Garth Hudson Preferred Speaking Music to Speaking, Say, English

David Hinckley
6 min readJan 22, 2025

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When I get my rock ’n’ roll time machine, one stop will be New Year’s Eve 1971 at New York’s Academy of Music, where The Band was wrapping up a four-night stand.

For the record, The Band gave incredibly good live shows in the early 1970s. Consistently masterful. That happens when the same five talented guys had been playing together for more than a dozen years.

Just before midnight at the Academy of Music, Garth Hudson kicked his Lowery organ into “Chest Fever,” which Band fans anticipated and adored at every show.

Garth Hudson.

With the dark beard and untamed hair, Garth Hudson looked to be half wildman, half mystery man. He was the only member of The Band who didn’t sing. He also didn’t seem to speak. He declined to do interviews because he claimed to be inarticulate, which was not true. He just didn’t want to do them. Which was fine.

When he played “Chest Fever,” which needed no lyrics to fill a room, it felt like this might be the closest we would come to knowing him. He rarely played it the same way twice, weaving rhythms that stayed in his head from jazz, gospel, Alan Freed, Beethoven, ouds and bouzoukis.

For a serious musician it was a master class. For civilians it was a splendid cruise through uncharted waters — and at the Academy of Music, he finished it up just before the stroke of midnight by seguing into “Auld Lang Syne.”

Few new years have gotten a better welcome.

“Looking back at Garth,” his late bandmate Robbie Robertson wrote in the autobiography Testimony, “I thought, ‘God only made one of those.’ . . . . [He was] an inspiration in showing how much a musical instrument has locked inside it, and how much you can truly get out of it.”

Garth Hudson was the last surviving member of The Band, which played together for some 16 years before splitting apart with another of rock ’n’ roll’s peak moments, the 1976 Last Waltz concert.

After that, the last waltzes came sequentially. Richard Manuel died in 1986, Rick Danko in 1999, Levon Helm in 2012 and Robertson in 2023. Hudson died Tuesday at a nursing home in Woodstock, N.Y. He was 87.

Right up to the end he did much of his talking through musical instruments, most of which he seemed to play. Organ, clarinet, violin, piano, accordion, French horn, saxophone, clavinet. The list goes on. A Raymond Foye video from 2018, soon after Hudson turned 80, shows him accompanying his wife Maud on a rendition of the Band gem “It Makes No Difference.” Wearing a black hat, hunched over the keyboard on what seems to have been a chilly August night, Hudson’s long fingers caress the keys like a master jeweler shaping a diamond.

If there’s a consensus on Hudson’s life from people who knew him, it’s that music was his first language. English was necessary to talk to the rest of the world, but music is what he spoke.

Hudson was raised in a musical family, middle class, and by the time he was in his early 20s he had played in churches, jazz sessions and a rock ’n’ roll band. He also had had a year of classical music training — Bach, guys like that — at Western Ontario University, though he chafed at the rigidity of classical musical studies. He liked taking what was there and doing something more with it.

All this made him a great potential catch for the four members of the rock ’n’ roll band that backed Ronnie Hawkins at the turn of the 1960s and quite logically was known as the Hawks.

The sticking point, as famously recounted by Robertson in the movie The Last Waltz, was that they had to convince Hudson’s parents he wasn’t wasting his talent or his education by joining another rock ’n’ roll band. The actual deal, Robertson explained in Testimony, was sealed by Hawkins, who promised Mr. and Mrs. Hudson that the other band members would pay Garth $10 a week to be their teacher.

Richard Manuel, Levon Helm, Rick Danko, Garth Hudson, Robbie Robertson in 1969.

It was the best $10 they ever spent. While the Hawks were already good musicians, Hudson would over the next 16 years provide much of the musical foundation that separated The Band from virtually every other band. He arranged, he tweaked, he played. Besides his routinely prominent keyboards on tunes like “The Weight,” that’s his accordion on “Rockin’ Chair,” just as it’s his accordion on Bob Dylan’s “When I Paint My Masterpiece.” That’s his sax on “Tears of Rage” and “Unfaithful Servant.”

He also drew consistently on his appreciation for music and musicians who came before, to the extent that he once suggested the group hire expatriot sax player Ben Webster to open for one of their German shows. The others eventually convinced him that a rock ’n’ roll audience might not be kind to an older jazz saxman. What he did sell to the others was putting a verse from “Darktown Strutters Ball” on the back jacket of their second album, The Band.

Back jacket of “The Band.”

At the April 1991 funeral of Henry Glover, an underappreciated early black music executive who had worked with The Band, Hudson played the ambient organ music and accompanied Annisteen Allen on “I Love Him, Yes I Do.”

As for the private Hudson, it stayed mostly private. He had narcolepsy, meaning he could fall asleep at any random moment. He had to file for bankruptcy after his Malibu home and studio were destroyed in a 1978 wildfire. He was married to Maud, who died in 2022, for 43 years.

Before the marriage, he seemed to largely stay away from rock ’n’ roll excess. He didn’t share, for instance, the serious drug habits of Danko, Manuel and Helm — perhaps, Robertson later suggested, because he had seen what drugs did to so many of the jazz players he admired. Robertson recalled one evening in Arkansas when the others were considering visiting some sketchy late-night entertainment facilities on the other side of the tracks, a plan that died when Hudson said, “Well, sometimes it’s better just to stay out of the way.”

Adding to the impact of that remark, undoubtedly, was Hudson’s low timbre and very slow enunciation, which he often preferred not to use. While he could talk for an hour on the history of jazz recording, he was not a fan of small talk.

He was a bit different from the other four, and not just because he was a little older with his own quirks — like buying orange juice and not drinking it for two days until he was sure all the pulp had settled. One time, after the group flew to Australia for short tour, he decided he would return to the States on an ocean liner. He loved tinkering with musical instruments and was apparently prone to explaining more than the others often wanted to hear about how an organ produced particular sonic effects.

That did not, however, suggest he was detached. Hudson was “a teacher,” Robertson wrote, “but much more. A sidekick. A brother in arms. Part of our street gang. I savored Garth for turning me on to the glorious sounds of Anglican choirs, Greek and Arabic sounds with rhythms accompanying hip-rattling belly dancers, classical musical maestros and their masterpieces, jazz masters’ unique tones and techniques. It broadened my sonic horizons as far as the ear could see.”

Hudson’s quiet demeanor also didn’t mean he took the world too seriously. When The Band was playing behind Dylan on Dylan’s first electric tour, and therefore was also the target of whatever blowback Dylan was hearing, Robertson recalls Hudson shrugging and saying, “You get up in the morning and you cut the grass. Or you go on stage and get booed. It’s the same thing.”

Critic Ralph Gleason once wrote that Hudson was “the first organ player since Fats Waller with a sense of humor.”

For our part, lacking a time machine, we only need to cue up “The Weight,” “Stage Fright,” “The Shape I’m In,” “When You Awake,” “I Shall Be Released,” “Up On Cripple Creek,” “It Makes No Difference,” “Caledonia Mission,” “Masterpiece,” “Atlantic City” or dozens of others — not forgetting Dylan’s “Forever Young” at the Last Waltz — to appreciate how a man known for his verbal silence spoke with timeless musical eloquence.

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David Hinckley
David Hinckley

Written by David Hinckley

David Hinckley wrote for the New York Daily News for 35 years. Now he drives his wife crazy by randomly quoting Bob Dylan and “Casablanca.”

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