In the winter of 1967, the band summoned Mr. Helm to rejoin them. With Mr. Manuel on drums, Mr. Helm picked up mandolin, though he would soon return to drums.

Mr. Grossman got the Hawks their own recording contract with Capitol in February 1968, initially as the Crackers, a name Capitol didn’t like. There was no band name on the LP label or front cover of “Music From Big Pink,” the group’s debut album, which simply had a painting by Mr. Dylan as its cover. (The songs had been written at Big Pink but recorded in professional studios.) The LP label listed all the musicians’ names, while inside the double-fold cover the musicians were listed under the words “The Band.” “The name of the group is just our Christian names,” Mr. Robertson insisted in an interview. But the band became the Band.

Released on July 1, 1968, a year after the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” “Music From Big Pink” was “rebelling against the rebellion,” Mr. Helm wrote. There were no elaborate studio confections, no psychedelic jams, no gimmicks; the music was stately and homespun, with a deliberately old-time tone behind the enigmatic lyrics. Sales were modest, but the album’s influence was huge, leading musicians like Eric Clapton and the Grateful Dead back toward concision. The Band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994.

Adding to its mystique, the Band didn’t tour until 1969 because Mr. Danko broke his neck in an auto accident. It made its concert debut as the Band at Winterland in San Francisco in April 1969.

By then, the Band was well into recording its second album, simply titled “The Band,” which would include the group’s only Top 30 single, “Up on Cripple Creek.” The album was universally hailed, and the Band played a summer of huge pop festivals, backing Mr. Dylan at the Isle of Wight and performing in August at Woodstock. In 1970, Mr. Helm and the songwriter Libby Titus had a daughter, Amy Helm, now a member of the band Ollabelle; she survives him, along with his wife since 1981, the former Sandra Dodd, and two grandchildren.

The Band would never match its two initial masterpieces. By the time the group started recording its 1970 album, “Stage Fright,” members were drinking heavily and using heroin, and there were disputes over songwriting credits and publishing royalties, of which Mr. Robertson had by far the greatest share. The collaborative spirit of the first two albums was disappearing. But the Band’s career had momentum; it produced several more studio albums, toured internationally, and a live album, “Rock of Ages,” reached the Top 10 in 1972. In 1973, the Band, the Grateful Dead and the Allman Brothers were the triple bill for the Watkins Glen festival, which drew 600,000 people to upstate New York — larger than Woodstock. In 1974, the Band made an album with Mr. Dylan, “Planet Waves,” and toured with him. “The Basement Tapes,” a collection of songs with and without Mr. Dylan from the Big Pink era, was released in 1975.