Garth Hudson, last surviving member of the Band, dies at 87

Garth Hudson, the Band’s virtuoso keyboardist and all-around musician who drew from a unique palette of sounds and styles to add a conversational touch to such rock standards as “Up on Cripple Creek,” “The Weight” and “Rag Mama Rag,” has died at age 87. Hudson was the eldest and last surviving member of the influential group that once backed Bob Dylan and helped deepen and reshape modern American music. His death was confirmed Tuesday on The Band’s social media accounts, which did not provide additional details.

Hudson had been living in a nursing home in upstate New York. A rustic figure with an expansive forehead and sprawling beard, Hudson was a classically trained performer and self-educated Greek chorus who spoke through piano, synthesizers, horns and his favored Lowrey organ. No matter the song, Hudson summoned just the right feeling or shading, whether the tipsy clavinet and wah-wah pedal on “Up on Cripple Creek,” the galloping piano on “Rag Mama Rag” or the melancholy saxophone on “It Makes No Difference.”

The only non-singer among five musicians celebrated for their camaraderie, texture and versatility, Hudson mostly loomed in the background, but he did have one showcase: “Chest Fever,” a Robbie Robertson composition for which he devised an introductory organ solo (“The Genetic Method”), an eclectic sampling of moods and melodies that segued into the song’s hard rock riff.

Robertson, the band’s guitarist and lead songwriter, died in 2023 after a long illness. Keyboardist-drummer Richard Manuel killed himself in 1986, bassist Rick Danko died in his sleep in 1999 and drummer Levon Helm died of cancer in 2012. The Band was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1994.

Formed in the early 1960s as a backing group for rocker Ronnie Hawkins, the Band was originally called The Hawks and featured the Arkansas-born Helm and four Canadians recruited by Helm and Hawkins: Hudson, Danko, Manuel and Robertson.

The Band mastered their craft through years of performing as unknowns — first behind Hawkins, then as Levon and the Hawks, then as the unsuspecting targets of outrage after hooking up with Dylan in the mid-1960s. All joined Dylan on his historic tours of 1965-66 (Helm departed midway), when he broke with his folk past and teamed with the Band for some of the most stirring and stormiest music of the time, enraging some old Dylan admirers but attracting many new ones. The group would rename itself the Band in part because so many people around Dylan simply referred to his backing musicians as “the band.”

By 1967, Dylan was in semi-seclusion, having allegedly broken his neck in a motorcycle accident, and he and the group settled in the artist community in Woodstock that two years later would become world famous thanks to the festival in nearby Bethel.

With no album planned, they wrote and played spontaneously in an old pink house outside of town shared by Hudson, Danko and Manuel. Hudson was in charge of the tape machine as Dylan and The Band recorded more than 100 songs.

Dylan resurfaced in late 1967 with the austere “John Wesley Harding,” and the Band debuted soon after with “Music from Big Pink,” its down home sound so radically different from the jams and psychedelic tricks then in fashion that artists from The Beatles to Eric Clapton to the Grateful Dead would cite its influence. The Band followed in 1969 with a self-titled album that many still consider its best and has often been ranked among the greatest rock albums of all time.

In recent years, Hudson struggled financially. He had sold his interest in the Band to Robertson and went bankrupt several times. He lost one home to foreclosure and saw many of his belongings put up for auction in 2013 when he fell behind on payments for storage.

The son of musicians, Hudson was born in Windsor, Ontario in 1937 and received formal training at an early age. He was performing on stage and writing before he was even a teenager, although by his early 20s he had soured on classical music and was playing in a rock band, the Capers.

Associated Press