On Tuesday, Garth Hudson, who played organ, accordion, saxophone and much more as a member of the band — perhaps still the group that best embodies the glorious, outlaw merging of styles at the heart of rock ‘n’ roll — died at the age of 80. . Eighty-seven, near Woodstock, New York. Hudson’s bandmates—guitarist Robbie Robertson, drummer Levon Helm, bassist Rick Danko, and pianist and multi-instrumentalist Richard Manuel—often described him as scholarly, intelligent, and discerning, a master of a freewheeling kind in a scene dominated by aesthetics. Clowns. Rockabilly singer Ronnie Hawkins, whom the band backed in the early 1960s, when they were still known as the Hawks, understood Hudson as a unique kind of man: “He would hear all sorts of strange voices in his head, and he would play like the Phantom of the Opera. . . . Most organists were In those days they played everything, but Garth would lie on his back, lick, and hit the trumpet. He knew exactly what to put in and what to leave out.”
Hudson was born on August 2, 1937 in Windsor, Ontario. As a teenager, he got a job as an organist at his uncle’s funeral parlor. “The Anglican Church has the best musical tradition of any church I know,” Hudson later told Barney Hoskins, author of “The Anglican Church.”Across the Great Divide: Band and America“It’s the old-fashioned vocal drive that gives it the counter-melodies and adds all those classical instruments that aren’t immediately there, but they add a little texture.” This influence is evident in Hudson’s playing, which features small, unexpected, almost unexpected characters; his style was broad Knowledgeable, but annoying. After high school, Hudson joined a band called the Silhouettes, which later became known as Paul London and the Capers. “Garth was very professional, and had a weird, dry sense of humor. It was kind of weird, but it wasn’t weird, London told Hoskins. (Funny, weird, but not so strange– Strange – if only we could all be described that way one day!)
Hudson played Laurie’s massive organ, the FL (or festival) model; It was purchased by the band in 1961, to help sweeten the deal after Hudson rejected the first several offers to join. (Hudson finally agreed after the band agreed to pay him an extra ten dollars each week to be their “music teacher,” a title that appeased his angry parents.) Helm credited Hudson with turning the band into a more legitimate outfit, telling Hoskins, “Once it was… We have a musician of Garth’s caliber in the band, and we are really starting to sound like a professional act.” After Hawkins left, the band toured on their own for a time, until Bob Dylan recruited them as his backing group in 1965 and 1966 – the infamous “going electric” years. In July of 1966, Dylan crashed his Triumph motorcycle outside Woodstock and took some time off to heal. (in “Records: Volume One“, Dylan doesn’t completely quash rumors that he may have exaggerated those injuries: “I was in a motorcycle accident and got hurt, but I recovered. The truth is, I wanted out of the rat race.)
Dylan’s accident changed things for the band. In the spring of 1967, Hudson, Danko, and Manuel moved into Big Pink, a rented house in West Saugerties, New York. In his diarycertificateRobertson describes it as “a pink ranch-style house set in the middle of a hundred acres—a mountain range, a good-sized pond, and nothing but space and wilderness all around.” They acquired some equipment, including a quarter-inch tape machine from Dylan’s house, and turned the Big Pink’s basement into a kind of dedicated recording studio. “When I asked the recording engineer to take a look at the basement, he said the concrete walls, glass basement windows, and large metal furnace would make the worst sound anyone had ever used to record music,” Robertson wrote. “For me, this was good news.” Over the next year, the band made “The Basement Tapes”, a series of demos with Dylan, and “Music from Big Pink”, two of the greatest rock ‘n’ roll recordings of the 1960s (although “The Basement Tapes” It was not officially released until 1975).
“It’s difficult to talk about Hudson’s contributions to the band’s discography without talking about the organ solo that opens.”Chest fever“, one of the best and strangest songs on “Music from Big Pink.” The band was not constitutionally prone to showboating and, in fact, seemed mostly sensitive to elaborate solos; their whole thing had a kind of smooth, flowing alchemy. Except, of course , “Chest Fever,” in which Hudson plays the opening motif of Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor,” then begins a dreamy, cinematic improvisation that somehow sets up the following: A song not It makes any kind of narrative sense (the lyrics were improvised during rehearsal and were never rewritten), and perhaps even less musically (in his memoirs, Helm wrote that “The Bridge has a funny tuneless Salvation Army feel to it.” The band feels). However, I find Chest Fever miraculous – a frightening and disturbing boogaloo.
Hudson was the oldest member of the band and, incidentally, the last living member, and the news of his death made me feel surprisingly alone. It seems wrong, somehow, that they’re all gone. Certainly part of this gloom can be attributed to some habitual quasi-social associations. I’ve now spent many a Thanksgiving night curled up on the couch, wearing my jacket, and eating spoonfuls of cold stuffing straight from the frying pan while watching “The Last Waltz” — the Martin Scorsese-directed documentary about the band’s final performance, in 1976 — which… I started thinking of Van Morrison, who came on stage to sing “Caravan,” while my uncle was drunk, kicking hard, exploding as his eyes closed involuntarily, “Now We can get to what’s really wrong, really wrong, really wrong, weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee Weyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!” But part of it has to do with the intimacy of the band’s music, which is so free, so warm, so tender and so palpably emotional, that it doesn’t sound like a cultural product meant for mass consumption but something private and quiet. ,just for me. “the weight“, perhaps the band’s most famous song, contains one of the most humane and compassionate choruses in rock history:
It’s possible, knowing the band’s lyrical leanings, that “Weight” is actually about the opposite experience, about the complete exhaustion of other people’s needs, but either way, it’s a song about helping and being helped, and that is to say, it’s a song about the human condition. When the band chimes in on the last line, well — I don’t know what makes you cry. I have a hard time singing along to this verse without my voice becoming a little wet and froglike. The idea of holding hands, taking care of each other, reappears in the swinging chorus to “Even on Cripple Creek“,” a song from the band’s self-titled second album. “If I leak, she fixes me / I don’t have to talk, she’s got my back,” sings Helm, his voice hot and loose. Hudson plays this little clavinet role throughout, playing a keyboard Keys through a wah-wah pedal It’s unexpected and ridiculous and funny and weird, but it’s not strange-Weird- It’s absolutely perfect forever. ♦
