The Band's name came from what Woodstock locals called them
For years they backed someone else: rockabilly singer Ronnie Hawkins, then Bob Dylan when he went electric. Around Woodstock everyone just called them the band, so when four Canadians and an Arkansas drummer finally stepped out on their own in 1968, they kept that plain label as their official name.
As the Hawks, they learned their trade under Hawkins in Toronto from the late 1950s. He had a crafty way of dealing with rivals: when a promising group appeared, he poached its best players, which is how Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko and Richard Manuel arrived. Garth Hudson, a college-trained musician who planned to teach, held out until the others agreed to pay him 10 dollars a week each as their instructor and buy him a new Lowrey organ. All-night rehearsals after club gigs sharpened them, but Hawkins fined them for bringing girlfriends or smoking marijuana, and by late 1963 they had outgrown him.
Dylan hired them in 1965 after a tip from a Toronto friend working for his manager. Folk purists heckled the electric shows so fiercely that drummer Levon Helm quit and spent months on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. At Manchester's Free Trade Hall in May 1966 someone yelled Judas; Dylan called him a liar, told the band to play loudly, using saltier language, and tore into Like a Rolling Stone. That night circulated for decades on bootlegs mislabelled as the Royal Albert Hall.
Settled in Saugerties, New York, they made the informal recordings known as The Basement Tapes, which led to Music from Big Pink in 1968. Roger Waters of Pink Floyd rated it the second most influential record in rock history. The Weight, The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down and Up on Cripple Creek followed, blending folk, country, soul and rock into a sound that shaped George Harrison, Eric Clapton and the Grateful Dead.
Their farewell concert on November 25, 1976 became Martin Scorsese's film The Last Waltz. Four of them regrouped without Robertson in 1983, carrying on until Danko's death in 1999. Rock's Hall of Fame inducted them in 1994.
Source: The Band
