Garth Hudson, last surviving member of The Band, dies at 87

Garth Hudson, the band’s virtuoso keyboardist and versatile musician who drew on a unique palette of sounds and styles to add a conversational touch to rock standards such as “Up on Cripple Creek,” “The Weight” and “Rag Mama Rag,” died at age 87.

Hudson was the eldest and last surviving member of the influential group that once supported 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 lived in a nursing home in upstate New York.

A rustic figure with an expansive brow and a sprawling beard, Hudson was a classically trained performer and self-taught Greek chorus who spoke over piano, synthesizers, horns and his favorite Lowrey organ. Whatever the song, Hudson invoked just the right feeling or nuance, whether it was the drunken clavinet and wah-wah pedal on “Up on Cripple Creek,” the galloping piano on “Rag Mama Rag” or the melancholic saxophone on “It Makes No Difference”. .”

The only non-singer among five musicians celebrated for their camaraderie, texture and versatility, Hudson appeared mostly in the background, but he had a showcase: “Chest Fever,” a Robbie Robertson composition for which he crafted a solo. The introductory organ (“The Genetic Method”), an eclectic sampling of moods and melodies that extend into the song’s hard rock riff.

Robertson, the band’s guitarist and primary songwriter, died in 2023 after a long illness. Keyboardist-drummer Richard Manuel hanged 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 the backing band for rocker Ronnie Hawkins, the group was originally called The Hawks and included Arkansas-born Helm and four Canadians recruited by Helm and Hawkins: Hudson, Danko, Manuel and Robertson.

The band mastered their craft over years of performing as unknowns – first behind Hawkins, then as Levon and the Hawks, then as unsuspecting targets of outrage after meeting Dylan at the mid-1960s. All joined Dylan on his historic 1965-66 tours (Helm left midway), when he broke with his folk past and teamed up with the group for some of the most moving and stormiest of the era, angering some of Dylan’s old admirers but attracting many of the new ones. The group would rename itself The Band in part because so many people around Dylan simply called his backing musicians “the band.”

In 1967, Dylan was in semi-isolation, having broken his neck in a motorcycle accident, and he and the band settled in the Woodstock artist community that, two years later, would become world famous thanks to at the nearby Bethel Festival. With no album planned, they wrote and performed spontaneously in an old pink house outside the town shared by Hudson, Danko and Manuel. Hudson was in charge of the tape recorder while Dylan and The Band recorded more than 100 songs, available for years only as bootlegs, known as “The Basement Tapes.” Often cited as the foundation of roots music and Americana, the music ranged from old folk, country and Appalachian songs to new compositions such as “Tears of Rage”, “I Shall Be Released” and “This Wheel’s on Fire.” »

“There would be an informal discussion before each recording,” Hudson told online publication Something Else! in 2014. “Ideas were floating and stories were being told. And then we came back to the songs.

“We looked for words, phrases and situations that were worth writing about. I think Bob Dylan showed us discipline and an undying concern for the quality of his art.

Dylan resurfaced at the end of 1967 with the austere “John Wesley Harding”, and the group debuted soon after with “Music from Big Pink”, its down home sound so radically different from the jams and psychedelic tricks then fashionable that the Artists from the Beatles to Eric Clapton to the Grateful Dead would cite his influence. The Band followed in 1969 with a self-titled album that many still consider their best and has often been ranked among the greatest rock albums of all time.

Future records included “Stage Fright,” “Cahoots” and “Northern Lights/Southern Cross,” a 1975 album that earned Hudson particular praise for his work on keyboards. A year later, Robertson decided he’d had enough of live performances, and the group hosted the all-star concert and Martin Scorsese film, “The Last Waltz,” starring Dylan, Clapton, Neil Young and more. ‘others. Tension between Robertson and Helm, who would claim the film unduly elevated Robertson over others, led to a complete breakup before the documentary’s release in 1978.

Hudson played briefly with the English band The Call; appeared with various later incarnations of the group, 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 has also organized his own projects, although his first solo effort, “The Sea to the North,” was released on the day of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. In 2005, he formed a 12-piece band called The Best! with his wife singing. “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 has experienced financial difficulties. He had sold his interest in the band to Robertson and went bankrupt several times. He lost a home to foreclosure and saw many of his belongings put up for auction in 2013 when he fell behind on his storage payments. Hudson’s wife, Maud, died in 2022. They had one daughter, Tami Zoe Hill.

The son of musicians, Hudson was born in Windsor, Ontario in 1937 and received formal training from an early age. He was performing and writing before he was even a teenager, although by his early twenties he had grown bitter about classical music and was playing in a rock band, the Capers.

He was the last to join the group and he feared his parents would disapprove. The solution was to have Hawkins hire him as a “music consultant” and pay him $10 more per week.

“It was a job,” Hudson said of the group in a 2002 interview with Maclean’s. “Play in a stadium, play in a theater. My job was to come up with arrangements with pads underneath, pads and fills behind the good poets. The same poems every night.