Garth Hudson Dies: The Band’s Last Surviving Member Was 87

Erik Pedersen

21 January 2025 at 11:33 am·4-min read

Garth Hudson Dies: The Band’s Last Surviving Member Was 87

Garth Hudson, the keyboardist, sax player and archivist for Rock and Roll Hall of Famers The Band whose farewell show with the group was memorialized in Martin Scorsese’s landmark documentary The Last Waltz, died Tuesday in his sleep at a nursing home in Woodstock, NY. He was 87.

The executor of his estate executor confirmed the news to the Toronto Star.

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Born Eric Hudson on August 2, 1937, in Windsor, Ontario, and was trained in classical piano and music theory. He played in local bands before hooking up in the late 1950s with rockabilly singer Ronnie Hawkins’ The Hawks, which eventually would feature many of his Band mates. The group would back Bob Dylan’s on the notorious mid-’60s “Going Electric” tours and, rechristened The Band, they collaborated on groundbreaking album The Basement Tapes, helping to invent the Americana genre.

The Band broke out with its 1968 debut album Music from Big Pink, which made the U.S. Top 30, went gold and featured such classic tracks as “The Weight” and the Dylan cover “I Shall Be Released.”

“The Weight” was featured in nearly two dozen movies, playing an integral role in classics such as Easy Rider, The Big Chill and as well as in projects as diverse as Patch Adams, Starsky & Hutch, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and The King of Staten Island.

In 1969, The Band played at Woodstock and became the first North American rock group to appear on the cover of Time magazine.

Later that year, the group — which also featured fellow Canadians Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko and Richard Manuel and American drummer Levon Helm — released its sophomore album The Band in 1969, which included its biggest pop single, “Up on Cripple Creek,” along with the Civil War-set folk tale “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” The disc was its first Top 10 album, reaching No. 9 on the Billboard 200, and remains its only million-seller without Dylan.

The Band went on to release several other albums through the 1970s. Stage Fright (1970) reached No. 5 and featured the title track and “The Shape I’m In.” Cahoots (1971, No. 21) had “Life Is a Carnival,” and the Top 10 double live set Rock of Ages (1972) followed.

Its other albums include Moondog Matinee (1973), Northern Lights-Southern Cross (1975) and Islands (1977). Along with 1975’s The Basement Tapes, The Band also released a pair of Top 10 albums with Dylan the year before: Planet Waves, which spent four weeks atop the Billboard 200, and Before the Flood. The soundtrack to The Last Waltz — which was recorded in November 1976 at the Winterland in San Francisco and released with the movie in April 1978 — also featured Dylan, Hawkins, Eric Clapton, Neil Young, Ringo Starr, Emmylou Harris, Van Morrison, The Staples Singers, Neil Diamond and many others. The album reached No. 13 in the U.S. and went gold.

From left: Rick Danko, Robbie Robertson, Garth Hudson and Bob Dylan in ‘The Last Waltz’ (United Artists/Everett Collection)

In 1973, The Band performed before the largest rock concert audience in history, an estimated 650,000 people, at the Watkins Glen Festival in New York. Two decades later, the surviving members of the group — Manuel died in 1986 — embarked on an extended tour of mostly small venues that included the House of Blues in West Hollywood and led in a slot at Woodstock ’94.

The Best of the Band was released in 1976 and went gold. It was followed by several other compilation discs, including the now-out-of-print three-CD box set Across the Great Divide. A second five-disc box, A Musical History, arrived in 2005.

More recently, The Band was the subject of the 2019 documentary Once Were Brothers, which told the group’s story from Robertson’s POV. The film was directed by Daniel Roher and executive produced by Scorsese, Brian Grazer and Ron Howard.

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The band never won a competitive Grammy during its career but received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Recording Academy in 2008. The group was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994 and the Juno Awards’ Canadian Music Hall of Fame in 1989. Robertson died in 2023, Helm died in 2012, and Danko died in 1999.

Hudson became a sought-after session player and contributed to a number of his former Band mates’ solo efforts. Hudson played sax and accordion as part of Roger Waters’ 1990 mega-concert performance of Pink Floyd’s The Wall at the Berlin Wall.

He released his first solo album in 2001 and went on to form Burrito Deluxe with Flying Burrito Brothers alum Sneaky Pete Kleinrow, which released a pair of albums in the mid-’00s. He continued to record and perform into the 2020s.

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