It stands to reason that Garth Hudson was the last living musician from The Band. An organ virtuoso, he died last Tuesday at 87 years of age near Woodstock, a few kilometers from Big Pink's basement where his group and Bob Dylan changed the course of popular music by jamming freely. He was the mysterious musician of the Band, the oldest, the taciturn, the only one who didn't sing. He was over 30 when it came out in 1968 Music from Big Pink. It fits, I was saying, because he, brilliant and self-deprecating as he was, embodied the spirit of the Band's musician-craftsmen, people who played Southern music, putting the spirit of the frontier into it. Garth Hudson represented the paternal wisdom of that beautiful rock brotherhood, the glue that held that fantasy together.
With his bow ties and the longest beard in rock, he was accompanied by the mysticism of an old man who lives in the mountains, the wise man who comes from the woods and ends up in a rock band by pure chance. He had studied classical music and wasn't sure he wanted to join that group. But as he says in Barney Hoskyns' book Across the Great Divide«to learn the language of rock you also have to play in bars».
It was a bit of a mystery even for the others in the Band. He rarely gave interviews, he spoke with his fingers which he placed on organ, piano, accordion, wind instruments, whatever was needed for the song. “I had no doubt that he was the best rock musician in the world at the time,” Robbie Robertson said. «He could easily play with us, but also with John Coltrane or with the New York Symphony Orchestra».
One of his great moments is immortalized in The Last Waltz. At the end of It Makes No Differencethe Band's best performance ever, Robertson plays a tormented solo before giving way to Garth and his soprano sax, who with his serenity closes the piece on a note of stoic resignation. Only someone like him could play so powerfully and at the same time inconspicuously. They are just 68 seconds, but inside there is all the emotion of The Last Waltz and the history of the Band.
The way he dressed, he seemed like a mature man even at 20 years old. No rocker before him tried hard not to look young. It was even difficult to guess his age. Rejecting the division between youth culture and the ancient world was a characteristic of the Band. On the debut album, accompanied by the words “close relatives”, there was even a photo of the musicians with their parents, the least cool thing a band could do in 1968.
If you want to hear him at his best, and unleashed, listen to the recordings of Bob Dylan's legendary 1966 tour accompanied by The Band, who at the time were still called The Hawks. When Dylan sings about the “ghost of electricity howling in the bones of his face” it almost seems to describe the way Hudson plays while the audience, who are shocked that their favorite folksinger has plugged in, screams to go home and to tune out that noise. The musician silences him with Ballad of a Thin Man and Hudson is unleashed, he launches into a back and forth with Dylan, transforming the song into a nightmare. And when he gets to the part that goes “Who is THAT man?”, it almost seems like Dylan is referring to him, the guy who plays the organ.
They all lived together in a house in Saugerties, upstate New York, which they called Big Pink. Rolling Stone dedicated the cover to them in August 1968, with a photo by Elliott Landy that defined their image, five guys sitting on a bench in a park with their backs to the camera and looking at the snow-covered woods. We don't see what they look like, we only see hats and coats. I've stared at that photo all my life and still haven't figured out who's who, and maybe that's the point. They were brothers in music. Everyone in the rock world wanted to be part of the Band, even Elton John dressed like Garth on the cover of Tumbleweed Connection.
Hudson was the one who put this community spirit into the music. One of my favorite moments of his is when he plays the honky-tonk piano in Rag Mama Rag with Rick Danko on fiddle, Levon Helm on mandolin, Richard Manuel sitting in on drums and Robertson on guitar, while producer John Simon plays tuba. It is music with the freedom and liveliness that none of the Band's many imitators have managed to copy (for the sessions of Get Backinspired by them, the Beatles recruited Billy Preston to play Garth Hudson). Writing about their participation in Planet Waves by Dylan, Robert Christgau defined it as “music for alley cats”.
Under the name Hawks, he and his bandmates had been recruited as the backing band of '50s rockbilly singer Ronnie Hawkins. Hudson had grown up in Ontario in a farming family. “My father had a lot of instruments around the house,” he said in 1968. “I started playing the piano around the age of 5.” He may have studied classical music, but he grew up with the country music his father listened to on the radio. «At 12 I played the accordion in a country band».
When he joined the Hawks, the last to do so, he was given extra weekly time to teach others music theory and harmony lessons and pissed off Danko by suggesting he practice playing scales. It was he who shaped its musicality. Temperamentally and appearance-wise he was unique. “At 24 he was exactly the same as he was at 50,” Robertson said. Even Hawkins didn't know what to make of a guy like that. «It was different, it wasn't rock'n'roll at all, and yet it suited us».
The Hawks moved on to accompany Dylan and became The Band. If they were «the point of contact between Duke Ellington and Dylan», as Ralph J. Gleason said of Rolling Stoneit was also thanks to Hudson. His top moment in concerts was The Genetic Methodeight “Bachian” minutes of introduction to Chest Fever. «The first to play the organ with a sense of humor since Fats Waller», said Gleason.
His character was unique even for the 1960s. He was “one of the strangest guys I've ever met” according to Al Kooper. «If Harvey Brooks (the bassist of the Highway 61 Revisited sessions, ed) is rock's good grizzly bear, Garth is its brown bear.” Playing with Dylan he got to let loose Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window And One of Us Must Knowbut also in the outtakes Number One, She's Your Lover Now And Seems Like a Freezeoutembryonic version of Visions of Johanna. The piece we know is a slow burn, but the fast (and better) version is the bomb. It was Hudson behind Dylan's “thin wild mercury sound”.
He was also the Band's nerd, the one who set up the recording equipment at Big Pink where the band and Dylan spent the Summer of Love playing together. Thanks to him, the basement became a club where you could jam and record on a two-track stereo. “Garth,” Levon Helm recalled, “had put one of the microphones over the water heater, the only problem was the boiler was on.” Yet the world has never stopped hearing the music made down there by those stoned guys immersed in the profound mysteries of American song. The tapes were released immediately in the form of bootlegs and officially only in part in 1975 and then made up the box set in 2014 The Complete Basement Tapes.
The Band was a symbol of friendship especially among musicians: everyone wanted to be part of a gang like that. After spending time with them at Woodstock, George Harrison began to hate taking orders from the other Beatles and so he started his own band, recording with Hudson, Robertson, Helm and Danko (everyone except Manuel) and Ringo. the delicious Sunshine Life for Me (Sail Away Raymond). And who was watching over that friendship? First of all Garth.
Hudson then played with artists younger than him such as Wilco, Neko Case, Mercury Rev and each time he took their music to another level. He was married for 43 years to Maud, who died in 2022. He didn't care about ego, he had an enigmatic presence. In the 1980s he had a brief moment of popularity on MTV playing with a new wave group called Call and appearing in the video for The Walls Came Down. Obviously he doesn't care about the camera, he sits with his head bowed playing the synth. Seeing him there, between a Men Without Hats video clip and one of Spandau Ballet, he seemed like an ordinary guy, or perhaps an alien from a distant planet.
He participated in Day of the Deadthe 2016 Grateful Dead tribute album put together by Bryce and Aaron Dessner of the National. You can feel it in Brokedown Palace which, in hindsight, feels like a kind of goodbye. His organ seems to possess the song, like a spirit. And at the last minute, he transforms it from a lullaby to a dirge.
He was the last living member of the Band, his death definitively putting an end to their history of brotherhood. It represented an ideal of friendship, a community of workers who live together, perhaps argue, but create raw beauty. Their music was the sound of friendship, with all its conflicts and contradictions. It remained so even when it was all over. And if there was anyone who symbolized this community spirit, it was Garth, if only because it was impossible to imagine him doing anything else.
The Band was his home, that's why the world mourns him: he represented something deep and ancient in the American spirit. And although his death represents the end of the Band, their friendship lives on in the music they made, as vibrant as ever, held together by Garth Hudson.
From Rolling Stone US.