Let Me Tell You About Garth Hudson

He's crazy.

Note: You can watch a video version of this article here.

---

I know that this is perhaps at a high-level for people who are not already familiar with The Band. But I can’t help myself. It would take me forever to write an entry-level introduction to The Band because I wouldn’t want to leave anything out. I would challenge any Baby Boomer to a quiz on esoterica of The Band (except the ones who wrote their biographies). The Band is really quite central to my conception of myself, as any artistic thing is that you obsess over in your formative years. Suffice to say, go listen to The Band. I provide some links here. And go read about them, too. They’ve got a great story.

---

Oh Garth.

I never thought that Garth Hudson would be the last man standing of The Band. But here we are.

The man is insane, beautifully so. He’s a mystic. He’s bizarre. He’s painfully yet endearingly languid. He’s esoterica incarnate. He’s separate from time.

I remember the very first time I ever saw him when I was in middle school. He was behind the keys with The Band performing their eternal “The Weight” with the Staple Singers for The Last Waltz documentary. I remember smirking when I saw his hirsute face, his large head, his three-piece suit. He stuck out like a sore thumb. He was striking. I thought he looked like a Civil War veteran. In reality, he’s more of a jazz man. A musical historian. A weird, sleepy, quiet, impossibly well-versed virtuoso of the keys, mainly, but also horns. The first iteration of The Band, the rockabilly outfit known as Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks, hired Hudson as their organist in 1961 with the understanding that he would get payed a little more for being their “music teacher,” an arrangement made to please Hudson’s conservative parents who would perish the thought that their classically-trained, church organist progeny could waste his talents on a vulgar rock band.

Hudson was also the oldest member of The Band. I thought for sure that Robbie Robertson, The Band’s most talkative and media-savvy member, would surely outlive Hudson. I feared it, actually. Robertson played to the spotlight. Hudson hid from it. With the previous deaths of The Band’s Levon Helm, Rick Danko, and Richard Manuel, Robertson was the de facto voice of the group now. Ironic, since Robertson rarely sang on any recordings The Band made. With Hudson’s eventual death, I knew that all the magazines would be going to Robertson to ask him about Hudson’s legacy. And of course Robertson would be gracious and kind and diplomatic and would emphasize Hudson’s unique contribution to The Band as their “professor,” while also noting the unifying whole that every member of The Band contributed to. Even in the face of harsh criticism from Levon Helm after The Band’s breakup, Robertson usually responded to questions about his former bandmates with grace, always trying to be positive (it helped that he made most of the money from the project). I surely thought Robertson would have the final word about all matters The Band.

But now, quite unexpectedly, only Hudson can be the voice for The Band. And man, what a state.

Alas, when Robertson died recently, not many media outlets reached out to Hudson to receive any pithy quotes. I knew that would never happen. And I found it quite funny imagining a New York Times reporter trying to have a conversation with Hudson. Go try to find an extended interview with Hudson. There’s scant videos and a few transcripts from over the years. Read them. Watch them. The man is not made for interviews. It’s not just that he talks slower than Noam Chomsky on tranquilizers. It’s that he talks almost to himself, giving little smirks here and there, and he goes off on meanders that pull in all kinds of little known references which are the antithesis of pith and soundbites.

To be fair, even though his interview in The Last Waltz has the most obvious splices in it, Hudson gives a beautiful rejoinder to those stuck-up white folks who viewed jazz as the devil’s music, saying: “There is a view that jazz is evil because it comes from evil people, but actually the greatest priests on 52nd Street and on the streets of New York City were the musicians. They were doing the greatest healing work. And they knew how to punch through music which would cure and make people feel good.”

It’s quite telling that this particular “interview” with Hudson is actually mostly composed of him just playing the piano and the accordion. That’s what he does best. He plays. His playing in that video is quite worth checking out because, at least for me, it makes quite clear where Hudson and The Band stand in North American music history (I say North American because Hudson and most of the other members of The Band are Canadian.) You can hear some jazz inflections throughout his playing, but really the gestalt is much more of old-timey Anglican hymns, ragtime, and traditional European folk music.

This kind of musical melting pot is critical to understanding just why The Band was and remains so influential. They literally invented the mélange genre now known as Americana. It didn’t exist before The Band released their first seminal album, Music From Big Pink, in 1968. That album itself was a product of the storied Basement Tapes recorded with Bob Dylan, a rarefied moment of talented musicians making music just for fun, off the clock, in their own homes, and happily leaving behind the recorded ghostly wails of a strange music that launched the first-ever bootleg vinyl industry and changed the trajectory of popular music for all time (see all the copycats, from The Beatles to Elton John to Blind Faith to The Eagles and even Led Zeppelin, that started making “back-to-basics” records in the late 60s and early 70s).

And it is because of Hudson bringing to bear his odd, off-kilter influences for a rock group that The Band sounded so beyond anything else that other musicians were doing at the time. The Band’s music of course still felt grounded and strangely familiar. It wasn’t cutting edge like acid or progressive rock. It was deeply moored in the various traditions of popular American music. But it was also unique, new, daring, unheard of before (and, if I may say so, since). It was like the music you’d hear scoring your dreams after getting drunk and high and falling asleep to the crackling sound of an old Victrola 78 record. That’s what Hudson contributed to The Band. That extra weird, historical kick. They called him “Honey Boy” because he sweetened their recordings.

Go listen to Hudson’s wild piano frills, edging into atonal cacophony, on live recordings of “Rag Mama Rag.” Listen to his extended organ journeys on “The Genetic Method.” His glittering accordion work on “Atlantic City” or “Knockin’ Lost John.” His ebullient, screaming, carnival ride organ solo on “Slippin’ and Slidin’.” I get chills every time I hear the old, woody, pump organ-like intro to “Daniel and the Sacred Harp.”

These musical moments are where Hudson sees the spotlight. But really, it’s his consistent subtlety that counts. Hudson provides the constant, grooving undercurrent to the bulk of The Band’s recordings, using his beloved Lowrey organ to fill in the gaps, as it were. Any one song by The Band, if you muted Hudson’s track, would just be missing an essential, something. Hudson’s whirling, vibrating, ghostlike moan on the always punchy, weird, rollicking, and electrifying “Yazoo Street Scandal,” brilliantly underscores Robertson’s sizzling guitar riff and Helm’s rough-hewn bellow. (I worked at an opera company this summer where I got to contribute to the work playlist, and as such “Yazoo Street Scandal” blared over the theatre’s big speakers one day in all its bizarre, brilliant glory. I was grinning the whole duration.) Likewise, “Up On Cripple Creek,” The Band’s only top-ten hit on the charts, while never showcasing Hudson’s organ, instead relying on his iconic use of a well-placed clavinette that sounds like a jaw harp, would be a fundamentally different song if you took away the background gurgling of Hudson’s electric organ on the chorus.

I would be remiss not to mention Hudson’s sublime work on the very first song that introduced The Band to the world, “Tears of Rage.” A lot has been written about the fact that “Tears of Rage” is a slow song because, well, it’s the album opener. Nobody did that back then. It went against the conventional wisdom which said you always start your album with your radio-friendly fast song to really get the listener’s attention. But beyond that, I mean, just listen to it. The moment where Hudson’s staid organ announces the chorus suggests a deep reserve and gestures toward a dignified, panoramic world far beyond the song itself. To use a now overused word, Hudson’s organ contains lore. I really mean that. I see things when I hear it. My mind travels to a place, somewhere. I feel my whole body swell and get goosebumps every time that organ kicks in. And then Hudson’s earthy horn section comes up from below ground and punctuates the final word of the chorus, “brief,” and carries you gently into the next verse. It is just the cherry on top that moves me over the edge.

But for me, in terms of well-crafted restraint, it doesn’t get any better than the achingly beautiful horn duet that Hudson does at the end of “Unfaithful Servant” with The Band’s “sixth member,” producer John Simon. Woven from the repeating notes of Robertson’s acoustic guitar solo right before, the duet carries the song up into a perfectly-all-too-brief broken cry of Hudson’s soprano saxophone and into the closing, sensitive notes with Simon’s euphonium, where you can hear their breaths and the vibration of Hudson’s reed. You can watch Hudson and Simon play that duet here, and be treated to a bit of Hudson’s humor at the end that never fails to make me laugh.

Sadly, while recognized amongst fellow musicians for the odd genius that he is, Hudson’s talent was not sufficient to save him and his (recently departed) wife from financial troubles. At one point a few years ago, Hudson had to struggle to get his belongings back from a storage unit that was being auctioned off, which included the actual original Basement Tapes for god’s sake. Those things belong in a museum.

I just wish I lived in a world where Garth Hudson was a more recognizable name on the street than Jimmy Buffet, you know? That’s how I know there’s no such thing as justice in this life.

Anyway, I guess I’m just glad that Hudson is still around these days. I once had a hope that I would get to see at least one member of The Band play music in person. After the death of Levon Helm in 2012, I gave that dream up. But it’s nice to know that I live in a world where one of them is still kicking, or, in Hudson’s case at this point, rolling around. The Band already belongs to the ages. Probably nothing can beat the kick in the chest I felt when I heard that Levon Helm was on his deathbed. But I do know that, when the day finally comes, I will feel a little different about this world and my place in it, if ever so slightly, when Garth, the last of them, is borne away on those snow-white wings to join the angel band.

---