Garth Hudson was the Heart of The Band
Remembering a North American music legend, gone at 87
In many ways Garth Hudson was an enigma.
Hudson, who passed away at the age of 87 on January 21, was, in a very real sense larger than life. A multi-instrumentalist, a key element in the recordings and arrangements that defined The Band as essential forebears of the Americana genre, and a man with a distinctly large physical presence, he also happened to be the only member of the group who didn’t contribute vocals. Content to reside in the background, he was equally reticent to do interviews.
“It was a job,” Hudson once of his said of his efforts with The Band in a 2002 interview with the Canadian magazine Maclean’s. “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.”
That statement offered yet another example of the understated honesty and humility with which Hudson approached his work. His bandmate Levon Helm once told producer John Simon that “The Band wouldn’t be The Band without him.”
Simon, who produced The Band’s early efforts, once said in an interview with the Toronto Star, that Hudson was the “wild card” that made Music From Big Pink a favorite of such superstars as Eric Clapton and George Harrison.“Garth was essentially a colourist,” he continued. “He had an incredible palette.”
Indeed, over the course of the twelve albums he recorded with The Band throughout their collective career, his keyboards and horn-playing had an essential role in shaping the indelible imprint of the music that was so essential to the Band’s ongoing legacy. His regal organ solo on the classic “Chest Fever” is but one example of his commanding presence.
AUDIO: The Band “Chest Fever”
“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. 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.”
Taken in tandem, the work paid off. The group was awarded a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award and inductions into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Canada’s Walk of Fame.
Hudson was The Band’s last surviving member following the passing of Robbie Robertson in August, 2023.
Notably, Hudson absorbed music early on. Born in Windsor, Canada on August 2, 1937, he quickly absorbed the influences of his parents. His mother played piano and accordion, while his father was adept at drums, sax, flute, clarinet and piano. Garth himself took piano lessons, first applying his skills in church and in his uncle’s funeral parlor, both of which likely nurtured the commanding organ sound he integrated into The Band’s work later on. He composed his first piece of music at the age of eleven and briefly pursued a degree in classical music before abandoning college after finding the studies too stifling His first professional outfit was the Silhouettes, but it was his recruitment by the Hawks, an invitation he initially declined after they rejected his request for a Lowery organ, that led to the formation of Levon and the Hawks, and eventually, The Band, which also included fellow musicians Levon Helm, Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko and Richard Manuel. Recruited by Bob Dylan as the backing band on his controversial “electric” tour, they contributed to The Bard’s classic Blonde on Blonde and later took up residence at a pink house near Woodstock, New York, where they reconvened with Dylan after his motorcycle accident for sessions that culminated in the legendary “Basement Tapes.”
In 1968, they struck out on the own and recorded Music from Big Pink, an album that would become once of the most important debut albums in the whole of American music. Although composed almost entirely of original music — including a handful Dylan’s contributions — it possessed a distinctly archival sound, one seemingly branded in the heartland and the history of Appalachia, as well as other realms of the American frontier.
After The Band played what was billed as its final concert at San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom — a performance famously known as “The Last Waltz” — Hudson continued to work with the remaining members of the group following Robertson’s departure. Once that ensemble ended its run, Hudson opted to make music on his own as well as with others. He recorded with a band called the Call and loaned his talents to albums Van Morrison, Leonard Cohen and Emmylou Harris. Yet, he never completely relegated The Band to the proverbial rearview mirror. He could occasionally be found onstage and in the studio with Danko and Helm and he also contributed to solo albums by Danko and Robertson. He even joined Danko and Helm for a performance of Pink Floyd’s The Wall at the Berlin Wall.
Later, after assembling a 12-piece band he called “The Best!” with his late wife Maud Hudson, he released a 2010 tribute album, Garth Hudson Presents: A Canadian Celebration of The Band which included contributions from Neil Young, Bruce Cockburn, Blue Rodeo, Cowboy Junkies, The Trews, Great Big Sea, Hawksley Workman, Mary Margaret O’Hara and the others in its all-star line-up.
Ironically, his first solo album, The Sea to the North, was released on September 11, 2001 and all but forgotten in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Nevertheless, it’s a brilliant work, and one that ably demonstrates the fact that Hudson was not only a remarkable musician, but a superb arranger and songwriter as well. All instrumental, it shared a diverse musical palette, one that ranged from rock, blues and country, to traces of classical music, jazz, hymns and polkas. It sounds nothing like The Band, but its eclectic nature contained a similarly striking range of depth and dexterity.
Canadian producer and musician Colin Linden met Hudson while opening for a reunited Band concert in 1985 before joining the group as their touring guitarist in the early ‘90s. His comments, shared with the Toronto Star, summed up Hudson’s strengths.
“He was so incredibly unlike anyone else,” Linden insisted. “And absolutely everything that he said and everything that he played was like nobody else would have or could have. I treasured every bit of time that I spent with him.”
VIDEO: Garth Hudson May 2023
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