RIP Garth Hudson: The Band's musicologist

Some lingering thoughts on the man Robbie Robertson once called "far and away the most advanced musician in rock & roll."

Rolling Stone asked me to write an obit for Garth Hudson before he died — common practice among publications re: important public figures, particularly those of advanced age. I’m certain many draft obits of Bob Dylan, Garth’s sometimes-bandmate, lay in wait on computers worldwide, where I hope they stay.

Sadly, it was time for Garth’s to post; you can read it here. (Thanks to my man David Browne for some last-minute adds.) Garth passed early Tuesday morning, age 87, at the Ten Broeck Center for Rehabilitation & Nursing in the town of Lake Katrine, just north of Kingston NY, tucked between the Esopus Creek and the mighty river he shared his surname with. It’s not far from where I live, not far from the fabled town of Woodstock, not far from the Big Pink house in West Saugerties at 56 Parnassus Lane, where Garth moved in 1967 with Rick Danko and Richard Manuel and made legendary music at with Dylan and the rest of The Band.

Here’s a bit about Hudson from my piece:

[He] was a prodigy who once disassembled his father’s old pump organ and rebuilt it. He was playing accordion in a country band at age 12; his parents sent him to the Toronto Conservatory, where he learned to play Bach preludes; at an uncle’s funeral parlor, he played Anglican hymns. (“The Anglican church has the best musical traditions of any church that I know of,” he told author Barney Hoskyns in the Band biography Across the Great Divide.)

He soon developed a deep love of rock & roll. As a member of the Capers, he played piano and sax, and backed up touring stars like Johnny Cash and Bill Haley when they came to town. Rockabilly veteran Ronnie Hawkins eventually lured him into joining his backing band, the Hawks, which included Robbie Robertson, Levon Helm, Richard Manuel, and Rick Danko. According to Robertson, “There’s no question in my mind that, at the time, Garth was far and away the most advanced musician in rock & roll.” Once Hudson joined, Helm wrote in his memoir, This Wheel’s on Fire, “We really thought we were the best band in the world.”

Hudson’s death made me think about how much of the best rock music is a combination of head, heart and gut instinct, and how many of the greatest rock bands had members whose playing was informed by one of those qualities above the others, adding them to the mix, sometimes oppositional to the rest of the band. That was generally when the magic happened. Think about John Cale, fresh from London’s Goldsmiths College music program and a summer studying with Aaron Copland at Tanglewood, meeting Lou Reed and forming the Velvet Underground. Think of Phil Lesh, studying classical composition with Luciano Berio as Mills College, then picking up an electric bass and joining the Grateful Dead.

Then listen to the organ intro to “Chest Fever,” perhaps Garth’s signature moment in The Band catalog, and the song that blooms from it.

Here’s a little more history:

Hudson’s primary keyboard during this period, relatively unique among rock musicians loyal to the Hammond B-3, was a Lowrey organ that he was constantly modifying. When the Hawks officially became the Band in 1967 with their debut LP, Music From Big Pink, Hudson immortalized the Lowery’s church-like pipe-organ tone with “Chest Fever” (sometimes referred to separately as “The Genetic Method”). The song — especially the extended introduction — would become Hudson’s signature performance. It begins with a fragment of Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D minor,” before launching into an extended improvisation, a landmark fusion of classical music reach, jazz wandering, and R&B grind that stands as the greatest organ performance in rock history. (Legend holds that for the life of the Band, Hudson never played the intro the same way twice.)

I’ve been re-discovering Garth’s music outside the Band lately. Neko Case’s great memoir (out next week; I’ll post more on it soon) sent me back to her triumphant 2006 Fox Confessor Brings The Flood, which Hudson contributed beautifully to — listen to his fills on "Margaret vs. Pauline," the heartbreakingly gorgeous outro to "Star Witness," the roadhouse gospel abstractions on "John Saw That Number."

There’s a lot of stuff to discover. Thanks to my archive-plumbing comrade at Mangrove Valley for flagging this 1980 cassette release, which you might call an ambient-experimental piece. It’s wild, comforting, restless — surprising, but not out of character.

Among the players on that cassette are Garth’s wife Maud, and his fellow Band keyboardist Richard Manuel, whose funeral Garth played at about 6 years later. The oldest member of The Band, Garth outlived them all.

I ended my obit of Garth with one of my favorite quotes about his playing, from fellow Substacker Greil Marcus, who has chronicled Dylan and the Band mightily over the decades:

If anything, his playing only got better after the Band ended. Writing in 2001 about a performance, Greil Marcus observed Hudson’s playing to be “everywhere at once. As soon as you thought you caught a tune — ‘Home Sweet Home,’ ‘Shenandoah’ — it vanished. He was an avant-garde pianist in a 1915 grindhouse, forgotten girlie flicks and ‘In a castle dark…’ epics turning profound under his fingers.”

It’s sad to imagine the world — moreover, the mid-Hudson Valley music scene here — with none of the dudes in the Band, who branded this region as a power spot for musical creation. Then again, they’re all still here, in all the rootsy bands with singing drummers, stinging guitarists, and wooly wild organists, soundtracking a country’s unruly, ugly-beautiful history through vivid human storytelling, flights of melodic invention, and grooves that get your ass up off the chair. Rest in peace and harmonies, Garth.