Garth Hudson, R.I.P.

When Charlie Watts died in 2021, I wrote, “This feels like a big one” — and it did, it was. But the death yesterday of Garth Hudson is a bigger one for me personally; I’m genuinely grieving. 

Of all the legendary musical groups of the rock era, The Band is the most difficult to assess. They weren’t around for all that long, and they made some indifferent music. But only Bob Dylan rivals them — and doesn’t obviously excel them — as the embodiment of what Greil Marcus called the music of “the old, weird America,” and what Dylan himself called “historical-traditional music.” Robbie Robertson once said that — when they were all living in and around the house in West Saugerties, New York they called Big Pink — Dylan would play them songs he was working on and they couldn’t tell whether he had just written them or found them under a rock. The Band’s best music is like that: it feels old, time-worn and seasoned, and yet is also a brand new thing. 

You have to remember how much the Discourse of the late Sixties was dominated by talk of the “Generation Gap,” how strong the tensions were between the young and the old, to recognize the vital and wonderfully generous thing The Band did when they made an album, Music from Big Pink, that you opened up only to see a photo of the band members with their families: 

It seems like a small thing … but it wasn’t. It was a powerful statement about the bonds that hold us firm to our past, about the people and places we belong to. And their music made that statement even more powerfully, especially in “the brown album” — the one called simply The Band, which I think is the single finest recording of that era. The Beatles were the best group of that time, and created the greatest body of work, but for albums — well, it’s The Band and The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds and then everything else trailing well behind. Or so I say. Give a listen and discover for yourself. 

Richard Manuel died in 1986, Rick Danko in 1999, Levon Helm in 2012, Robbie Robertson in 2023 — but as long as Garth remained, that musical world seemed still a living world. Now it recedes into the past. That doesn’t mean that we aren’t linked to it — listening to the music of The Band is enough to remind us of that. But for all those guys to be gone now … it’s tough.