Members / Rick Danko

Rick Danko

Danko grew up in Greens Corner, Ontario, a farming community outside Simcoe, the third of four sons in a Ukrainian family where everybody played or sang something. He was performing banjo for his classmates as early as first grade. By his teens he was working days as a butcher and playing music at night, already five years into it by the time Hawkins noticed him.

His own band, the Starlights, opened for the Hawks, and Hawkins hired him on the spot as a rhythm guitarist. When the Hawks' regular bassist got fired not long after, Hawkins simply told Danko to learn bass, and by September 1960 he had. He turned out to be one of the more distinctive players in rock for it, developing a melodic, restless style that ignored most of what bass players were supposed to do in the background.

It was Danko who actually found the pink house in West Saugerties, New York, that gave Music from Big Pink its name and the group its most productive stretch of writing. On that debut album he sang lead on three songs, including "This Wheel's on Fire," which he co-wrote with Bob Dylan himself. He almost didn't get to tour behind it. Not long after the album's release, a car accident broke his neck and back in nine places, and he spent months in traction. He recovered in time for the group's second album and became, by most accounts, the most emotionally exposed of the band's three lead singers, particularly on "It Makes No Difference" and "Unfaithful Servant."

His solo career started with a self-titled Arista album in 1978, but it landed just as The Last Waltz film and soundtrack were dominating attention, and got buried under it. He rejoined the reunited Band in 1983 without Robertson, toured with Ringo Starr's first All-Starr Band in 1989 alongside Helm and Hudson, and sang on Roger Waters's staging of The Wall in Berlin in 1990. In the '90s he formed a trio with Norwegian musicians Eric Andersen and Jonas Fjeld, releasing two albums together.

Danko struggled with drugs for years, and in 1997 was arrested in Japan attempting to bring heroin into the country. He told the court he'd started using the drug, along with prescription morphine, to manage chronic pain from that 1968 car accident. He received a suspended sentence. He kept performing anyway, releasing the live album Rick Danko in Concert that same year and Live on Breeze Hill in 1999, and was working on a fourth solo record when, on December 10, 1999, not quite three weeks shy of his fifty-sixth birthday, he died in his sleep at home near Woodstock, of heart failure. No drugs were found in his system.