Remember When: The Band’s Rick Danko Plays His Final Show, Four Days Before His Death in 1999

Robbie Robertson took his last waltz with The Band at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco, on Thanksgiving Day, November 25, 1976, and never stepped on stage with them again. Though he never performed with the Band again, their final show was memorialized in Martin Scorsese‘s 1978 film The Last Waltz. Their final bow together ended with a cover of Marvin Gaye‘s “Baby Don’t You Do It,” but not before guests like Bob Dylan, Ringo Starr, Neil Young, Muddy Waters, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, Ronnie Wood, Dr. John, Neil Diamond, Ronnie Hawkins, and Paul Butterfield joined the band on stage throughout a 42-song set.

Nearly a decade after the band’s final show and their split, drummer Levon Helm, bassist Rick Danko, keyboardist Garth Hudson, and pianist Richard Manuel—who died shortly after in 1986—started to perform as the Band again in 1983 without Robertson, who had shifted gears as a producer and writing film soundtracks—including friend Scorsese’s Raging Bull, The Color of Money, The King of Comedy, and more.

“I just didn’t want to,” said Robertson in 1987 of rejoining the Band. “We called it ‘The Last Waltz,’ and to me that was it. The end. It was over. To come out a few years later and say, ‘Hey, just kidding’ or ‘We’ve changed our mind,’ that would be wrong, to me at least. It would be a cheat.”

Following their breakup, Danko was the first band member to release a solo album, his 1977 eponymous debut, followed by Helm’s Levon Helm & the RCO All-Stars that year. The Band’s early ’80s reunion ran for more than 15 years, until Danko’s in 1999. That year, Danko also released Live on Breeze Hill and appeared, along with Hudson, on the Indigo Girls‘ Come On Now Social.

Danko’s final performance took place at The Ark in Ann Arbor, Michigan on December 6, 1999. At the time, he was on a brief tour of the Midwest that included two other shows in Chicago.

[RELATED: 5 Songs You Didn’t Know Levon Helm Wrote for The Band]

Accompanied by Aaron “Professor Louie” Hurwitz on the piano, Danko played through a 10-song set for a sparsely filled audience. “Since there are so few of us, why don’t you all move in closer,” joked Danko to the crowd, according to Michael Erlewine, founder of All Music, who was in attendance at the show. “Oh, I can see you’ve already done that.”

Opening with his solo songs “Sip the Wine” and “Book Faded Brown,” Danko slipped in a cover of J.J. Cale’s “Crazy Mama” next—a song he first released on his 1979 live album with Paul Butterfield, Live from the Blue Note, Boulder Co., 1979. Danko also delivered another cover, one that wouldn’t be released until his posthumous 2000 album, Times Like These, Dave Bartholomew’s “Let the Four Winds Blow.”

The remaining six songs of the set were all placed around the Band, beginning with “Twilight,” “The Weight,” and “It Makes No Difference” from Northern Lights – Southern Cross. “I felt tears rolling down my cheeks and dripping onto my shirt,” said Erlewine of the latter track, penned by Robertson. “It had been a long time (and many live concerts) since I had experienced this kind of moment.”

The show came to an end returning to the Band’s beginning with “Chest Fever” from debut Music from Big Pink, which Danko bookended by the title track from Stage Fright (1970), and the closing “The Shape I’m In.”

On December 10, 1999, just four days after Danko’s performance, he died in his sleep from heart failure at the age of 55 at his home in Marbletown, New York. His bandmate Helm died in 2012 from throat cancer and was buried near Danko at Woodstock Cemetary in New York State.

Setlist: Rick Danko Setlist, The Ark, Ann Arbor, Michigan, December 6, 1999

1. “Sip the Wine”
2. “Book Faded Brown”
3. “Crazy Mama”
4. “Let the Four Winds Blow”
5. “Twilight”
6. “The Weight”
7. “It Makes No Difference”
8. “Stage Fright”
9. “Chest Fever”
10. “The Shape I’m In”

Photo: Rick Danko backstage at McGreevey’s, Niles, Illinois, April 22, 1983. (Paul Natkin/Getty Images)