Cheek to Cheek Lounge — Richard Manuel's Last Show, Winter Park

The Cheek to Cheek Lounge on Lee Road in Winter Park, Florida, was the venue where Richard Manuel played his final concert with The Band on March 3, 1986. The show was an ordinary tour date for the reunited Band — the lineup at that point included Levon Helm, Garth Hudson, Rick Danko, and Richard Manuel, without Robbie Robertson who had departed when the band officially broke up in 1976. By all accounts it was a good performance. After the set, Manuel returned to the nearby Quality Inn and did not survive the night.

The Cheek to Cheek was a small supper club, the kind of mid-sized Florida venue that the mid-1980s version of The Band regularly played. The contrast between the intimacy of the room and the scale of the music they had once made — the Fillmore, the Last Waltz, Woodstock — was part of the particular sadness of that period in the band's story. Rick Danko and Levon Helm would continue performing as The Band with varying lineups until Danko's death in 1999 and Helm's in 2012.

The Cheek to Cheek Lounge no longer exists. The Lee Road address in Winter Park has been redeveloped. The broader Winter Park area — a pleasant Orlando suburb with a good arts scene — has no formal acknowledgement of Manuel's connection to it. For Band devotees, the Lee Road stretch between the former club and the former motel is a quiet pilgrimage point.