It’s so fitting that Garth Hudson was the last man standing from the Band. The beloved organ virtuoso died on Tuesday morning at 87, near Woodstock — just a few miles down the road from Big Pink, the house where the Band and Bob Dylan transformed music history just by jamming in the basement. Garth Hudson was the mystery man in the Band, the silent one, the only one who didn’t sing. He was years older than the others, already in his thirties when they made their classic 1968 debut Music from Big Pink. But with his self-effacing genius, he epitomized The Band as a group of whittlers and tinkerers, playing down-home music with a frontier spirit. They were the ultimate rock & roll fantasy of brotherhood, and Garth Hudson was the wise father figure, the glue guy who made that fantasy real.
Hudson always had the mystique of the Old Man from the Mountains, with his string ties and the longest beard ever seen in rock & roll. He came on like a woodsy sage who’d landed in a band by mistake. As a classically trained virtuoso, he wasn’t so sure he wanted to join these rowdy kids at first. But as Hudson put it in Across the Great Divide, Barney Hoskyns’ classic history of The Band, “Unfortunately, in order to become acquainted with the idiom of rock & roll music it is necessary occasionally to play in a bar.”
The rest of the Band could never really figure this guy out. Nobody did. He rarely said a word in interviews, doing his talking with his fingers. The mad professor could play organ, piano, accordion, horns — anything to serve the song. “There’s no question in my mind that, at the time, Garth was far and away the most advanced musician in rock & roll,” Robbie Robertson said. “He could just as easily have played with John Coltrane or the New York Symphony Orchestra as with us.”
One of Hudson’s best moments comes in The Last Waltz during “It Makes No Difference” — note for note, the greatest performance this band ever did, with all five hitting career highs. At the end, Robertson blazes on guitar, all tortured and stormy, until he gives way to Garth on the soprano sax, all pained serenity, closing out the song on a note of stoic resignation. Only he could make it so simple and unshowy, yet so powerful. It’s just 68 seconds, but it sums up all the emotional stakes of The Last Waltz— and the Band’s whole career.
Hudson had the gravitas of an old man when he was in his twenties, and dressed the part. No rock star before him made such a point of refusing to look young — you couldn’t even guess his age. That was a crucial part of The Band’s statement, rejecting the divide between youth culture and the old world. They even posed with their parents on their debut album, with the words “Next of Kin” — the most radically unhip thing a band could do in 1968.
To hear Garth Hudson at his deranged best, listen to the legendary 1966 tour with the Band (still known as the Hawks) backing up Bob Dylan, especially the May 20 gig in Edinburgh. When Dylan sings “the ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face,” he’s just describing how Hudson sounds tonight. This crowd is not happy about hearing their folk hero play with an electric band — you can hear them yell “Go home!” and “How about switching it off?”
But for the finale, the band shuts them up with “Ballad of a Thin Man.” Hudson goes totally off the rails, answering Dylan line for line, bringing all the song’s nightmares to life. When he sings “Who is THAT man?,” the question seems aimed at the bearded weirdo at the organ.
They lived together communally in upstate New York, in the Saugerties house they called Big Pink. Their image was set by their classic Rolling Stone cover photo from August 1968, taken by Elliott M. Landy. All five guys cram onto a park bench, backs to the camera, gazing out at the snowy woods. We don’t see their faces, just their old-man hats and coats. I’ve been staring at this photo all my life and I still can’t tell which Band dude is which, yet that’s the point. They were brothers bonded by the music. Everybody in the rock world wanted to be in the Band — hell, even Elton John dressed like Garth on the cover of Tumbleweed Connection, right down to the string tie.
Hudson brought out that friendly spirit in their music. One of my favorite moments is his honky-tonk piano in “Rag Mama Rag,” plunking alongside Rick Danko’s fiddle, Levon Helm’s mandolin, Richard Manuel taking over the drums, Robertson on guitar, producer John Simon pitching in on tuba.
It’s got the loose, frisky feel that none of the many Band imitators found a way to copy. (The Beatles, who sure did try to copy them their Get Back sessions, recruited Billy Preston as their Garth Hudson.) The critic Robert Christgau, writing about their Dylan collabo Planet Waves, called their sound “stray cat music — scrawny, cocky, and yowling up the stairs.” That yowl was Hudson’s organ.
Like his bandmates, he got recruited by Fifties rockabilly vet Ronnie Hawkins for his back-up band, the Hawks. He grew up in Ontario, in a farming family. “My father had a lot of old instruments around the house,” Hudson told Rolling Stone in the group’s first interview, in 1968. “I guess I began to play the piano when I was about five.” He studied classical, but he was schooled in country. “My father used to find all the Hoedown stations on the radio and then I played accordion with a country group when I was 12.”
He was the last to join the Hawks, and got paid a few bucks extra every week to give his teenage bandmates lessons in music theory and harmony. He pissed off Danko by suggesting he practice his scales. But he shaped up their musicianship. Temperamentally (and visually), he stood out like a sore thumb. “At 24 he was exactly the same as at 50,” Robertson said in Across the Great Divide. “He talked reeeeeal slow, and he whored around a little less than everybody else. He was always inventing something, figuring something out.”
Ronnie Hawkins, like everybody else, had no idea what to make of this strange cat. “Garth was different,” Ronnie Hawkins said. “He heard all sorts of weird sounds in his head, and he played like the Phantom of the Opera. He wasn’t a rock & roll person at all, but it fitted.” Check out “There’s a Screw Loose,” an early B-side from 1963, but a wild early showcase for Hudson’s hair-raising organ antics.
The Hawks split off from Hawkins, backing up Dylan, then going on as the Band. “They join Duke Ellington and Dylan,” as Rolling Stone co-founder Ralph J. Gleason put it, and they did it via Hudson’s time-traveling expertise. His big show-stopping moment live showcase was “The Genetic Method,” his extended eight-minute Bach-style intro to “Chest Fever. “You might think he was playing a concerto for organ and orchestra the way he goes about it,” Gleason wrote in a review of a 1972 San Francisco show. “It becomes a whole world of its own, the only organ playing since Fats Waller to contain a sense of humor.”
Even by Sixties hippie standards, this guy stood out as a real character. “Garth Hudson is one of the strangest people I ever met,” Al Kooper wrote in Rolling Stone in 1968, reviewing Music From Big Pink. “If Harvey Brooks [bassist from the Highway 61 sessions] is the gentle grizzly bear of rock & roll Garth is the gentle brown bear.” Like Kooper, Hudson did some of his wildest playing with Dylan. He cuts loose in the 1966 single “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window” and the Blonde on Blonde highlight “One of Us Must Know,” as well as crucial outtakes like “Number One,” “She’s Your Lover Now,” and “Seems Like a Freezeout,” an early pass at “Visions of Johanna.” The slow version is all smoldering rage, but the faster (superior) one is Hudson at his scariest. He’s the mercury in Dylan’s “thin wild mercury sound.”
Hudson was also the gearhead in the Band, the one who set up a makeshift recording studio in the basement of Big Pink. That’s where they and Dylan spent the Summer of Love, making their legendary Basement Tapes. He turned the cinder-block cellar into a “clubhouse” where they could jam. He set up a two-track tape recorder and a mixer, so they could record in stereo. As Helm wrote in his memoir, “Garth had positioned one of the microphones on top of the hot-water heater.” It was a funky down-home sound. “The only problem might have been the furnace going on,” he told Rolling Stone’s David Browne in 2012.
The world has kept listening ever since to the music those guys made down there, stoned and steeped in the deepest mysteries of American song. He recorded the sessions on reel-to-reel tapes, widely bootlegged almost immediately. An official Basement Tapes sampler came out in 1975, but the bootlegs kept coming up to the 2014 box The Complete Basement Tapes.
The Band symbolized friendship to the world, especially to other musicians, who wished they could be in a gang like this. George Harrison, after hanging out with the Band in Woodstock, found it impossible to go back to taking orders from the other Beatles. He made his own Band record with Ringo, the delightful “Sunshine Life for Me (Sail Away Raymond),” jamming with Hudson, Robertson, Helm, and Danko. (Everybody but Manuel.) Garth, more than anyone, made the Band the friendship that everyone else wanted desperately to share.
Hudson kept playing with younger artists over the years, like Wilco, Neko Case, and Mercury Rev, not to mention old pals like Robertson and Helm. But he elevated everything he played on. He was married for 43 years to his wife Maud, who passed in 2022. He always seemed devoid of ego, a kindly presence from a world of his own. As Rolling Stone lovingly called him in the Seventies, he was always “the enigmatic forehead.”
He even had an MTV moment in the Eighties — he played with the new wave guitar band the Call, on their odd 1983 hit “The Walls Came Down.” No mugging for the camera — he just sits at his synth, head down. Seeing this familiar rumpled uncle on MTV, between videos by Men Without Hats and Spandau Ballet — Garth never looked more wonderfully ordinary, or more like an alien from another planet.
He has a beautiful spotlight on Day of the Dead, the 2016 Grateful Dead tribute masterminded by the National’s Bryce and Aaron Dessner, in a version of “Brokedown Palace” that now sounds like a final fare-thee-well. The vocals sound like a church choir, with the Arcade Fire’s Richard Reed Parry — but Hudson’s organ is the spirit haunting the song. In the final minute, it transforms it from a lullaby to a funeral dirge, with Hudson leading the way.
Garth was the last remaining member of the Band, and his death marks the end of their brotherhood. The world saw this five-man group as an ideal of friendship, a community working and living together, fussing and fighting but making rough beauty out of it. Their music was the sound of that friendship, in all its conflicts and contradictions, even as it fell apart. But Garth symbolized that communal spirit more than any of them, if only because it was impossible to imagine him anywhere else. He truly belonged in The Band. That’s why the world is mourning Garth Hudson now — he represented something profound and ancient in the American spirit. Even if his death is the end of the Band, their fellowship lives on in the music they made, as vibrantly as ever, with Garth Hudson holding it all together, as he always did.
