Yahoo Lifestyle Garth Hudson, Last Surviving Member of the Band, Dies at 87
Garth Hudson, whose fantastical approach to the organ and virtuosity on a panoply of other instruments lent a distinctive touch to the roots-rock of the Canadian-American group the Band, has died, representatives for the group have confirmed. Hudson “passed away peacefully in his sleep” Tuesday morning at a nursing home in the Band’s longtime home base of Woodstock, New York, the musician’s estate executor told the Toronto Star. He was 87.
Retiring and seldom interviewed, Hudson was the quiet man in the group that began life as the Hawks, Arkansas-born rockabilly singer Ronnie Hawkins’ backup band, who in 1966 graduated to supporting Bob Dylan on his tumultuous first tour as a rock ‘n’ roll performer.
After woodshedding with Dylan in West Saugerties, N.Y. — where Hudson served as recording engineer for Dylan and the group’s legendary “basement tapes” – the musicians stepped out as the Band on a stunning 1968 debut, “Music From Big Pink.” That album and the self-titled 1969 sequel established them as one of the day’s top rock acts.
In a typically self-effacing, and typically rare, interview with the Canadian magazine Maclean’s in 2003, Hudson – the only Band member who never contributed vocally on stage or on record — minimized his unique accomplishments.
“It was a job,” he said. “Play a stadium, play a theater. My job was to provide arrangements with pads underneath, pads and fills behind good poets. Same poems every night.”
Robbie Robertson, the Band’s guitarist and songwriter in the group’s years of stardom (who himself passed away in August of 2023), offered a far more effusive assessment of what Hudson brought to the table in his 2016 memoir “Testimony”
“He played brilliantly, in a more complex way than anybody we had ever jammed with,” he wrote. “Most of us had just picked up our instruments as kids and plowed ahead, but Garth was classically trained and could find musical avenues on the keyboard we didn’t know existed. It impressed us deeply.”
He made an unforgettable statement with a long, Bach-inspired introduction – later a stand-alone concert feature known as “The Genetic Method” – to “Chest Fever,” a cryptic “Big Pink” rocker.
Every album contained a song that demonstrated Hudson’s great gifts: “Up On Cripple Creek,” with its twanging, wah-wah-infused clavinet, on “The Band”; “Daniel and the Sacred Harp,” boasting an elegant church-organ intro, on “Stage Fright” (1970); the Dylan cover “When I Paint My Masterpiece,” highlighted by his accordion obbligato, on “Cahoots” (1971); the percolating “Third Man Theme,” the old Hawks break song, from the collection of covers “Moondog Matinee” (1973); and “It Makes No Difference,” a lush ballad featuring Hudson’s soprano saxophone work, from “Northern Lights-Southern Cross” (1975). Even a rock and roll classic like the group’s cover of Little Richard’s “Slippin’ and Slidin'” features a wild organ solo from Hudson that evokes a deranged calliope.
Following the Band’s celebrated, star-studded farewell show, “The Last Waltz,” in San Francisco on Thanksgiving 1976, the act called it quits in the studio with “Islands” (1977); the title instrumental proved to be Hudson’s lone co-writing credit.
After an abortive attempt at a reunion, a good deal of highly public acrimony between Robertson and the other members of the Band – especially drummer Levon Helm, who had served as the Hawks’ first musical director – and the 1986 suicide of pianist-vocalist Richard Manuel, the act regrouped in 1993 for the album “Jericho,” with Jim Weider replacing the guitarist. Two more albums followed in 1996 and 1998, but the group couldn’t recapture the commercial clout of its glory years.
Hudson, who regularly performed the music of the Band on tour in later years, released three solo albums on independent labels. In 2010, he curated “A Canadian Celebration of the Band,” a salute to the group featuring such countrymen as Neil Young, Bruce Cockburn, Mary Margaret O’Hara, Cowboy Junkies and Blue Rodeo.
He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of the Band in 1994, and received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Recording Academy in 2008. The group became part of the Juno Awards’ Canadian Music Hall of Fame in 1989.
He was born Eric Garth Hudson in Windsor, Ontario, on Aug. 2, 1937, and grew up in the northeastern city of London. His family was musical: His father played flute, drums, cornet and saxophone and performed in local dance bands, and his mother played accordion. He grew up listening to country and jazz. His first public experience in music was playing hymns in an uncle’s funeral parlor.
In Helm’s 1993 memoir “This Wheel’s On Fire,” he recalled, “My parents sent me to study piano at the Toronto Conservatory. I had a good teacher who used older methods and older pieces. That’s how I learned to play the Bach preludes and fugues, material like that. I loved Chopin, and Mozart amazed me. But I found I had problems memorizing classical annotated music…so I developed my own method of ear training and realized I could improvise.”
After a year studying music at the University of Western Ontario in London, he dropped out and began to play professionally. In the late ‘50s, he worked with the regional bands the Silhouettes and Paul London and the Kapers. His abilities caught the attention of Helm, who lobbied Hawkins to bring him into the Hawks.
“Garth was different,” Hawkins told Barney Hoskyns in “Across the Great Divide,” his 1993 book about the Band. “He heard all sorts of weird sounds in his head, and he played like the Phantom of the Opera. He wasn’t a rock ‘n’ roll person at all, but it fitted.”
Hudson – who was paid an additional $10 per week to teach his band mates music, to mollify his dubious parents – became the eldest member of a lineup that included Helm, Robertson, Manuel and bassist Rick Danko. As part of his deal, he ultimately was rewarded with a new Lowrey electronic organ; Hudson found it more versatile and easier to manipulate than the popular Hammond B-3. A gearhead and tinkerer by nature, he customized the instrument (perhaps most importantly with a pitch-shifting device), and it became the keystone of his sound.
After splitting in 1963 with Hawkins, whom they came to view as a parsimonious disciplinarian, the group recorded singles as the Canadian Squires and Levon & the Hawks. Hudson, Helm and Robertson backed blues singer John Hammond, Jr. (son of the Columbia Records A&R legend) on his album “So Many Roads.” A recommendation from Mary Martin, assistant to Bob Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman, led to a job as Dylan’s band on his 1965-66 world tour.
Depressed by the violent reaction of Dylan’s folk fans to his new electric music, Helm quit the group early in the trek and was replaced by Trini Lopez’s drummer Mickey Jones. The Hawks soldiered through a riotous series of dates in the U.S. and Europe. They parted ways at the tour’s conclusion, but Dylan, after recuperating from a serious motorcycle accident, summoned the Hawks to woodshed with him in West Saugerties, N.Y.
They recorded a breadth of old American music and new Dylan compositions at his home and in the basement of a pink ranch house, “Big Pink,” where most of the musicians lived communally; Hudson rolled the tapes at Dylan’s direction. As record label interest in the Hawks developed, Helm rejoined the unit and participated in some of the basement sessions. Several of the so-called “basement tapes” were ultimately culled by Hudson for use as music publishing demos; these songs ultimately made an illicit appearance on the first major rock bootleg album, the two-LP 1969 set “The Great White Wonder.”
Signed to Capitol Records in their own right, the Hawks assumed a new handle, the Band. The group recorded for the label for a decade, issuing seven studio albums and a widely praised two-LP live set, “Rock of Ages.” They also backed Dylan on the collaborative Asylum Records set “Planet Waves” (1974), which reached No. 1 in the U.S., and a joint headlining tour that year, which spawned the concert set “Before the Flood.”
At Capitol and on the Band’s three reunion albums, Hudson distinguished himself as a do-anything player; his instrumental arsenal included tenor, baritone, and soprano saxophones, piccolo, accordion, synthesizer, clavinet, slide trumpet and occasional piano.
A frequent collaborator with Hal Willner, he played at the producer’s Harry Smith Project concert at UCLA’s Royce Hall in 2001; the five-hour show ended with a recessional organ solo by Hudson. In 2016-17, Hudson appeared regularly as a member of the “Last Waltz 40 Tour,” an all-star touring homage to the ’76 concert. He was the special guest at the Wild Honey Orchestra’s 2017 benefit for autism research at Glendale’s Alex Theatre, which featured full-length performances of “Music From Big Pink” and “The Band” (see video, below).
Maud Hudson, his wife of 43 years and longtime musical partner, died in February 2022.
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