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On Tuesday, Garth Hudson, who played organ, accordion, saxophone, and more as a member of the Band—perhaps still the group that best embodies the glorious, lawless amalgamation of styles at the very heart of rock and roll—died at the age of eighty-seven, near Woodstock, New York. Hudson’s bandmates—the guitarist Robbie Robertson, the drummer Levon Helm, the bassist Rick Danko, and the pianist and multi-instrumentalist Richard Manuel—often described him as scholarly, nimble, and discerning, a professor type at loose in a scene dominated by beautiful buffoons. The rockabilly singer Ronnie Hawkins, who was backed by the Band in the early sixties, when they were still known as the Hawks, understood Hudson as a singular type of dude: “He heard all sorts of weird sounds in his head, and he played like the Phantom of the Opera. . . . Most organ players in those days would just play through everything, but Garth would lay back, hit licks, hit horn shots. He knew exactly what to put in and what to leave out.”
Hudson was born on August 2, 1937, in Windsor, Ontario. As a teen-ager, he got a gig as an organist in his uncle’s funeral parlor. “The Anglican church has the best musical traditions of any church that I know of,” Hudson later told Barney Hoskyns, the author of “Across the Great Divide: The Band and America.” “It’s the old voice leading that gives it the countermelodies and adds all those classical devices which are not right out there, but which add a little texture.” That influence is palpable in Hudson’s playing, which is marked by unexpected, almost counterintuitive little figures; his style was erudite, but teasing. After high school, Hudson joined a band called the Silhouettes, later known as Paul London and the Capers. “Garth was very professional, with a strange, dry sense of humor. He was kinda weird, but not weird weird,” London told Hoskyns. (Funny, weird, but not weird-weird—if only we could all one day be described this way!)
Hudson played a hulking Lowrey organ, the FL (or Festival) model; it was purchased by the Band in 1961, to help sweeten the deal after Hudson refused their first several offers to join. (Hudson finally acquiesced after the Band agreed to pay him an extra ten bucks every week to be their “music teacher,” a title that placated his fretful parents.) Helm credited Hudson with transforming the Band into a more legitimate outfit, telling Hoskyns, “Once we had a musician of Garth’s calibre in the band, we really started to sound like a professional act.” After leaving Hawkins, the Band toured on its own for a bit, until Bob Dylan recruited them as his backing group in 1965 and 1966—the notorious “gone electric” years. In July of 1966, Dylan crashed his Triumph motorcycle just outside of Woodstock, and took some time off to heal. (In “Chronicles: Volume One,” Dylan doesn’t exactly neutralize rumors that he might’ve exaggerated those injuries: “I had been in a motorcycle accident and I’d been hurt, but I recovered. Truth was that I wanted to get out of the rat race,” he writes.)
Dylan’s accident changed things for the Band. In the spring of 1967, Hudson, Danko, and Manuel moved into Big Pink, a rental house in West Saugerties, New York. In his memoir, “Testimony,” Robertson describes it as “a pink ranch-style house in the middle of a hundred acres—a ridge of mountains, a good-sized pond, and nothing but space and wilderness all around.” They scrounged some gear, including a quarter-inch tape machine from Dylan’s house, and transformed the basement of Big Pink into a kind of ad-hoc recording studio. “When I asked a recording engineer to take a look at the basement, he said the concrete walls, glass basement windows, and big metal furnace could make for the worst sound anybody ever used for recording music,” Robertson wrote. “To me, that was good news.” Over the next year, the Band made “The Basement Tapes,” a series of demos with Dylan, and “Music from Big Pink,” two of the greatest rock-and-roll records of the nineteen-sixties (though “The Basement Tapes” was not officially released until 1975).
It’s hard to talk about Hudson’s contributions to the Band’s discography without talking about the organ solo that opens “Chest Fever,” one of the best and strangest songs on “Music from Big Pink.” The Band was not constitutionally prone to showboating, and, in fact, mostly seemed allergic to elaborate solos; their whole thing was a kind of seamless, flowing alchemy. Except, of course, for “Chest Fever,” in which Hudson plays the opening motif of Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor,” and then begins a dreamy, cinematic improvisation that somehow sets up what follows: a song that does not make any sort of narrative sense (the lyrics were improvised during a rehearsal and never rewritten), and maybe even less musical sense (in his memoir, Helm wrote that “the bridge has this funny, tuneless Salvation Army band feel”). Yet I find “Chest Fever” miraculous—a rollicky, creepy boogaloo.
Hudson was the oldest and, incidentally, the last living member of the Band, and news of his death made me feel surprisingly lonesome. It seems wrong, somehow, that they are all gone. Part of that melancholy can surely be chalked up to some run-of-the-mill, parasocial attachment. I’ve now spent so many Thanksgiving nights prone on the sofa, hoodie up, eating forkfuls of cold stuffing directly from the pan while watching “The Last Waltz”—the Martin Scorsese-directed documentary about the Band’s final performance, in 1976—that I’ve begun to think of Van Morrison, who stumbled onstage to sing “Caravan,” as my blackout drunk, high-kicking uncle, bleating away while his eyes involuntarily close, “Now we can get down to what’s really wrong, really wrong, really wrong, weeeely wong, weeeeeely wooong!” But part of it has to do with the intimacy of the Band’s music, which is so free and warm, so tender and plainly affectionate, that it doesn’t feel as though it’s a cultural product intended for mass consumption but a special, quiet thing, just for me. “The Weight,” perhaps the Band’s best-known song, has one of the most humane and compassionate choruses in all of rock history:
Take a load off, Fanny
Take a load for free
Take a load off, Fanny
And you put the load right on me
It is possible, knowing the band’s lyrical proclivities, that “The Weight” is actually about the opposite experience, about being totally overwhelmed by other people’s needs, but either way, it is a song about helping and being helped, which is to say, it is a song about the human condition. When the band harmonizes on the last line, well—I don’t know what makes you cry. I have a hard time singing along to that bit without my voice getting a little wet and froggy. The idea of bearing a hand, of taking care of one another, arises again on the swinging chorus to “Up on Cripple Creek,” a single from the Band’s self-titled second album. “If I spring a leak, she mends me / I don’t have to speak, she defends me,” Helm sings, his voice hot and loose. Hudson plays this wild little clavinet part throughout, running the keyboard through a wah-wah pedal. It’s unexpected and honking, funny and weird, but not weird-weird—it is absolutely, eternally perfect. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
