Of all the rock groups from the 1960s, few can match the regard in which the Band have been held. The loss of their bass player and songwriter Rick Danko, who has died aged 56, may finally draw the line under their illustrious career.
Danko was born in Simcoe, Ontario. Both his parents and his three brothers were keen musicians, and Rick grew up steeped in country music and rhythm & blues. He made his performing debut on four-string banjo at school. He left at 14 to become a musician, and at 17 joined the Hawks, the backing band of journeyman rock 'n' roller Ronnie Hawkins.
Danko started off on rhythm guitar, then switched to bass. For three years, he and the Hawks learned their trade in roadhouses and honky-tonks across Canada. Their 1963 recording of Bo Diddley's Who Do You Love remains a minor rock 'n' roll milestone.
By then, the Hawks were developing ambitions of their own. They split from Hawkins, and began working as Levon Helm & The Hawks, Helm being their Arkansas-born drummer. The otherwise all-Canadian lineup was completed by guitarist Robbie Robertson, pianist Richard Manuel and organist Garth Hudson. In 1965, they released a single called The Stones I Throw, which caught the attention of Bob Dylan's manager, Albert Grossman. Dylan, now on the brink of turning from folk to rock, needed a backing band for a world tour, saw the Hawks in Toronto, and invited them to join him. "Once we got out of the south, people started booing a lot," Danko recalled. "But they were booing at Bob; they didn't really know who I was."
The music the group made with Dylan on his 1965-66 tour still stands as some of the most extraordinary ever made, a panoramic and theatrical deluge of sound built around Dylan's freewheeling imagery. But Dylan was already planning new directions, and retreated to a large pink house in West Saugerties, near Woodstock, New York state, accompanied by the as-yet-unnamed Band.
The music they made with Dylan eventually emerged as The Basement Tapes (including This Wheel's On Fire, co-written by Danko and Dylan), a phantasmagorical mix of folklore, country, blues and rockabilly. The mood of reassessment and retracing historical roots strongly coloured the Band's 1968 debut album, Music From Big Pink, a quietly revolutionary collection which marked a drastic change of course from the prevailing mood of underground rock and social confrontation.
It was a showcase not only for the group's songwriting, but also for their intuitive ensemble playing and superb harmony singing. Danko's high, panicky wail was clearly in evidence on This Wheel's On Fire and The Weight.
Their second album, The Band, is the one that cemented the group firmly into rock aristocracy. They played at the 1969 Woodstock festival, and backed Dylan at the Isle of Wight the same year. However, the Band were never at their most enthralling as a live attraction, a point acknowledged in the 1970 album Stage Fright, where Danko sang the title tune like a man running for his life.
Subsequent recordings never matched the first two, but they achieved commercial success with the live Rock Of Ages, while their 1974 reunion tour with Dylan was one of the events of the decade. Two years later, the Band's Thanksgiving Day farewell concert at the Winterland ballroom, San Francisco, featured Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Eric Clapton, Van Morrison and Muddy Waters, and resulted in the triple album, The Last Waltz, together with Martin Scorsese's live concert movie.
The band members' subsequent careers inevitably lost momentum. Danko's debut solo album, Danko (1978), fared poorly, though he worked steadily as a solo artist. The Band, minus Robertson, reunited in 1983, but the suicide of Richard Manuel in 1986 was a major blow. Nonetheless, Danko, Helm and Hudson reformed the Band at intervals through the 1990s, and the albums Jericho and High On The Hog managed to recapture some of the group's rich, distinctive sound. In 1994, they were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame by Eric Clapton.
Danko continued to make solo records, including the folk-influenced Danko Fjeld Andersen and 1997's Ridin' On The Blinds, and became involved in ecological projects. He struggled with heroin addiction in his later years, having received a suspended sentence for smuggling the drug into Japan in 1997.
His wife Elizabeth and his son and daughter survive him.