Members / The Sidemen

The Sidemen

Not everyone who mattered to this story got one of the five main chairs.

Ronnie Hawkins built the machine the whole story runs on. Born in Huntsville, Arkansas, on January 10, 1935, he moved his rockabilly outfit to Toronto in the late 1950s and staffed it by poaching the best players from whichever local band happened to open for him, which is how he ended up, piece by piece, with the five musicians who'd eventually leave him and become the Band. Hawkins never seemed to hold it against them. He turned up as a guest at The Last Waltz in 1976 and again at the group's 1989 Canadian Music Hall of Fame induction, and stayed a fixture at Band-adjacent events for the rest of his life.

John Simon produced Music from Big Pink and co-produced The Band, playing piano, tuba, and horns on both, and kept contributing to the group's records as late as their 1993 reunion album Jericho. He's been called the "sixth member" so consistently, by critics and by the band itself, that the label has basically become part of his name. Simon was a Princeton-trained arranger with an already-serious résumé, having worked on Janis Joplin's Cheap Thrills and Leonard Cohen's debut record before the Band, and he brought a formal musical vocabulary to sessions where almost nobody else in the room could read music. Early on, he reportedly asked Robertson if he could just join the band outright. Robertson said no.

Stan Szelest stepped into Richard Manuel's piano chair after Manuel's death in 1986, an old friend of the group from the Toronto club circuit years, but died himself not long into his tenure with the reunited band, in 1991.

Richard Bell followed Szelest on piano from 1992 until the group's end in 1999. He'd crossed paths with the Band once before without quite meaning to, playing keyboards for Janis Joplin's Full Tilt Boogie Band on the 1970 Festival Express train tour that also included the Band as a headline act. He died in 2007.

Jim Weider took over Robertson's guitar seat starting in 1985, two years into the post-Robertson reunion, and stayed through the group's final show in 1999, becoming, alongside Hudson, Helm, and Danko, one of the most durable presences in the band's second act.

Randy Ciarlante joined on drums and vocals in 1990 and stayed through 1999, rounding out what became the group's final and longest-serving lineup: Helm, Danko, Hudson, Bell, Weider, and Ciarlante.

None of them wrote "The Weight" or played Woodstock with the original five. But every one of them kept the Band's music alive on stages for years after the lineup most people picture had already stopped existing.