Garth Hudson, master instrumentalist and last surviving member of The Band, dies aged 87

NEW YORK (AP) – Garth Hudson, the band’s virtuoso keyboardist and all-around musician, drew from a unique palette of sounds and styles to add a conversational edge to such rock standards as “Up on Cripple Creek,” “The Weight” and ” Rag Mama Rag,” has died at the age of 87.

Hudson was the oldest and last surviving member of the influential group that once supported Bob Dylan and helped deepen and reshape modern American music. His death was confirmed on Tuesday on The Band’s social media accounts, which gave no further details. Hudson had been living in a nursing home in upstate New York.

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

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

Robertson, the band’s guitarist and main songwriter, died in 2023 after a long illness. Keyboardist-drummer Richard Manuel killed 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 & Roll Hall of Fame in 1994.

Formed in the early 1960s as a backing group for rocker Ronnie Hawkins, the band was originally called The Hawks and featured the Arkansas-born Helm and four Canadians recruited by Helm and Hawkins: Hudson, Danko, Manuel and Robertson .

The band mastered their craft through years of performing as unknowns—first behind Hawkins, then as Levon and the Hawks, then as the unsuspecting targets of outrage after dating Dylan in the mid-1960s. All joined Dylan on his historic tours of 1965-66 (Helm left midway through), when he broke with his folk past and joined the band for some of the most sensational and stormy music of the era, infuriating some old Dylan admirers , but attracted many new ones. The group would rename themselves the band in part because so many people around Dylan simply referred to his backing musicians as “the band”.

In 1967, Dylan was in semi-reclusion after breaking his neck in a motorcycle accident, and he and the group settled into the artistic scene of Woodstock, which two years later would become world famous thanks to the festival in nearby Bethel. With no album planned, they wrote and played spontaneously in an old pink house outside the city shared by Hudson, Danko and Manuel. Hudson was in charge of the tape machine when Dylan and The Band recorded more than 100 songs, for years only available as bootlegs, which became 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 such new compositions as “Tears of Rage,” “I Shall Be Released,” and “This Wheel’s on Fire.”

“There would be an informal discussion before each shoot,” Hudson told the online publication Something Else! in 2014. “Ideas would flow around and tell stories. And then we would go back to the songs.

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

Dylan re-emerged in late 1967 with the taut “John Wesley Harding” and the band soon after debuted “Music from Big Pink”, its down home sounding so radically different from the jams and psychedelic tricks then in vogue that artists from The Beatles to Eric Clapton to the Grateful Dead would cite its influence. The Band followed up in 1969 with a self-titled album, which many still consider the 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 brought Hudson particular praise for his work on keys. A year later, Robertson decided he was tired of live performances, and the band staged the all-star concert and Martin Scorsese film, “The Last Waltz”, with Dylan, Clapton, Neil Young and many others. The tension between Robertson and Helm, who would argue that the film unfairly elevated Robertson above the others, led to a complete break before the documentary’s release in 1978.

Hudson played briefly with the English band the Call; performed with various later incarnations of the band, usually with 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 also organized his own projects, although his first solo effort, “The Sea to the North”, was released on the day of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. In 2005, he formed a 12-piece band called The Best!, with his wife on vocals . “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 struggled financially. 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 possessions put up for auction in 2013 when he fell behind on storage payments. Hudson’s wife, singer “Sister” Maud Hudson, died in 2022.

The son of musicians, Hudson was born in Windsor, Ontario in 1937 and received formal training at an early age. He was performing on stage and writing before he was even a teenager, although by his early 20s he had dabbled in classical music and played in a rock band, the Capers.

He was the last to join the band and he was worried that his parents would disapprove. The solution was to have Hawkins hire him as a “musical consultant” and pay him an extra $10 a week.

“It was a job,” Hudson said of the band in a 2002 interview with Maclean’s. “Play a stadium, play a theater. My job was to arrange events with pillows under, pillows and stuffing behind good poets. The same poems every night.”