Garth Hudson, the multi-instrumentalist wizard of The Band, the first Canadian group inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, has died. He was 87.
Hudson, according to social media posts related to the group, had resided in an assisted living facility in recent years.
He was the last of the five members who would comprise The Band to join, entering the picture in their formative years as the group backed the Canadian bar-hopping outfit of Arkansas-born showman Ronnie Hawkins.
Leaving Hawkins for greener pastures in the United States, they would eventually back Bob Dylan on a raucous 1966 world tour — when they were called The Hawks — before launching their own recording career in 1968.
Hudson was the only one of the quintet who was classically trained. As told in subsequent years by Hawkins and The Band guitarist Robbie Robertson, who died in 2023, Hudson’s conservative parents had to be persuaded to let their son became a road musician.
The other musicians were undoubtedly glad his folks acquiesced, as over the course of The Band’s recording career, Hudson was the group’s musical jackknife, playing accordion, clavinet, piccolo, saxophone, melodica, piano and synthesizer.
Above all, Hudson was known for the sounds he coaxed from his Lowrey organ — from sentimental and wistful, to eerie and foreboding, to playful and circus-like. He was nicknamed “Honey Boy,” drummer Levon Helm wrote in his 1993 memoir This Wheel’s On Fire, for his ability to sweeten the band’s recordings.
“With Garth and that organ, we sounded like a rock-and-roll orchestra,” Helm wrote. “We felt so enriched it was ungodly. He had sounds no one else had.”
‘We were lucky to have him’
The group’s first two albums — Music From Big Pink and The Band — are considered classics, each ranking in the top 100 of Rolling Stone’s updated compilation of the top 500 albums of all time in 2023.
The Band reached the top 40 charts with songs Up on Cripple Creek and Don’t Do It, with The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down and The Weight inspiring several cover versions.
The Band were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1994, five years after receiving induction into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame at the Juno Awards.
Hudson was known as the quietest member of The Band, though he escaped the ravages of drug use that afflicted three of his bandmates.
He was also quirky — bandmates later recounted how at their communal “Big Pink” house in Woodstock, N.Y., he wouldn’t let others wash the dishes. Onstage, he often played shoeless, with a highlight of the band’s concerts his otherworldly intro to Chest Fever, inspired by Bach.
Hudson often played shoeless onstage, with a highlight of the group’s concerts his otherworldly intro to Chest Fever, inspired by Bach.
“He could’ve been playing with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra or Miles Davis, but he was with us and we were lucky to have him,” Robertson wrote in his 2016 book, Testimony.
Guested on numerous albums
The Band’s first incarnation came to a close symbolically with the star-studded concert in 1976, the subject of a revered Martin Scorsese-directed documentary, The Last Waltz, two years later.
Robertson moved on to pursue film scores and a solo career, while Hudson and Helm rejoined Rick Danko and Richard Manuel, the other two members of The Band.
Manuel died by suicide at a Florida hotel in March 1986, just hours after the group had played that night. Hudson reportedly moved the congregation to tears at the Stratford, Ont., funeral for Manuel with an instrumental version of I Shall Be Released, the Dylan song they played countless times in their heyday.
The remaining trio would release three mostly well-received albums as The Band in the 1990s.
The musician and the director explain how they got together to make a film about the final 1976 performance by The Band. Aired April 14, 1978 on CBC’s 90 Minutes Live.
Hudson on his own released independently Music for Our Lady Queen of the Angels in 1980 and The Sea to the North in 2001.
Meanwhile, he was often in demand for guest spots. He contributed to the albums of dozens of artists, a diverse list that included Neil Diamond, Poco, Marianne Faithfull and Norah Jones, as well as Canadian artists Leonard Cohen, Martha Wainwright and Doug Paisley.
Hudson rarely gave interviews, but in a 2002 article in the Globe and Mail, he gave a hint of his unique insight and wry humour.
“Different musical styles are just like different languages. I’m able to play a lot of instruments so I can learn the languages,” he said. “It’s all country music; it just depends on what country we’re talking about.”
In his later years, Hudson encountered financial struggles, declaring bankruptcy on more than one occasion. In February 2022, his wife of 43 years, Maud, died.
From funeral parlours to bars
Born Eric Garth Hudson on Aug. 2, 1937 in Windsor, Ont., he grew up down the highway in London, Ont.
He was the only son of church-going parents who were both musically inclined, and Hudson studied classical music and played piano at their Anglican church and at his uncle’s funeral parlour.
He pursued music studies at Western University but didn’t graduate, and he began gigging in various bands in southwestern Ontario in 1956.
Hudson, in late 1961, joined the band known as The Hawks under the leadership of Ronnie Hawkins, who died in May 2022.
“With his dark hair, long forehead and pale skin, Garth looked jazz-musician cool, or like someone who hadn’t been out in broad daylight for ages. He played brilliantly, in a more complex way than anybody we ever jammed with,” Robertson wrote years later.
Leaving Hawkins, they were eventually introduced to Dylan in New York, with help from Mary Martin, a Canadian who worked in the music industry.
Joining the influential folksinger as he cranked up the volume and strapped on an electric guitar saw them endure a trial by fire, as some folk purists chafed at Dylan’s amplified rock music.
But then, in a rock music era marked by psychedelic excess and the emergence of the wailing guitar solo, The Band’s early recorded output offered a range of styles and rustic playing. High-profile musicians George Harrison and Eric Clapton said they were influenced by the group’s debut LP, as did up-and-comers like Elton John.
John told the BBC in 2019 that he and co-writer Bernie Taupin “freaked out when we heard it (Music From Big Pink), we never heard anything like this before. It was Americana done in a very soulful, funky, kind of laid-back way.”
The Band were a Time Magazine cover subject in 1970, a rarity for a rock group at the time, after the release of their self-titled second album.
Hudson “sprinkles each number with unexpected and attractive sounds that always seem to come as a predictable surprise,” said the writer of the article, Jay Cocks, who decades later co-wrote the screenplay with director James Mangold for the just-released Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown.
The Band played a number of festivals, including Woodstock, and kept up a regular touring schedule until bowing out with their famed live show in San Francisco in 1976. By then, the group had mostly relocated to California, and Danko, Helm and Manuel were all grappling with substance or alcohol abuse.
The Band’s breakup also served as a cautionary tale, as Robertson’s business acumen and greater share of songwriting and publishing royalties put him in a significantly higher income bracket than the others.
Rock legend Robbie Robertson was a guitarist and the songwriting force behind The Band. Born in Toronto, Robertson died at the age of 80 at home in Los Angeles.
Helm in particular became embittered about that, and he and Robertson never appeared together when The Band received their hall of fame honours over a decade later in the U.S. and Canada.
Hudson’s temperament was such that he was not known to be part of the squabbles, playing on solo albums by both Robertson and Helm.
Hudson and Robertson — the last survivors after Danko died in 1999 and Helm in 2012 — appeared together in 2014 as The Band were honoured on the Canadian Walk of Fame. Robertson died at age 80 in August 2023, after what his family described as a long illness.
At a tribute show in California to commemorate The Band in 2017, the Los Angeles Times described Hudson as requiring a cane to get around but otherwise demonstrating “that his musical abilities had been undiminished by time or physical infirmity.”
