Garth Hudson, the last surviving member of The Band, has died, aged 87. His death was confirmed by the Toronto Star, who report that Hudson passed away peacefully in his sleep at a nursing home in Woodstock, N.Y.
Hudson had a career that spanned rock music itself, from playing rockabilly at the end of the 50s, to pioneering rock with Bob Dylan in the 60s, backing some of rock's biggest artists in the 70s and 80s, and a late-period renaissance as he was hailed as an inspiration by acts like Wilco, Mercury Rev, Norah Jones and more.
Garth Hudson was a multi-instrumentalist known for his keyboard, saxophone and accordion playing. He was the last member to join The Band, back when they were called the Hawks, a backing band for rockabilly singer Ronnie Hawkins. Even then, guitarist Robbie Robertson said later, “Garth was far and away the most advanced musician in rock’n’roll.”
The Hawks had a reputation as a blistering live band, and they took those performance skills with them when they renamed themselves The Band and joined Bob Dylan at pivotal moment in his career. In 1965, he had upset folk fans by playing electric guitars at the Newport Folk Festival (now the subject of the film A Complete Unknown). Later that year, Like A Rolling Stone, heralded the arrival not just of a new Bob Dylan, but a new movement: rock music.
To tour the album Highway 61 Revisited, Dylan went on the road with The Band – Robbie Robertson, Levon Helm, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel and Garth Hudson – drawing both admiration and vocal opposition from a conservative folk audience opposed to this new direction. They recorded with Dylan, most notably in the jam sessions that were later collected as the 1975 album The Basement Tapes.
The Band started working on their own material and albums like Music From Big Pink and The Band established them as a powerful and influential force – a unique blend of soul, folk and blues rock with a unique flavour courtesy of Garth Hudson's Lowrey organ playing. The song Chest Fever was often prefigured by an improvised piece from Hudson, nicknamed "The Genetic Method".
After the dissolution of the Band, Hudson had a long career working with artists Muddy Waters, Eric Clapton, Van Morrison, Leonard Cohen, Tom Petty, Robert Palmer, Marianne Faithfull, Roger Waters and many more. In recent years a new generation of artists asked him to contribute to their albums: Mercury Rev, Norah Jones, the Indigo Girls, the Lemonheads, Neko Case and more.
"Anybody who gets a chance to play with Garth Hudson, they'd be a fool not to," Levon Helm told the San Francisco Chronicle. "As far as The Band is concerned, he's the one who rubbed off on the rest of us and made us sound as good as we did."
"The last piece of the puzzle is gone," says Gov't Mule leader Warren Haynes, who supported The Band in the early 1990s. "The last remaining member of everyone’s favourite band has passed. A key ingredient in a lost recipe where every ingredient was key.
"What Garth brought to The Band’s music was uniqueness and authenticity, and a deep history of musical knowledge that made those songs sound like they could have been written in previous eras. Garth himself was not only from a previous era, [but] he may have been from another planet."
