By Peter Applebome
Garth Hudson, whose intricate swirls of Lowrey organ helped elevate the Band from rollicking juke-joint refugees into one of the most resonant and influential rock groups of the 1960s and ’70s, died Tuesday in Woodstock, New York. He was 87 and the last surviving original member of the group.
His death, at a nursing home, was confirmed by Jan Haust, a close friend and colleague.
Hudson did far more than play the organ. A musical polymath whose workroom at home included arcana like sheet music for century-old standards and hymns, he played almost anything — saxophone, accordion, synthesizers, trumpet, French horn, violin — and in endless styles that could at various times be at home in a conservatory, a church, a carnival or a roadhouse.
He was the one who set up, installed and maintained the recording equipment in the pink ranch house in Saugerties, New York, where Bob Dylan and the Band recorded more than 100 songs that came to be known as the basement tapes.
When the Band became a force on its own, he arranged the music on the group’s albums and painstakingly tweaked and honed its recordings. He added brass, woodwinds and eclectic flourishes that accentuated the group’s homespun authenticity, a quality that set it apart from the psychedelia and youthful posturing of the rock of its era.
During its peak, the Band was famously a collaborative operation informed by the songwriting and barbed guitar playing of Robbie Robertson and the soulful singing and musicianship of Levon Helm, Rick Danko and Richard Manuel. But critics and his fellow band members agreed that Hudson played an essential role in raising the group to another level entirely.
Robertson, quoted in Barney Hoskyns’ 1993 book, “The Band: Across the Great Divide,” called him “far and away the most advanced musician in rock ’n’ roll.” “He could just as easily have played with John Coltrane or the New York Symphony Orchestra as with us,” Robertson said.
Eric Garth Hudson was born Aug. 2, 1937, in Windsor, Ontario. His mother, Olive Louella Pentland, played piano and accordion and sang. His father, Fred James Hudson, was a farm inspector, who played drums, C melody saxophone, clarinet, flute and piano. The family moved to London, Ontario, when Hudson was about 3.
He grew up listening to country hoedowns on the radio, learning Bach preludes and fugues and studying music theory, harmony and counterpoint. He first played in public at St. Luke’s Anglican Church and at an uncle’s funeral home, then began a musical career that took him, from 1961 to 1963, to Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks, a boisterous rockabilly and rhythm-and-blues band that included the other four members of what would become the Band, three of them Canadians. Helm was from Arkansas.
According to Helm and others, Hudson had kept turning down pleas to join the Hawks until he was offered a new organ, an extra $10 a week to give the others music lessons and the title “music consultant” — all so that his parents would feel better about their gifted son playing mere rock ’n’ roll.
After leaving Hawkins, the former members of the Hawks toured on their own, and then with Dylan, who recruited them to accompany him on his groundbreaking 1965 and 1966 folk-rock tours. Afterward, they settled near Woodstock, where the collaborations with Dylan became the stuff of rock lore. (Known to the locals there as simply “the band,” the five decided to name themselves that.)
The Band recorded its first album, “Music From Big Pink,” in 1968. With the release of a follow-up, “The Band,” in 1969, the group’s distinctive mix of rock, R&B and country became a phenomenon.
Songs like “The Weight,” “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” and “Up on Cripple Creek” offered a rich, anachronistic distillation of diverse American musics, with echoes of the Civil War and the nation’s rural past. Hudson was the wizard behind the scenes adding pastoral touches to the band’s sound out of Aaron Copland or Charles Ives.
His dark beard and inscrutable expressions made him look somewhere between a dour lumberjack and an Old Testament prophet, giving him the appearance of serious craftsman lost in his music rather than a crowd-pleasing rock star. His musical influence was enhanced by the fact that he played the Lowrey organ, which had a richer tonal range than the Hammond used by most rock organists. Much of his work consisted of adding rich counterpoint and textures to the music while other members’ singing and playing were more in the forefront.
Still, a highlight of every show by the Band was his virtuoso improvisation leading into the song “Chest Fever,” which usually took off from Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor and veered off in whatever direction, from classical to jazz, Hudson had in mind that night — and at whatever length.
The Band would never match the critical reception accorded its groundbreaking first two albums, and its members later descended into discord and substance abuse. They disbanded in 1976 with an all-star Thanksgiving concert in San Francisco that included performances by Dylan, Eric Clapton, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison and others. The concert was documented in the Martin Scorsese film that took its title from how the evening was billed, “The Last Waltz.”
The Band, minus Robertson, reunited in the early 1980s. It toured and released three albums with additional musicians in the 1990s, though the group never again approached its early success.
Hudson continued to be sought after and widely admired, performing and recording with dozens of musicians, including Roger Waters, Leonard Cohen and Tom Petty.
Hudson suffered numerous financial setbacks, including several bankruptcies and a messy row with his landlord in Kingston, New York, who sold off much of Hudson’s personal property in 2013. Over the years his bushy black beard became a bushy white one, and he took on a stooped, genial, gnomelike presence around Woodstock, where he sometimes performed with his wife, singer Sister Maud Hudson, who died in 2022 at 71. He left no immediate survivors.
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