Garth Hudson, the last surviving member of The Band, dies

Eric Garth Hudson in Windsor, Ontario, on August 2, 1937, in a very musical family: his father played flute, drums, cornet and saxophone and performed in local dance bands, and his mother played the accordion. He grew up listening to country and jazz, and his first public musical experience was playing religious hymns at his uncle’s funeral home.

He was the last to join the Canadian-American band that would later be known as The Band, which founded in 1957 by Rick Danko, Richard Manuel and Robbie Robertson and Levon Helmfirst under the name The Hawks accompanying rockabilly singer Ronnie Hawkins, with whom they recorded several albums and gave numerous concerts in the Toronto area. “Having Garth Hudson, that was the big day because no one could play like Garth,” Levon Helm said of the time Hudson came into the lineup. «He could play the saxophone, he could play the keyboards, he could play anything and better than anyone you knew… In the end, Hawkins bought Garth’s time to play with us. “Once we had a musician of Garth’s caliber, we started to sound professional.”

The Band’s guitarist Robbie Robertson described Hudson in his 2016 memoir ‘Testimony’: “He played brilliantly, more complexly than anyone we’d ever improvised with. Most of us had just picked up our instruments as kids and started playing, but Garth was classically trained and able to find musical avenues on the keyboard that we didn’t know existed. “It impressed us deeply.”

Shortly after they broke up with Hawkins, and in 1965 they were recruited as the band for Bob Dylan’s first ‘electric’ tour. It was at those concerts where the boys established an intense friendship with the singer-songwriter from Minnesota, who invited them to spend a season at his home in West Saugerties (New York). There, Hudson served as recording engineer for Dylan and the legendary ‘Basement Tapes’, and in 1968, already renamed The Band, they released one of the best debut albums of all time, ‘Music From Big Pink’. The group released seven other albums during the seventies, until they broke up in 1978 after the legendary farewell concert that Martin Scorsese recorded under the name ‘The Last Waltz’.

Following the dissolution of The Band, Hudson began her solo career in 1980 with the release of her first solo album, ‘Music for Our Lady Queen of the Angels’. But he joined a partial group reunion in 1983 – without Robbie Robertson, who never wanted to return -, and after Richard Manuel’s suicide in 1986 they recorded the album ‘Jericho’, with Jim Weider replacing the guitarist. Two more albums followed in 1996 and 1998, but the group did not enjoy the success of earlier times and disbanded again.

After the second separation, Hudson released two more solo albums, ‘The Sea to the North’ (2001) and ‘Live at the Wolf’ (2005). In recent years he performed classics by The Band and in 2010 promoted ‘A Canadian Celebration of the Band’, a tribute to the group in which compatriots such as Neil Young, Bruce Cockburn, Mary Margaret O’Hara, Cowboy Junkies and Blue Rodeo participated.

Additionally, in 2002 he teamed up with pedal player Sneaky Pete Kleinow to form Burrito Deluxe, and in 2005 he formed his own 12-piece band, The Best, with his wife Maud Hudson on vocals. Garth shared a 20-year marriage with Maud, during which they traveled and sang around the world before her death in 2022.

Hudson was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of The Band in 1994, and received the Recording Academy’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2008. The group was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Canadian Music Juno Awards in 1989.