Garth Hudson, the virtuoso multi-instrumentalist and last original member of The Band, has died at the age of 87.
According to The Toronto Star, Hudson passed away peacefully in his sleep on Tuesday, January 21st at a nursing home in Woodstock, New York
Hudson was born Eric Hudson in Windsor, Ontario, Canada, on August 2nd, 1937. Like their son, both of his parents were multi-talented musicians, and Hudson began playing piano at a very early age. His first official gigs were providing the organ for local church services and for a funeral parlor owned by his uncle. By 1949, he was playing professionally in dance bands around London, Ontario, eventually earning a spot in a group called Paul London and the Kapers.
It was after a Kapers show in London in 1961 that Hudson was first approached by his future-bandmates Ronnie Hawkins and Levon Helm, who asked if he would be interested in joining Hawkins’ band, The Hawks. Hudson declined the offer at first, but eventually agreed on two conditions: that the band would buy him a Lowery organ (which went on to be his signature sound), and that they’d pay him $10 a week to give “music lessons” to the band’s other members.
Hudson’s conditions were a bit odd, but, as the legend goes, he asked for the $10 a week in order to justify the decision to join the band to his parents, claiming that he wasn’t squandering his classical education on rock ‘n’ music for nothing. Besides, as his bandmates later explained in The Last Waltz, they really admired Hudson’s knowledge and benefited from the lessons. In the end, Hudson’s talents and his musical chemistry with the rest of Hawkins’ band were undeniable, so the band agreed to his conditions and he joined.
Over the next few years under Hawkins’ leadership, the group established themselves. By 1963, though, tensions between Hawkins and the musicians had begun simmering, and eventually, the backing band — Hudson, Helm, bassist Rick Danko, pianist Richard Manuel, and guitarist Robbie Robertson — broke off on their own, forming the first iteration of The Band.
It took a few years for The Band to get their name, though. For a while, they gigged as Levon and The Hawks, during which time Hudson supplemented his income by working as a session musician for other artists. Their big break came in 1965, when manager Albert Grossman’s assistant, Mary Martin, introduced the group to Bob Dylan. That November, they recorded their first song with Dylan, a single entitled “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?” The following year, they backed Dylan on his controversial “electric tour.”
All of this alone placed Hudson on the front lines of the musical revolution that was happening in the 1960s. But after Dylan suffered a serious motorcycle accident in July 1966, the musicians augmented their output to a legendary level. Relocating to a house dubbed “Big Pink” in West Saugerties, New York, the group — then still unnamed — began writing and recording a mass amount of songs with Dylan, which went on to become known as the Basement Tapes.
Then, in 1968, The Band finally became “The Band.” They recorded a debut album of original material, entitled Music From Big Pink, and put it out under the name. Featuring the group’s signature raw, acoustic sound — plus a handful of skillfully written songs, featuring some Dylan lyrics and a heap of musical augmentation from Hudson — Big Pink became a huge success, and left a mark on the history of modern music. The album’s most famous tune, “The Weight,” became well-known for its inclusion in the movie Easy Rider, and The Band’s influence began impacting artists around the world, including Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters, who once described Music From Big Pink as the “second-most influential record in the history of rock ‘n’ roll,” and claimed that it “affected Pink Floyd deeply, deeply, deeply.”
In September 1969, The Band unveiled their self-titled album, which introduced even more classic songs to the Great American Rock ‘n’ Roll Songbook. Hudson’s contributions can be heard loud and clear on songs like “Up on Cripple Creek,” which places his inventive clavinet playing front and center. The wah-wah-ified clav created a unique, novel sound that was a pretty major departure from the instrument’s classical origins, laying the groundwork for it to become a staple of funk on songs like Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition” and more.
The Band would go on to release a handful more of albums in the 1970s, including 1970’s Stage Fright, the 1972 live album Rock of Ages, and 1975’s Northern Lights — Southern Cross.
But in 1976, The Band’s initial run came to a close. On Thanksgiving day, the group played one last show at Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco with a number of their friends, including Hawkins, Dylan, Eric Clapton, Joni Mitchell, Ringo Starr, Neil Young, and many more. The concert was memorialized in the now-iconic film, The Last Waltz, directed by a young Martin Scorsese.
After that, Hudson laid relatively low, and did more session work for other artists, including Emmylou Harris, Leonard Cohen, Van Morrison, and more. He teamed up again with his former bandmates when a version of The Band sans-Robertson came together in the early ‘80s. The group toured for a few years, and even released a few more albums (including 1996’s High on the Hog, which might have the greatest, err most incongruous, album artwork of all time), but disbanded entirely in 1999 after Danko’s death.
In the final years of his life, Hudson continued collaborating with other artists — like Neko Case, Secret Machines, The Lemonheads, and others — but largely kept his affairs and personal life private, staying out of the public eye. He made his final live appearance in April 2023, performing a version of Duke Ellington’s “Sophisticated Lady” at a house party in Kingston, New York.