Garth Hudson, a virtuoso multi-instrumentalist best known for his distinctive organ and saxophone work with the Band, and who in his later years remained an in-demand player among young musicians — including Neko Case, Norah Jones, and Wilco — died early Tuesday morning at the Ten Broeck Center for Rehabilitation & Nursing in upstate New York in age 87.
Jan Haust, Hudson’s longtime friend and colleague, confirmed his death to Rolling Stone. He declined to reveal a cause of death, but said Hudson “died peacefully” and “yesterday was a day of music and hand-holding.”
One of the most inventive keyboardists in the history of rock & roll, Hudson was born in London, Ontario, on Aug. 3, 1937 — years before his fellow Band members — to a pair of gifted musicians: His mother was a pianist, and his father played a variety of wind instruments, though he was employed as a farm inspector and entomologist.
Hudson 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.”
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The Hawks soon parted ways with Hawkins, who was a strict taskmaster, and signed on with Bob Dylan, forming one of the greatest partnerships in rock. Hudson was part of the draw. “Like everyone else who encounters Garth for the first time,” Helm wrote of the singer’s reaction to a Hawks performance, “Bob was blown away.” Hudson’s ornamented fills magnified the folk singer’s poetry. “The wonderful thing in working with Dylan was the imagery in his lyrics,” Hudson told an interviewer. “I was allowed to play with these words.” As bootleg recordings document, his organ playing on “Ballad of a Thin Man” during those shows was quite literally in dialog with the singer’s verses.
In the spring of 1967 — in the wake of Dylan’s motorcycle accident — the Hawks moved to Woodstock, New York, into the house known as Big Pink, and Hudson lived upstairs with Manuel and Danko. Hudson found the area magical, and it would become a home base for much of his life. He grew a long beard and became, more than any of his bandmates, a musical mountain man, collecting guns and knives, skinning roadkill, and building a miniature pipe organ.
With his reserved manner and technical skills, he lent the group a gravitas that set it apart from peers during the Summer of Love. The freewheeling sessions with Dylan at Big Pink — remarkably well-recorded by Hudson using an Uher reel-to-reel tape recorder — would eventually be documented on The Basement Tapes, with Hudson supplying buoyant accompaniment on “This Wheel’s on Fire” and “Million Dollar Bash,” among other standouts.
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.)
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Hudson also used an early version of the Hohner clavinet in his rig, which he famously ran through a wah-wah pedal for “Up on Cripple Creek” (mimicking the sound of a jaw harp) and the group’s cover of “Mystery Train.” By 1975 and the Northern Lights—Southern Cross LP, Hudson had added numerous synthesizers to his arsenal, along with his accordion, saxophones, and other instruments.
By the time of the Band’s farewell concert in 1976, documented in The Last Waltz, Hudson had relocated to California with his wife, Maud, to a spread called the Big Oak Basin Dude Ranch. In 1978, a brushfire destroyed the home they were renovating. Hudson remained in California, working as a session musician and touring periodically with various lineups of the Band, who reunited in 1983 minus Robbie Robertson. At the funeral of bandmate Manuel, who died by suicide in the midst of a 1986 tour, Hudson played a selection of songs on organ that included Anglican hymns and Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released.”
Hudson moved back to the Woodstock area in 1991, where he continued to tinker (among other projects, he built a derringer handgun and cast his own bullets) and make music, playing with local bands and recording with a new generation of admirers that included Wilco, Norah Jones, Neko Case, and Doug Paisley. He released his solo debut, the fusion-minded The Sea to the North, in 2001, followed by other projects, including Garth Hudson Presents a Canadian Celebration of the Band, a set of covers by various artists, in 2010.
Like other members of the Band, Hudson weathered financial problems in later years; he declared bankruptcy multiple times, and in 2013, a landlord who rented him storage space sold off many of his belongings before he was stayed by a court order. Yet Hudson never showed any bitterness about his lot, even after selling off his publishing rights of the Band’s recordings to Robertson. “The deal was made. It was a good job. And I got out of it alive,” he told an interviewer.
And the music never stopped. 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.”
