Remembering Garth Hudson, the Man Who Transformed The Band
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!)
