was John Till, who’d played with Manuel in his first band, the Revols, and later played with Janis Joplin. “The first words John said to me were, ‘I don’t have the time or inclination to write a book on Richard Manuel.” When Lewis informed Till that he would be writing the book, he relented, granting him an interview. It was Till and his wife Dorcas who introduced Lewis to Manuel’s surviving Canadian relatives, including Manuel’s sister-in-law Kathryn, who in turn introduced him to Manuel’s widow, Arlie. Subsequently, Lewis and his wife made a few trips to Manuel’s native Stratford, Ontario, where Manuel is also buried. On one occasion, Lewis was treated to a tour of Manuel’s old haunts and childhood home by the town’s historian. “It was kind of easy to feel where his influences and showmanship came from.”
Next came connecting with Manuel’s first wife, Jane, and son Josh, who still reside in the Woodstock area, and daughter Paula, who lives in California. This required Lewis to get on social media—something he’d avoided up to that point—and, was able to reach out to Josh on Facebook. Previous attempts at Manuel biographies, including a documentary, failed to materialize, so it was also important for Lewis to gain the trust of his family. “If someone was writing a story about my father, I’d want to know who this dude is and what his intentions are,” he says. “I didn’t want the project to go unapproved by his family or [have them] think I was doing something sinister. So we connected and I was like, ‘Hey, I’m coming to Woodstock. I would love to meet you and your mom and tell you my intention.’” They loaned him photos, and he characterizes the Manuels as “the kindest, most beautiful people.”
Connecting with more famous names like Larry Campbell, a longtime sideman of Bob Dylan’s, came through Campbell’s manager, who’d worked with Albert Grossman, The Band’s manager, decades before. Lewis reached out to John Sebastian through his website. Eric Clapton came through a more peculiar way: “I’d identified some people through the liner notes of CDs,” recalls Lewis. “I found one of his management contacts and reached out. A week later, they wrote back and said that ‘Eric would love to contribute to your book.’ This is a testament to why this had to be done.” Clapton also provided a back cover blurb, and it was his management that put Lewis in touch with Van Morrison. Others proved more elusive. Lewis had been in talks with Robbie Robertson’s camp for an interview. “It was getting close, and then they said, ‘We’re going to have to put this stuff on hold because Robbie’s not feeling well.’” Robertson passed in 2023, and after the passing of Maud Hudson in 2022, Garth Hudson’s health began to decline as well, making an interview impossible.
The initial plan was to self-publish, but that changed after he mentioned the project to Tom Kohn, owner of The Bop Shop in Brighton, who connected Lewis to his wife, Jann Nyffeler, who said to him, “You need to put a proposal together to see if somebody wants this book.” His proposal was accepted by Schiffer Publishing, a Pennsylvania-based company with an extensive catalog of music-related titles. “They do beautiful work, and they take pride in their craftsmanship.”
Lewis hopes to follow up this book with another music project. “I want something to hit me as hard as Richard’s story did,” he says. He’s forged a close friendship with Josh Manuel, and prior to his passing in January, Garth Hudson gave the book what appeared to be his blessing. For Lewis, this is a treasured validation: “Somebody visited him and said, ‘You know, there’s a guy writing a book about Richard,’ and Garth got a smile out of it. I’ll take that.”
This article originally appeared in the July/August 2025 issue of (585).
Views: 0
