It’s so fitting that Garth Hudson was the last man standing from the Band . The beloved organ virtuoso died on Tuesday morning at 87, near Woodstock — just a few miles down the road from Big Pink, the house where the Band and Bob Dylan transformed music history just by jamming in the basement. Garth Hudson was the mystery man in the Band, the silent one, the only one who didn’t sing.
He was years older than the others, already in his thirties when they made their classic 1968 debut Music from Big Pink . But with his self-effacing genius, he epitomized The Band as a group of whittlers and tinkerers, playing down-home music with a frontier spirit. They were the ultimate rock & roll fantasy of brotherhood, and Garth Hudson was the wise father figure, the glue guy who made that fantasy real.
Hudson always had the mystique of the Old Man from the Mountains, with his string ties and the longest beard ever seen in rock & roll. He came on like a woodsy sage who’d landed in a band by mistake. As a classically trained virtuoso, he wasn’t so sure he wanted to join these rowdy kids at first.
But as Hudson put it in Across the Great Divide , Barney Hoskyns’ classic history of The Band, “Unfortunately, in order to become acquainted with the idiom of rock & roll music it is necessary occasionally to play in a bar.” The rest of the Band could never really figure this guy out. Nobody did.
He rarely said a word in interviews, doing his talking with his fingers. The mad professo.
