History / Reunion Years (1983–1999)

Reunion Years (1983–1999)

The original five actually played together once more after Winterland, though almost nobody noticed at the time. On March 1, 1978, during the late set of a Rick Danko solo show at the Roxy in Los Angeles, all five of them got up for an encore and ran through "Stage Fright," "The Shape I'm In," and "The Weight." No cameras, no farewell billing, just five old friends in a club. The real reunion took longer to arrive. By 1982, Helm and Danko had started playing shows together again, and talk began about bringing the group back properly. Manuel and Hudson were willing. Robertson wasn't. He called it a business decision rather than an artistic one, and declined to take part.

The other four went out anyway in 1983, opening with an eleven-city Canadian tour that ran from Halifax to Vancouver, filled out onstage by Helm's Arkansas cousins, the Cate Brothers Band, standing in for the guitar and extra instrumentation Robertson's absence had left behind. Helm was candid about the gap even while enjoying himself. Naturally you wish for the best, he told a reporter that summer, but for now this is just a whole lot of fun, and the crowds seem to like it. The crowds were real, if smaller: the old arena-filling Band had become a band playing theaters and clubs again, closer in scale to their Hawks days than their Last Waltz ones.

Jim Weider came into the picture through Helm's side projects, a local Woodstock guitarist good enough that Bob Dylan reportedly borrowed his green Silvertone to sit in with them one night at the Lone Star Cafe in Manhattan. When the reunited Band got an offer in 1985 to tour with Crosby, Stills and Nash, they went out first with the Cate Brothers for about a week, and then Helm called Weider and asked him to join for good. He stayed fourteen years.

Manuel's death came less than a year later, on March 4, 1986, after a show with the group in Florida. It followed one of the harder stretches of the reunion: days earlier, a critic who caught the band playing an actual dining hall at a small Massachusetts college later described it as a sad, diminished version of what the group had once been. Helm, writing about Manuel's state of mind afterward, put it plainly: he knew Richard felt they weren't getting the kind of respect they were used to. Nobody could say whether going back on the road had helped keep Manuel going a little longer or pushed him toward the end faster. Both were probably true at once.

The three who remained, Helm, Danko, and Hudson, kept going. Manuel's piano seat went first to Stan Szelest, an old friend from the Hawkins days who'd also been playing in Helm's side bands, until Szelest died suddenly himself in 1991. Richard Bell took over from there, and drummer and singer Randy Ciarlante joined the same year, giving the group its final, longest-serving lineup. In 1989, Robertson briefly rejoined Danko and Hudson onstage for the Band's induction into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame at that year's Juno Awards, backed by the Canadian band Blue Rodeo, a moment the music press framed as a kind of passing of the torch, rare enough that people noticed specifically because joint appearances with Robertson had become so uncommon.

The 1990s brought the group back into rooms that mattered. They played Bob Dylan's thirtieth-anniversary concert at Madison Square Garden in October 1992. In 1993 they released Jericho, their first studio album in sixteen years, leaning on outside songwriters now that Robertson wasn't there to fill that role, and that same year played Bill Clinton's inaugural Blue Jean Bash alongside Ronnie Hawkins and Dylan himself. In 1994 came the induction that mattered most, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, with Robertson appearing again alongside Danko and Hudson for the occasion. They played Woodstock '94, opened for the Grateful Dead's final run of shows in 1995, and released two more studio albums, High on the Hog in 1996 and, for their thirtieth anniversary, Jubilation in 1998, with Eric Clapton among the guests.

It ended on December 10, 1999, when Danko died in his sleep at home near Woodstock. Helm and Hudson didn't try to continue the group without him. A band that had spent sixteen years proving it could survive the loss of its most famous member finally ran out of road when it lost one nobody had ever imagined replacing.