Garth Hudson, The Band’s virtuoso keyboardist and all-around musician who drew from a unique palette of sounds and styles to add a conversational touch to such rock standards as Up on Cripple Creek, The Weight and Rag Mama Rag, has died at age 87.
Hudson was the eldest and last surviving member of the influential group that once backed Bob Dylan. His death was confirmed Tuesday by The Canadian Press, which cited Hudson’s friend, Jan Haust. Additional details were not immediately available. Hudson had been living in a nursing home in upstate New York.
A rustic figure with an expansive forehead and sprawling beard, Hudson was a classically trained performer and self-educated Greek chorus who spoke through piano, synthesizers, horns and his favoured Lowrey organ. No matter the song, Hudson summoned just the right feeling or shading, whether the tipsy clavinet and wah-wah pedal on Up on Cripple Creek, the galloping piano on Rag Mama Rag or the melancholy saxophone on It Makes No Difference.
The only non-singer among five musicians celebrated for their camaraderie, texture and versatility, Hudson mostly loomed in the background, but he did have one showcase: Chest Fever, a Robbie Robertson composition for which he devised an introductory organ solo (The Genetic Method), an eclectic sampling of moods and melodies that segued into the song’s hard rock riff.
Robertson, the band’s guitarist and lead songwriter, died in 2023 after a long illness. Keyboardist-drummer Richard Manuel hung himself in 1986, bassist Rick Danko died in his sleep in 1999 and drummer Levon Helm died of cancer in 2012. The Band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994.
Formed in the early 1960s as a backing group for rocker Ronnie Hawkins, the Band was originally called The Hawks and featured the Arkansas-born Helm and four Canadians recruited by Helm and Hawkins: Hudson, Danko, Manuel and Robertson.
The Band mastered their craft through years of performing as unknowns — first behind Hawkins, then as Levon and the Hawks, then as the unsuspecting targets of outrage after hooking up with Dylan in the mid-1960s. All joined Dylan on his historic tours of 1965-66 (Helm departed midway), when he broke with his folk past and teamed with The Band for some of the most stirring and stormiest music of the time, enraging some old Dylan admirers but attracting many new ones. The group would rename itself The Band in part because so many people around Dylan simply referred to his backing musicians as “the band.”
By 1967, Dylan was in semi-seclusion, having allegedly broken his neck in a motorcycle accident, and he and the group settled in the artist community in Woodstock that two years later would become world famous thanks to the festival in nearby Bethel. With no album planned, they wrote and played spontaneously in an old pink house outside of town shared by Hudson, Danko and Manuel. Hudson was in charge of the tape machine as Dylan and The Band recorded more than 100 songs, for years available only as bootlegs, that became known as The Basement Tapes. Often cited as the foundation of “roots” music and “Americana,” the music varied from old folk, country and Appalachian songs to such new compositions as Tears of Rage, I Shall Be Released and This Wheel’s on Fire.
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“There would be an informal discussion, before each recording,’” Hudson told the online publication Something Else! in 2014. “There would be ideas floating around, and the telling of stories. And then we’d go back to the songs.”
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“We looked for words, phrases and situations that were worth writing about. I think that Bob Dylan showed us discipline, and ageless concern about the quality of his art.”
Dylan resurfaced in late 1967 with the austere John Wesley Harding, and The Band debuted soon after with Music from Big Pink, its down home sound so radically different from the jams and psychedelic tricks then in fashion that artists from The Beatles to Eric Clapton to the Grateful Dead would cite its influence. The Band followed in 1969 with a self-titled album that many still consider its best and has often been ranked among the greatest rock albums of all time.
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Future records included Stage Fright, Cahoots and Northern Lights/Southern Cross, a 1975 album that brought Hudson special praise for his work on the keyboards. A year later, Robertson decided he had tired of live performances, and The Band staged the all-star concert and Martin Scorsese film, The Last Waltz, featuring Dylan, Clapton, Neil Young and many others. Tension between Robertson and Helm, who would allege the film unduly elevated Robertson over the others, led to a full breakup before the documentary’s release in 1978.
Hudson played briefly with the English band the Call; appeared with various latter incarnations of The Band, usually featuring Danko, Hudson and Helm; assisted on solo albums by Robertson and Danko; and joined Danko and Helm for a performance of Pink Floyd’s The Wall at the Berlin Wall. Other session work included records by Van Morrison, Leonard Cohen and Emmylou Harris.
Hudson also organized his own projects, although his first solo effort, The Sea to the North, came out on the day of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. In 2005, he formed a 12-piece band called The Best!, with his wife on vocals. Garth Hudson Presents: A Canadian Celebration of The Band was a 2010 tribute featuring Neil Young, Bruce Cockburn and other Canadian musicians.
In recent years, Hudson struggled financially. He had sold his interest in The Band to Robertson and went bankrupt several times. He lost one home to foreclosure and saw many of his belongings put up for auction in 2013 when he fell behind on payments for storage. Hudson’s wife, Maud, died in 2022. They had a daughter, Tami Zoe Hill.
The son of musicians, Hudson was born in Windsor, Ontario in 1937 and received formal training at an early age. He was performing on stage and writing before he was even a teenager, although by his early 20s he had soured on classical music and was playing in a rock band, the Capers.
He was the last to join The Band and he worried that his parents would disapprove. The solution was to have Hawkins hire him as a “musical consultant” and pay him $10 extra a week.
“It was a job,” Hudson said of The Band in a 2002 interview with Maclean’s. “Play a stadium, play a theatre. My job was to provide arrangements with pads underneath, pads and fills behind good poets. Same poems every night.”
