Tall and angular with a ragamuffin sport coat and a rubbery sway when he played the bass,
Rick Danko
epitomized the backwoods swagger that was so central to
the Band
's image. That's why listening to
Live on Breeze Hill
is such a sad experience. Gone is
Danko
's graceful ease as a musician, replaced with a labor instead. Gone is
's fragile phrasing, replaced with a quivering whine that grates on the listener's ear. In fact, as of December of 1999, gone is
. Listening to these renditions of songs he made famous such as
"Stage Fright"
and
"It Makes No Difference"
just makes you long for the original version when they were sung by a young, handsome musician at the peak of his game. No one wants to say bad things about the dead, but where
was once able to fill the listener with a positive kind of sadness, a melancholy that motivated you to think about your own life, unfortunately
Breeze Hill
fills you with a regretful kind of sadness that only makes you think about what went wrong with his. ~ Steve Kurutz