The Old Man and the Keys (director's cut)

Going even longer on Garth Hudson

I had the honor of publishing a remembrance of the great Garth Hudson last week in The Ringer. I have often had the thought as I read various newsletters by writers I admire that, more than anything else, it reminds me of the value of editors. And I’m no exception: the piece at The Ringer is better for being more concise than this. But since Garth had such a profound influence on me as a musician, I have a bottomless appetite for trivia, quotes, and miscellaneous Garthiana (especially around his formative years), so I’m indulging myself and posting the un-edited (almost twice as long!) remembrance here for those who share my fascination.

It also gives me the opportunity for a correction—thanks to Michaelangelo Matos for raising the question. I claimed in the published version that Garth’s wah clavinet part on “Cripple Creek” directly inspired Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition.” It’s one those things you hear people say and I assumed I had a source for it, but on further investigation, I couldn’t find one. My best guess is it’s an exaggeration/misunderstanding of what Don Was says here. If anyone has more specific info please let me know; otherwise, mea culpa Stevie!

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Garth Hudson wasn’t the most magnetic, the most handsome, or the most financially successful, of The Band—a group George Harrison, of all people, called “the best band in the history of the universe.” He didn’t sing or compose. Of the many words written about them, he has the least written about him. He has the least screen time in The Last Waltz, the Martin Scorsese documentary of their final concert which cemented their mythology. His essentially settled and placid nature, and apparent lack of ego, made him a less obvious object of attention than the volatile and leonine Helm, the childlike Danko, the hapless Manuel, the canny Robertson. He mostly stayed out of the later Helm/Robertson blood feud. He passed through the Band’s narrative—from barnstorming bar band to super-sidemen to mystic mountain men to dissipated rock burnouts to ghost-band afterlife—seemingly unscathed, untouched by Helm’s bitterness or Manuel’s despair. He resisted, without visible effort, the temptation that led to the band’s physical and musical decline. Helm’s ex-wife Libby Titus remembered Hudson as “authoritative about music, distracted, in his own world. He was very funny in a subtle way and more careful than the rest of them. Garth didn’t tend to have bad traffic accidents or burn himself up. He was older and wiser, and everybody looked up to him.” It made sense that he, the oldest member of the band, and Robertson, the youngest, would be the last ones standing—the latter protected from the party boys’ early deaths by his savvy and practical-minded ambition; Hudson by his gently single-minded focus on perfecting the sonic and technical details of his musical vision. Meanwhile, his bandmates spoke of him with something like awe: “He could’ve been playing with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra or with Miles Davis,” said Robertson, “but he was with us, and we were lucky to have him.”

In his quiet way, it was Hudson as much as any of them who made the Band sound the way they did, by expanding their harmonic palette as songwriters and their aural palette as arrangers, the ever-expanding breadth and depth of his musical reference—Anglican hymns, Bach, country polka, parlor song, jazz, R&B—broadening what had been a very good bar band into a group which, at its best, seemed capable of summoning the whole of American vernacular music. “A tremendous amount of our musical sophistication—if there is any,” said Robertson, “really came from Garth.” Musician and Woodstock neighbor Artie Traum “always thought that the person who really shaped the sound was Garth.” “Although I loved the work of all The Band’s members,” said Pete Townshend, “it was and still is Garth Hudson’s work I found to be inspiring…Somehow Garth’s presence is what gives the entire album a feeling of an album by The Band.” Band producer John Simon said of the group, “They were sometimes a single organism: Rick, the heart; Richard, the soul; Levon, the guts; Garth, the intellect”—but that “Garth was a universe unto himself.” Newsweek in 1969 called him “a backwoods Bach.” Levon Helm said simply, “Garth made us sound like we did…[he was] the soul and presiding genius of our band.”

Eric Garth Hudson’s retelling of his childhood shares something with the imaginary of Charles Ives: the long tail of 19^th-century America, an inventive but culturally conservative world of Protestant farmers, tinkerers, and brass-band fathers. Hudson was an only child, born in Windsor, Ontario in 1937. Hudson’s parents Olive and Fred soon moved to London—farther from the American border but, crucially, still within range of Detroit and Cleveland radio. To refer, as he did, to his family as “farm people” implies more hardscrabble circumstances than is perhaps strictly accurate: Fred Hudson was an entomologist working for the Canadian government researching the spread of Japanese beetles and Dutch elm disease. But they undoubtedly shared in the small-town sensibility of the Ontario farming community, with its Anglican values and Victorian tradition of amateur musicianship. His father and two uncles played drums and woodwinds in local dance bands: “Dad had a C-melody saxophone. He’d get it out every year or so, put a handkerchief on it, and play sweet band music like the Lombardos, Guy and Carmen, who were from nearby London.” His mother’s Soprani accordion had pride of place next to their piano, and Garth eventually picked up both, along with his father’s saxophone. The Hudson family piano was a player model, so he both “heard and watched music being played.” (Not realizing that some of the rolls were four-hands arrangements led to some technical challenges as he tried to imitate them, a formative misunderstanding he shared with Art Tatum.) When he finally pieced together “Yankee Doodle,” his persistent playing annoyed his parents enough that they sent him down the street to his first piano teacher, one Nellie Milligan. A traditionalist related to the Bluthner piano manufacturing family, Ms. Milligan drilled him in Czerny and Schmitt exercises and the sight-reading of hymn books, and impressed upon him the importance of subtlety of touch: “I remember her saying that her father [could] play a scale that would make you cry.”

Eventually his parents sent him to Toronto’s Royal Conservatory of Music (contemporary alums included Paul Shaffer and Steppenwolf organist Goldy McJohn), where he first encountered his beloved Bach. The serious but idiosyncratic young man found it difficult, though, to accommodate to conservatory training. “I loved Chopin, and Mozart amazed me. But I found I had problems memorizing [notated] music.” Like many young musicians who don’t quite fit the harness of classical pedagogy, he devised ad hoc workarounds: “I developed my own method of ear training and realized I could improvise…I would memorize shapes and forms…you begin to see form.” Even as his technical capabilities—extraordinary by rock standards—made him a valuable commodity, he occasionally expressed a practice-room jock’s regret over the woodshedding he gave up: “I found out I could improvise; I probably found out too young,” he told TIME magazine in 1970.

His practical training, though, was hardly limited to the classical canon: “My first record—I still have it—was a 78 with a chip in it: ‘Wild Old Horsey’ with ‘Gee It’s Great To Be Living Again’ on the other side. It was kind of country swing put out by a political-religious movement of the late 1940s called MRA: Moral Rearmament of America…I sort of grew up with country music because my father would find all the hoedown stations on the radio.” He took accordion lessons (“still one of my favorite instruments”), and “played accordion with a little country group when I was twelve.” A high-school teacher enlisted Hudson to transcribe big band arrangements from recordings, which the teacher used in his group. He sang in a boy choir, played trumpet and saxophone, and “backed up the high-school variety shows and the choirs” with a group called the Three Blisters: “We got the most applause of any of the acts…The next year [we were called] the ‘Four Quarters’ and we had a little show. I played accordion in it and we ended up with three trumpets and drums playing ‘Chinatown, My Chinatown’ in three-part harmony.”

Two musical experiences in particular shaped his sensibility: Anglican church music, then American R&B and rock and roll. Raised in the Anglican diocese of Huron, he worked as a summer and Sunday school organist at St. Luke’s Anglican Church. To better understand the instrument, his father bought “two or three” melodeons—reed organs—which he and Garth took apart, restored and repaired. His first experience playing in public, though, was as an accompanist at his uncle’s funeral parlor, where, assisted by his aunt, he assembled a repertoire of Anglican and Baptist hymns: “What A Friend We Have In Jesus,” “Softly and Tenderly Jesus Is Calling,” “Jesus Keep Me Near The Cross,” “Abide With Me,” “Dear Lord and Father of Mankind, Forgive Our Foolish Ways.” The genteel and unpretentious lay liturgy appealed to Hudson’s sensibility, while its connection to the Bach chorales he loved engaged his analytical, intellectual tendencies: “The Anglican church has the best musical traditions of any church that I know of. It’s the old voice leading that gives it the countermelodies and adds all those classical devices which are not right out there, but which add a little texture.”

While church work encouraged Hudson’s dutiful and familial side, he had become aware of and fascinated by a more Dionysian outlet. “[In] either 1952 or 1953—I started to tune into Alan Freed’s Moondog Matinee from Cleveland”—the pioneering rock and roll radio show. “That’s when I realized there were people over there were having more fun than I was.” Encouraged by the example of local London-based rock bands like the Melodines, he and some friends put together a group called the Silhouettes. Eventually he hooked up with a rockabilly outfit, eventually known as Paul London and the Capers (or Kapers), playing Little Richard covers at “teen hops and similar things,” backing touring acts (Bill Haley, Johnny Cash, the Everly Brothers), making the bar scene in Detroit, and recording a few singles as one of the few white acts on Detroit R&B imprints.

At this point he was still a horn player, “the only guy in London who knew how to play rock and roll saxophone,” under the influence of hard-edged soloists like Clifford Scott. (The lineage of “the tenor saxophone from 1943 to 1958 in rhythm and blues and rock and roll,” as he put it with customary specificity, remained a Hudson fixation.) “I originally wanted to play piano in the band,” he said later, “but it turned out to be more fun to play the saxophone.” When he eventually did switch to piano, he approached rock technique with the same seriousness he’d applied to Bach: “To learn what to play, I listened real close to Johnnie Johnson, Chuck Berry’s piano player. I wanted to play organ, but I couldn’t afford the one I wanted”—the unusual Lowrey which later became his signature instrument in The Band. (One thing he never had ambitions to do was sing: “The last time I sang [in public] was in an old dance hall with a big band. I think I sang [Lionel Hampton’s] “Hey! Ba Ba Re Bop” and was getting the words mixed up. I looked down and there was a young couple dancing and they had this strange look on their faces…That was the last time I sang in public with a band.”)

Hudson was an awkward fit in the teeny-bop world—frontman Paul London (nee Hutchins) remembered him as “very professional, with a strange, dry sense of humor…kinda weird, but not weird weird”—though not quite the chaste, reserved figure he seemed in the context of the roistering Band. “He’d jump up and down while he played the accordion,” said London; and Hudson’s attraction to rock and roll was hardly monkish: “It all started with the reaction I got from girls because I was a musician. I thought if I could get that many girls phoning me up, I should really get into it. There’s the power of a musician. I used to have chicks phoning me all the time.”

Hudson became, wrote Band biographer Barney Hoskyns, a “little legend” in the small world of Ontario rock, and was courted for poaching by Toronto rockabilly kings Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks—a mixed ensemble of Canadians and Americans that would, within a few years, evolve into the Band. “He was as interested in good polka music as he was in J.S. Bach,” said Helm. “We had to have Garth.”

For his part, Hudson was skeptical about a personality clash with the hedonist Hawks, and questioned whether he had a strong enough left hand for the pounding rock piano style: “I thought, I can’t play this music. I don’t have the left hand these guys do…The whole thing was too loud, too fast, too violent for me…I wasn’t interested in that kind of music at the time. I liked chord changes and music that was a little more ‘uptown.’” Fortunately, the Hawks already had a piano player in the engine room. Hudson later liked to refer to Richard Manuel as an “energy player;” Manuel, more usefully, said he played “rhythm piano,” which clarifies the general roles they would come to occupy: Manuel a heavy-pawed accompanist with rooted in Tin Pan Alley, Ray Charles, and New Orleans blues; Hudson the lead player, a spiralling melodist. “Richard,” said Hudson, “had this great rhythmic feel, so I never had to play the heavy left-hand stuff.” (When Hudson occasionally rotated to the piano chair, for the chromatic octave fills of “The Weight” or the spokes-flying barrelhouse of “Rag Mama Rag,” the difference was immediately apparent.)

There were two roadblocks. The first was Olive and Fred Hudson, who feared that joining a touring rock outfit would be a squandering of their son’s training: “Unfortunately,” Garth deadpanned, “in order to become acquainted with the idiom of rock and roll music it is occasionally necessary to play in a bar.” Hawkins, a charismatic performer with unlimited faith in his own charm, made a pilgrimage to the Hudson household. As the oft-told story goes, he convinced them that the band would be hiring Garth not just as keyboardist, but as a music teacher for the other members—at an extra ten dollars a week. In practice, these “lessons” were more suggestions than organized instruction—bassist Rick Danko, for one, groused at the proposition that he practice scales. “We had to go along with it because we wanted him to play in the band,” said Robertson. “Eventually it fizzled out.” “I never taught music to them,” said Hudson later. “It was always some kind of advice on learning music…I wrote some new chord changes and harmonies and told everyone what was hip and what was corny.” Essentially, he expanded the band’s harmonic vocabulary. “Garth showed us some shortcuts to more sophisticated chord progressions,” wrote guitarist Robbie Robertson in his memoir. “When we were practicing or learning some new songs, we’d get stuck and we’d say, ‘Hey Garth. How do we do this?’ He’d always have the answer.” He engaged in pedagogy by example, with the help of his trained ear. “He’d listen to a song on the radio,” wrote Helm, “and tell us the chords as it went along. Complicated chord structures? No problem. Garth would figure them out, and we found ourselves able to play anything. Our horizons were lifted.” (Hudson was later hired to transcribe and create lead sheets of Leonard Cohen’s songs for his music publishing registrations.) His sax playing gave the group a professional sheen and “a soul-band horn section when we needed one,” moving the Hawks, Helm said, “toward a more R&B feel from the rockabilly we’d been playing.”

But first, the Hawks had to buy him his dream Lowrey Festival organ. Hudson had worked briefly for the Ontario-based Minshall Organ Company (later Minshall-Estey), demonstrating its product at sales fairs and exhibitions. He was seduced, though, by a competitor, Lowrey of Chicago. He had seen a Detroit band using the Lowrey in 1959, while making the scene with Paul London at a rock bar called Ted’s Ten High. Hudson was impressed particularly by a foot switch, meant to approximate the effect of a Hawaiian guitar, which bent the pitch of a note down a half-step. (Hudson, wanting the glissando “longer and deeper,” modified this effect—in consultation with Band tech Ed Andrews and Lowrey engineer Albert Kniepkamp—to allow a pitch bend of a full step.) He also appreciated its reedy sound, which had “a slow attack with a sound [more] like an accordion or an old pump organ, [which] gave it an old-timey feel.” Hudson later pointed to “Tears of Rage,” the opening track on Music From Big Pink, as an example of the Lowrey’s expressive versatility as an arranging tool: “For the first part of the piece, the Lowrey is soft, a pure sound, like a muffled flute with no vibrato in the background of the verse. In the chorus, it sounds like a melodeon or harmonium, an old pump organ, accordion-like with a slow attack. The Hammond organ does not do this.”

The Hammond was, then and now, the hegemonic organ in rock. Hudson had technical explanations for why he preferred the Lowrey, feeling that it better “complement[ed] the voices” of the Band: “The Lowrey has a wider harmonic structure. It has, I think, twenty-seven different harmonics at various levels to get a sound, while the Hammond has eight or nine.” The Lowrey “had certain things a Hammond couldn’t do”: designed to be a home organ, it had—in addition to a theater organ’s selection of novelty effects—subtler and more quirky timbres, stereo outputs that could be routed to different Leslie cabinets for more woozy options, and “a buzz…a breath, [a] human element.” (Bob Dylan disliked the Lowrey, having become attached to the Hammond sound used by Al Kooper, but Hudson insisted and, backed by his bandmates, prevailed.) “A Hammond produces a very recognisable sound that is hard to vary,” said Pete Townshend, who, inspired by Hudson, used a Lowrey for the distinctive effects on the Who songs “Baba O’Riley” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” “But the Lowrey range was always more eccentric, and suits experimentation far better.” Essentially, Hudson wanted to avoid the Hammond cliches which were already endemic. “He wanted to be Garth Hudson, not a Jimmy Smith,” said Hawkins.

“It took us six months to save up enough money to buy the Lowrey organ,” said Rick Danko. Once they had, Hudson remembered, they “drove a hundred miles an hour from Toronto to Detroit,” bought the organ and a compact Leslie 145 speaker, and the lineup of the eventual Band—a slick social climber, three good-time Charlies, and a genius—was set.

Hudson was generally spared the armchair diagnoses that might accompany a shy eccentric with obsessive tendencies, who preferred listing obscure gear and sidemen to emotional excavation. He was euphemistically referred to as odd, or private, or “in another world.” His bandmates talked about him as a kind of holy fool, sweet, acquiescent, humble, accommodating and disassociated. “Garth was distant, as Garth was to a lot of people,” said Band road manager Jonathan Taplin. “Garth was in many ways an enigma,” wrote Robertson. “He had narcolepsy and could fall asleep at any time…He claimed he didn’t sweat, no matter how hot it got. He would buy orange juice but wait for two days to drink it until all the pulp had sunk to the bottom. He would eat around the seeds of a tomato.” But, he concluded, Garth “operated on his own wavelength and never bothered anybody.” Helm in particular took a protective, motherly tone about him, his reverence at Hudson’s capabilities never quite dissipated from the early days as their ostensible teacher. “People said Garth lived in his own little world,” said John Simon, “but it was a big world.”

He spoke elliptically, in a free-associative monotone croak (one writer referred to “the oddly measured, august cadence of a 19th-century scholar”) with a lateral lisp that became more pronounced as he aged: “Occasionally I speak properly, but literacy has never been my forte; I was never one for words.” Richard Thompson remarked on Hudson’s “fascinating, and disconcerting, ability to continue the last conversation you happened to be having with him, even after a gap of years.” Interviewers had to adjust to his deliberate pacing and accustom themselves to gnomic digression and an aversion to emotional introspection. His memory of The Last Waltz, for example, focuses on details of a malfunctioning Leslie speaker; his recollections of the Big Pink period involve domestic arrangements—“Richard did the cooking, I did the vacuuming.” (He was fastidious: “Garth washed all the dishes,” said Danko. “He didn’t trust anyone else to do them because he wanted them clean.”) He was unaffected by the drugs and paranoia of the Dylan tours—“You get up in the morning and mow the lawn, or you get up on stage and get booed. What’s the difference?”[1] “He was just so firmly balanced, so planted,” remembered filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker. “He’d go whole days without speaking. We’d walk around and see places together, but not necessarily talk at all. I felt very close to him.” (Hudson took an ocean liner home from London at the end of the 1966 tour). The sentimental power of music amounted, it sometimes appeared, to just another technical challenge. “I once asked Garth,” said Danko, “about getting away with what he gets away with. And his reply was that he used to play at his uncle's funeral parlor. He’d just listen to the eulogy. And when it was time to push the buttons that made people cry, he would push those buttons.”

A gentle giant with a high forehead and receding hairline, Hudson, when the Band relocated to the Woodstock area, embraced the identity of hillbilly oddball, “the mountain man,” as Taplin put it, “in his cabin high above the reservoir.” The Band’s rustic image was always a bit of a put on—these were, after all, seventies rock stars, with all the womanizing and indulgence that implies. But Hudson went native with gusto and evident sincerity. He grew out his beard, took up pipe-smoking, trucker caps, and the wide-brimmed Amish-style hats that became his signature performance attire in later years. He collected guns and knives—even, on occasion, molding his own bullets. He settled in the nearby hamlet of Glenford, studied architecture, worked on building his house, and taught Helm how to dowse for water with a bent stick. “He was less of a hell raiser and more of a scholar” than his bandmates, said Titus, “but he was still very primitive. I’ll never forget seeing him skin a deer that had been hit in the road” by the glow of Helm’s headlights. He was a good neighbor. Musician Geoff Muldaur remembers Hudson dropping in to sit at Muldaur’s piano and play Bix Biederbecke’s “In A Mist”—“a strange cat, but he couldn’t be any sweeter.” “Garth was so dear,” said Maria Muldaur. “He would come down the hill and say, ‘Well, I’m getting my snow plow out today—you want me to plow you out?’ He was a darling man.’”

Rock writer Ralph Gleason called him “the first organ player since Fats Waller with a sense of humor,” and his droll wit was underrated by people who thought him, perhaps, a bit simple. Take his accounting of touring as a series of chairs:

First, you get in a car and go somewhere to sit and wait in someone’s living room. Then you all go to a meeting place and sit and wait for everybody. Next you sit in a car on the way to the airport, and when you get there, you sit in another chair waiting to clear the tickets. Then you move to another chair in the waiting room ‘til you get a seat on the plane where you’re stuck for a couple of hours. You get off the plane and go to the waiting room where you're tempted to sit down until you get to the hotel to try and get freshen up. That’s eleven chairs already. The limousine comes and then you wait at the gig in an armchair. When you go on stage, in my case, I just have to sit down when I play. On the way back to the hotel or to another gig, it’s the whole thing all over again. There are about eighty chairs in a weekend—for sure sixty chairs. If you do it in different weekends there are 240 different chairs in a row. That’s a drag unless you really want to become an expert on chairs. I’ve often thought of going into the furniture business.

When the Band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, he stepped up to the podium and announced, “This’ll be short and sweet,” before spending several minutes listing obscure names from the band’s past—Thumbs Carllile?—and giving a short lecture on tenor sax players from the early rock period, as Danko and Robertson looked on bemused.

For all his deflection and diplomacy, he could occasionally let slip an opinion on Band dynamics. When Robertson, in an interview, seemed to diminish Hudson’s role in songwriting—“with Garth, every time we sat down it was like a musical journey into the cosmos, a lesson in improvisation. Beautiful stuff came out of it, but no defined structures, nothing I could repeat or build upon”—Hudson pushed back in his understated way: “Now as then, I provided and placed a thesaurus of melodies for the writer to capture.” (What this meant in practice can perhaps be seen in another Robertson quote: “If I was trying to do a song that was on the verge of being a little more sophisticated than what we normally did, Garth would help me with the chord structures. I’d say, ‘I’m playing this, Garth, but there’s something missing, something wrong.’ And I’d have my hands on the piano and he’d just come over and hit a note between my fingers that would complete the chord I was really imagining against the melody I was singing. Or if I heard a horn line in my head, Garth would always know where to take it.”) Still, Hudson said elsewhere, “I didn’t contribute [lyrically] the same way as everybody else. I’d be around when songs were written, and I’d try to think of something silly to put in. Maybe I was just envious of the writers who were filling up yellow legal pads.”) His doggedly literal-minded answers to interviewers provided an implicit contrast to Robertson’s pompous self-mythologizing. And he seemed to endorse a criticism sometimes levelled at the Band, that their vaunted democratic ethos which rejected having a designated “frontman” also exposed a kind of weakness in a group which had, after all, spent the bulk of its career as a backing group—and a hint to the enduring appeal of the guest-filled Last Waltz. Despite their reputation as a ferocious live act, contemporary reports sometimes criticized the Band as alienating and inward-looking on stage without a welcoming or focusing presence at the center. “That one feature we did really well,” Hudson once said, was “accompanying a singer.”

Hudson was, indeed, an unusual fit for the Hawks. He “spoke seriously and deliberately,” said Helm, “and whored around less than us.” “Garth was not an orgy guy,” Jonathan Taplin told the podcast The Band: A History—he’d stay in his hotel room on the road and practice soprano sax. “When [the group] started to get into money, everybody else bought fancy cars…[Garth] spent most of his money on musical instruments.” Robertson said Garth “looked like someone who hadn’t been out in broad daylight for ages,” that “at 24, he was exactly the same as at 50…He talked real slow, [and] was always inventing something, figuring something out.” “He heard all sorts of weird sounds in his head,” said bandleader Ronnie Hawkins, “and he played like the Phantom of the Opera. He wasn’t a rock and roll person at all, but it fitted [sic]. Most organ players in those days would just play through everything, but Garth would lay back, hit licks, hit horn shots.”

But it was the piano and organ doubling of Hudson and Manuel that was the foundation (Robertson called the instrumentation “secure”) of what became the Band sound—“that’s what we built on,” said Helm, “until we really thought we were the best band in the world.” The piano/organ combo (“sometimes drums, usually drums, but very subtle guitar,” said Hudson) was familiar in the late ‘50s gospel music the group loved—Hudson pointed to The Caravans’ “To Who Shall I Turn” as a model—but still unusual in rock. Guitarist Robertson mostly eschewed power chords for single-note melodies or Curtis Mayfield-inspired double stops, and Hudson’s organ handled the bulk of the soloing. The instrumentation proved immensely influential, notably in the E Street Band (Roy Bittan’s piano melodies in right-hand octaves also share more than a little DNA with Hudson’s fills in, for example, “The Weight”), or in Benmont Tench’s double-handed double duty in the Heartbreakers.

He took his role as aural set designer seriously. “One of the goals in orchestrating Band songs was to make the background or keyboard work somehow fit an era, or imply a certain life situation…considering the meaning of the words, and the time period” in which the song took place. (Similarly, when working with Bob Dylan, he tried to connect his organ parts with “the imagery of his lyrics. I was allowed to play with these words…I would try to introduce some little thing…which might have something to do with the words that were going by.”) The “Salvation Army horn section” of Garth on sax and John Simon on baritone horn was one Ivesian sonic marker for their 19^th-century imaginary, as well as Hudson’s wheezing accordions, organ effects, and the various “good old horns” he found during habitual pawnshop visits on the road. (He also collected old sheet music, and maintained a road book—a “captain’s log”—of instrument repair shops, later fantasizing about “writing a book and manual for the working musician…a pocket sized, leather bound manual with gold embossed letters TSS, code for Top Secret Stuff.”) The group nicknamed him H.B., for “Honey Boy,” because, said Helm, “at the end of the day, after the other instruments were put away, Garth was still in the studio sweetening the tracks, stacking up those chords, putting on brass, woodwinds, whatever was needed to make that music sing.” (Garth, said John Simon, preferred to overdub overnight.) He was resistant to repeating himself: “Garth was like musical ketchup,” said Stage Fright producer Todd Rundgren. “You could put [him] on anything. No two takes were alike.” As the Band’s career progressed, though, Hudson said it became “harder for me to find something different for each song.”

His drive for novelty was powered by his technical proficiency—Taplin called him “a born tinkerer.” In addition to the hot-rodded Lowrey, he commissioned a custom Leslie speaker with directional rotation to achieve a kind of Doppler effect. He was the de facto engineer of the so-called “Basement Tapes,” recording experiments, sketches, and publishing demos with The Band and Bob Dylan (as well as a group called the Bengali Bauls) in their cinder-block basement with a pair of microphones—borrowed from Peter, Paul, and Mary via their shared management—perched atop the hot-water heater. (Hudson made a rare vocal appearance in a Basement Tape recitation called something like “Even If She Looks Like A Pig.”) He built a pipe organ in his shed, from parts. He was, said Danko, “interested in Scriabin around then,” and the possibilities of synaesthesia. In the studio for the Band’s debut album, he put his organ speakers in a booth against the wall, so he could overdrive them while still getting a muffled tone he liked. He triggered a Rocksichord with a telegraph key for a special effect in “This Wheel’s On Fire.” He played the weeping, harmonica-like melodica in the verses of “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” with the instrument wedged against one leg while playing the Lowrey with the other hand (“kinda tricky”). He rigged up a talk-box for Helm on their cover of “Ain’t Got No Home.” And, on “Up On Cripple Creek,” he innovated the use of the wah-wah pedal on a Clavinet, for a jaws-harp effect like that later used by Stevie Wonder for “Superstition.” “Some people want to know how a watch works,” said Robertson, “and other people just want to know what time it is”—Hudson was emphatically the former. Hudson would, said arranger Allen Toussaint, “tinker with things to get tiny different sounds and work ever so long to get a slightly different sound…You’d wonder, was it worth it? But when you heard the final things [you’d think] ‘Oh yes, that’s the difference in him and all the other players in the world.’”

Hudson became a more prominent part of the Band sound as the group’s recording career stumbled along, if only because he and Robertson were the members who could be relied on to turn up for work. “Garth and I showed up every day on time, hoping the other guys would follow suit,” wrote Robertson. (“Garth would have a little toke once in a while, but nothing more than that,” said Taplin. “Only if a piece of equipment got damaged would he flip out and sulk.”) When the group relocated to Malibu in the 1970s, Hudson had the time, budget, and track space to experiment with new synthesizer technology—Moogs, ARPs, and more—enlivening the Band’s lackluster latter-day records (by 1977, the Times acknowledged him as “the dominant player”). By the late-career highlight Northern Lights, Southern Cross, Greil Marcus wrote, “he wrap[ped] his sound around The Band, enfolding their performance with a warmth of spirit.”

Like his bandmates, the press had a tendency to exoticise Hudson with a mix of bewilderment and veneration: “a bearded, big-browed Thor in the back,” “a combination of Beethoven and U.S. Grant,” “one part Rick Wakeman and one part Civil War…more peculiar than persuasive.[2]” TIME, in their 1970 cover story, called him “beyond question the most brilliant organist in the rock world. His improvised variations, drawn from a vast knowledge of popular and classical music, provide both decorative scrollwork and depth to The Band's total impact. He also sprinkles each number with unexpected and attractive sounds that always seem to come as a predictable surprise, like the emergence of a cuckoo from a cuckoo clock.” His signature showcase was an extended improvisation, usually culminating in the organ riff to “Chest Fever,” which the group came to call “The Genetic Method” (after book of speculative ethnomusicology Hudson was reading). Hudson, said Robertson, “was able to combine in twenty seconds of playing ten uniquely different influences, and you could hear them all. You could hear church music but it wasn’t gospel music, it was high Anglican mixed with a little of Bach and a little bit of Earl Bostic. All of these elements were at his fingertips and he could access these things quicker and more brilliantly…it seemed completely seamless.” In a famous incident, the Band’s set at Watkins Glen (for a then-record crowd of 600,000) was interrupted by rain. The group had left the stage, but as Helm tells it, “Garth has a couple of sociable pulls on this whiskey his homeboy has, and all of a sudden the roadies are shouting and scrambling, and Garth climbs into his organ seat and starts to play by himself. It was extra-classic Hudsonia: hymnody, shape-note singing, gospel, J.S. Bach, Art Tatum, Slim Gaillard…the rain petered out. Just like that. It seemed clear to me that master dowser Garth had stopped the rain.”[3] In post-Band years, these improvisations would move to piano, and integrate new enthusiasms—cocktail jazz, Stephen Foster, Leo Ferre, Hawaiian music, norteno, Eastern European accordion[4]. There is considerable overlap with the more valorized improvisations of Keith Jarrett on tracks like “Every Time I See The Sun.” Not infrequently, he offered them to interviewers in lieu of verbal answers. It seemed to be the way he preferred to communicate, to illuminate his interests and the musical connections he intuited directly, by example.

His participation was crucial to the reunited Band tours of the ‘80s, when the musicianship of his compatriots (sans Robertson) had begun to deteriorate. “If Garth says yes, we will [tour],” said Helm in 1984. “Garth is the key—the one who will rub off on the rest of us and make us sound real good, too.” (At one point, Helm said that if the show was Hudson and any other musicians, it could be billed as The Band.) Though he joined the reconstituted group—he needed the money, among other things—Garth said touring hurt his technique: “The road’s okay. I had a considerable piano technique built up; I was out to kill. But when I got on the road, I lost it. On the road, you don’t practice…It’s a route to deterioration.” He was typically unsentimental about his recorded legacy with the Band. In 2010, he said he hadn’t listened to Band records for years. When he did—“it’s a good thing for someone to do at one point every thirty years, check it out, see what you did then”—his review was, simply, “I was satisfied that I had done my job, that I fulfilled the role.”[5]

It is perhaps worth pondering for a moment, when considering his legacy with The Band, Hudson’s contribution to the whiteness of the group. Not as a pejorative, necessarily—although Ta-Nahesi Coates has written about his visceral reaction against “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” calling it “the blues of Pharaoh”—but as a sonic marker of (mostly) working-class identity. When the band, then best known for backing Dylan, was trying to choose a name to go on their record contract, they seriously considered calling themselves The Crackers or The Honkies. Their homespun image, which was a crucial element of the evolution of the vague genre of “Americana,” was one of rural whiteness: the Scotch-Irish whiteness of Appalachia, the proletarian English whiteness of the South, and the contested, liminal whiteness of the francophone Acadians (Americanized to “cajuns”) who connected Helm’s deep southern heritage to that of his Canadian bandmates. Hudson was capable of the funky Clavinet that put him in the conversation with Stevie Wonder, but also of what Greil Marcus once called “the whitest organ playing imaginable—circa 1900 Episcopal funeral music so palely genteel it could lighten the skin of the janitor.” His chosen instrument was not the gospel-associated B3, but the more Victorian-domestic Lowrey; his church music not gospel but Anglicanism; his musical core not the soul of Ray Charles and Bobby “Blue” Bland that animated Manuel or the devotion to the blues of Muddy Waters and Sonny Boy Williamson that leavened Helm’s redneck affect, but Bach. The mythos Robertson created owed a great deal to Helm’s southern upbringing, but also to Hudson’s aural evocations of the minstrel and medicine shows, the shape-note singers and hillbilly squeezeboxers, the pre-rock sonic popular detritus of white North America.

Hudson spent the decades following The Last Waltz on a steady string of sessions. That’s him in the background of Robertson’s solo record, as well as middle-Boomer offerings from the likes of Ringo Starr, Taj Mahal, Steve Miller, Eric Clapton, Emmylou Harris, Van Morrison, Don Henley, Robert Palmer, Leonard Cohen, and others. He joined Marianne Faithfull’s touring band, and, later, a Flying Burrito Brothers spinoff called Burrito Deluxe; and had a moment of MTV rotation with the younger new-wave band The Call. He was a consultant for Yamaha on the development of their new digital synthesizers. He experimented with their Disklavier, reproducing the Hudson family player piano for the digital age. While the sheer irreproducibility of the combination of his broad musical vocabulary and his doctored Lowrey may have limited the influence of his idiosyncractic idiolect, his presence on record remained a commodity. Mercury Rev, on their Deserters Songs, used guest appearances by Hudson and Helm to tie themselves to the Woodstock legacy. A more or less unbroken string of invitations, from Tom Petty and Los Lobos, through Camper Van Beethoven, to Secret Machines and Neko Case kept his discography humming along.

His bank account didn’t follow. Despite the resumption of Band touring (if not writing), Hudson suffered three bankruptcies, the loss of his Big Oak Basin Dude Ranch in a Malibu brushfire, and the theft of many of his golden-years keyboards and accordions from a storage space. In 2013, the contents of another loft in Kingston, N.Y.—which he rented after his house was foreclosed—were auctioned off after eleven years and a reported $60,000 in unpaid rent, after what the New York Times called “years of unanswered correspondence, a second eviction in 2010, and an unsuccessful attempt to coordinate a fundraiser for Mr. Hudson with other Band members.” (Rolling Stone added that the stash apparently included an uncashed royalty check from 1979 to the tune of $26,000.)[6] He, along with Danko and Manuel, sold his share of the Band’s publishing and legacy to Robertson, saying only “The deal was made. It was a good job. And I got out of it alive.[7]”

The one thing Hudson didn’t do in the ‘80s and ‘90s was release music under his own name. “I’ve never seen someone more able, and less willing, to take the spotlight,” said producer Janine Nichols, who worked with him on a collection of Disney songs. 1980’s “Our Lady Queen Of The Angels,” a Moog-heavy ambient soundtrack to an immersive installation by sculptor Tony Duquette (including natural sounds, and a Ray Bradbury poem read by Charlton Heston), wasn’t released until 2005. His jammy solo debut The Sea To The North (2002) exists in two versions, the second a “Collector’s Edition” for some reason re-ordered and shortened. (It includes a rare vocal performance, a brief recitation during a cover of the Grateful Dead’s “Dark Star.” “I sang once in 1953 or ‘54, when I was with Buddy Brown and the College Men,” he said in an interview. “One couple was up dancing and another stood by the stage looking up at me with no expression in their eyes. It paralyzed me for years.”) Probably the best available distillation of Hudson’s live appearances and his unfiltered aesthetic —improvisations, selected classic Band songs, hymns and Balkan accordion, and eclectic covers including the standard “Willow Weep For Me” and The Coasters’ “Young Blood”—is Live at the WOLF, credited to Garth and Maud Hudson.

Garth met Sister Maud—as he liked to call her—around 1978, shortly after The Last Waltz. The former Maud Kagle was singing on a Hirth Martinez session that Robertson was producing. “Hirth and his wife said I should stay for dinner with Garth,” she said, “so I stayed and couldn’t get him out of my mind.” For someone who had been in rock bands since his teen years, Hudson was a restrained presence in that louche era: “Groupies don’t come up to me because I’m the old man. Oh sure, they’re around, but I just don’t get into it. It’s usually too much hassle. Unless, of course, it’s a day of spring in the middle of winter, but those chicks—it’s just not real. God bless them just the same.” Maud and Garth married in Utah (Maud was, and remained, Mormon) in 1979, and remained a constant presence in Garth’s life, as a gatekeeper, publicist, manager, and collaborator. “We’re both old-fashioned,” Maud said of their long marriage. “We’re a…viable entity…in-house partners…partners in transactions,” Garth said with customary pragmatism. After multiple car accidents (endemic in Band history) Maud had chronic spinal trouble, was sometimes confined to a wheelchair, and, wrote a reporter, Garth “fusses constantly over her.” The couple were nocturnal—playing music, listening to college radio (he taped and catalogued the polka/norteno show on SUNY New Paltz’s WFNP), meeting journalists for 3am interviews at all-night Kingston diners—retiring each morning just after sunrise.

I should admit to a deep bias toward Garth Hudson. My encounter with The Basement Tapes as a teenager made me pick up my father’s accordion (Hudson was perhaps the lone advocate from the rock and pop world, for the accordion during its long cultural eclipse). The hobo-formal vision of The Band in Elliott Landy’s sepia photographs—as well as the carnivalesque Basement Tapes cover—directed me toward a stage attire that I could use as well as a twenty-year-old as a middle-aged man. I finally got to see him at what was aspirationally billed as a “festival” in the fall of 2016, on a farm in Pine Plains, New York, in the eastern Hudson Valley. On a cold and rainy Friday evening a few dozen people huddled under a drink tent a hundred yards from the small stage as Hudson, shrunken and bent nearly double, in shuffled around his keyboards[8], slowly plugging in cables. He worked his way through a forty-five minute set of his signature improvisations while cycling through keyboard presets. My wife and her friend were indulgent but somewhat underwhelmed, and my daughter was cold. I noticed the lack of festival-style fencing or any security and decided to take the opportunity to introduce myself.

Some helpers were loading Hudson’s gear into a battered white minivan. Maud sat on a bench seat. I lurked awkwardly nearby looking for an opening. After some minutes I chickened out and returned to my family. My wife smacked me with a glove. “Go on,” she said. “Don’t be a wimp. That’s your hero! Go say hi!”

So I did. Hudson was sitting in the passenger seat in his long black coat and wide-brimmed hat. I said something generic—I was a big fan and a piano player. “Oh yes?” he said. “What piano players do you like?”

For some reason, the only name I could come up with in the moment was Art Tatum. Now, I respect Art Tatum, I love his records, but he’s hardly someone I consider an influence, or even have an emotional connection to—his technical ability was too intimidating to seem like a realistic goal, or to identify with. But that’s what I said.

Hudson recoiled. “I don’t recommend Art Tatum for young players,” he said sternly. “Start with Johnnie Johnson and montunos.”

I asked if I could take a picture with him, but he had embarked on a lecture. I tried to listen while surreptitiously snapping a photo of the two of us in the low light and suppressing a twinge of guilt at my own frivolousness. A handler said it was time to go, I thanked him, and that was that.

Several people have pointed out to me that it’s not that hard to spend time with Hudson, that he’s more than available as a player-for-hire. A certain lore has evolved around his magical in-studio ability to assemble a part from multiple overdubs. This trope is encapsulated by Mercury Rev’s Grasshopper in Barney Hoskyns’ Small Town Talk: “’He’d bring out one horn and play a few notes, and then he’d play another horn and play some notes. It was all in his head. And after an hour, all the parts fit together into this melody line. We were flabbergasted. It was like, ‘How did he do that?’” (Artie Traum’s twist is “My fondest memory is watching [Garth] cut a track and before listening back say, “You know the 22nd measure, 3rd note? Take that out.”) But there may be an aspect of wishfully affectionate mythmaking in play. An acquaintance told me a story of friends of his who hired Hudson to play on their childrens’ record: “He came in and recorded a track on accordion, then asked to overdub another, and another, and another. When all four were done he asked for playback. It sounded awful; and he just laughed and said ‘Sometimes I get lucky.’”

I suppose this is the point in the piece, almost eight thousand words in, where I simply execute a notebook dump, in the name of corralling all known Garthiana in one place: how he advocated for jazz saxophonist Ben Webster to open for The Band in Hamburg in 1971. How he often played shoeless, or barefoot. How when asked to describe himself in one word, he chose “eager,” and when asked what song he’s most proud of he named one that didn’t exist.[9] How his five favorite records, he said, were The Best of Spike Jones, Leona Anderson’s Music To Suffer By, The Four Freshmen Live, Johnny Hodges with Wild Bill Davis, and Primus. His favorite musician? “Me.”

Hudson was one of those people who finally achieved their apotheosis, or seemed to settle into their proper form, as an old man—a gnome obscured behind an accordion, an ancient mariner with a shrunken carved-apple face. While Robertson has taken a hegemonic role in the legacy-maintenance of The Band, Hudson hasn’t lacked for honors: in 2019, he received the Order of Canada, and he is a fixture at Last Waltz tribute shows worldwide. Still, one would like to give attention to a talented and highly unusual artist in advance of their passing, instead of, as is more often the case, hurriedly in the days immediately following it. And while he is spoken of in certain circles with a mix of reverence and gentle affection, it’s not always clear that the full measure of his language and sophistication survives a kind of reputational matryoshka muffling: a quiet sideman in a band with only a few canonic records of their own which often seem buried, themselves, beneath the weight of Boomer self-mythologizing. In his latter-day interviews, he mused about creating a “Garth Hudson School of Music,” or speculated various curricula for master classes and music education. The fantasies of passing on his accumulated knowledge—the leather-bound tour wisdom, the “Garth Hudson Institute” that never materialized—seemed to be the manifestation of uncertainty about the legacy of a man with a deep and idiosyncratic well of knowledge with no obvious outlet, and a deus ex machina answer to the question, why had it been accumulated?

It made sense that he would identify Johnnie Johnson as a foundational player. In a way, Johnson was Hudson’s nearest precursor in reinventing the role of keyboardist in a rock band: not a self-accompanying frontman like Fats Domino, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard and the other early rock pianists, but an inventive and invaluable sideman. Hudson was, wrote Hoskyns, “genuinely the most original and brilliant and moving keyboard player that has ever operated within rock ‘n’ roll.” What is the E Street duo of Roy Bittan and Danny Federici but a two-person approximation of Hudson’s woozy organ and accordion and piano-octave melodies?[10] His two-handed agility was rare among the pounding left hands of most rock pianists, and his inadvertent, antiquarian charisma—“less a mad professor,” said John Simon, “than a very dedicated pedant”—and appropriately old-fashioned name made him more memorable than the next generation of seventies virtuosos like Bill Payne, Bob Andrews, and Terry Adams. Perhaps only Mike Garson, playing with David Bowie, matched the sheer unexpectedness of his choices and unpredictability of his playing in a rock context. For such a restrained and rooted person, Hudson’s playing was notably restless and overflowing, constantly swirling on multiple fronts: the woozy pitch slippage of his carnivalesque organ, the accelerating and slowing Leslie and chorus settings, the overflowing fills and stuttering octaves that poked through the spaces between the end of each vocal line and the beginning of the next, never quite the same shape or rhythmic pattern or even sound. To picture Hudson in flight is to picture precarious organs and synths stacked on each other on a festival stage, a rickety fortress almost completely enclosing Hudson, who reaches for them, eyes closed, in turn, never settling on a tone for more than a phrase or two, always in the process of approaching or leaving or decorating a chord tone with grace notes, passing tones, mordants, and appoggiatura, snakelike chromatic obbligati, circling without resolving, flashy but nonchalant: Hoskyns called it “inspired noodling;” Hudson called them his “rotlings.” Even the clavinet bass in “Up On Cripple Creek”—a single repeated note—gets played by multiple fingers in turn, and morphed and twisted by the wah pedal. “Every time I hear Garth play,” said Levon Helm, “I hear something that shakes me.”

Hudson’s anchorite, inward-looking devotion to the study and pedagogy of music undermined the truism of the naïve rock performer, the inspired noble savage. “Most of [the learning process] is supposed to be a secret,” he said in one interview, while playing through Hanon piano exercises. “You’re supposed to jump off the turnip truck and grab an axe and perform.” He was neither rebellious—his parents appear, with other Band kin, on the inner sleeve of the Music From Big Pink album—nor dissolute. But he drew on as deep a well of musical vocabulary, and the curiosity that engendered it, as any musician in the rock canon. “The way Bob [Dylan] was Shakespeare compared to all the other songwriters,” said Al Kooper, “Garth was the Shakespeare of the organ.” The analogy is perhaps less hyperbolic than it appears. Hudson, too, assimilated a vast array of (musical) language, from the vernacular to the elite, into a deeply referential but unmistakably personal and original idiolect. That he deployed it in the service, mostly, of other peoples’ songs and under their names is no diminishment, and is perhaps to his credit. His self-effacing, autodidactic virtuosity wasn’t in the service of ego, but­—like an anonymous monk copying and illuminating a manuscript towards the furtherance of human knowledge and the glory of God, while adding his errata, inside jokes, and graffiti in the margins—in the awe of the bottomless wonder of human musical expression.

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[1] “Like everyone else who encounters Garth for the first time, Bob was blown away,” reported Helm. For his part, Garth “liked the organ part” on “Like A Rolling Stone.”

[2] In the novella Music From Big Pink, in the 33 1/3 series, Hudson is a background figure—“a cross between General Grant and a professor of archaeology”—too well-adjusted to usefully fictionalize.

[3] This appears as “Too Wet To Work” on the album Live at Watkins Glen.

[4] Saxophonist Erik Lawrence, hired to perform with The Band for Bill Clinton’s inauguration, told me they picked him up at a New Jersey rest stop. By way of introduction, Hudson asked what sax players he liked, and Lawrence mentioned Ben Webster. Hudson opened a leather briefcase and pulled out a transcription he’d made of Webster’s solo on “Cottontail.”

[5] He thought the pipe organ he’d built in his shed sounded pretty good on “The Moon Struck One.”

[6] The History Channel progam “American Pickers” made an offer to Hudson’s landlord, a man with the improbable name of Mike Piazza, but the show’s producers couldn’t contact Hudson to get his permission. In the end, at least one fan—with the encouragement of the anonymous moderators of Hudson’s Facebook page—bought up some items “with the apparent intention to return them to him.”

[7] To Helm’s accusation that Robertson bilked him out of royalties, Hudson responded, “That could hurt if it were true. I don’t know how deeply a man could hurt if it were true.”

[8] “When I play a job,” he told the Woodstock Times in 2003, I like to have two keyboards; three would be ideal. It’s nice to have a main keyboard in front, one on the left and the other on top, so it’s like an organ.”

[9] He said “Where Did All Those French Girls Go,” supposedly on The Band’s Islands. Maybe he meant the short instrumental “French Girls,” which closes the final record credited to The Band, Jubilation—still an odd choice.

[10] Benmont Tench handled the doubling himself, but could seem so self-effacing as to disappear into the song.