Garth Hudson

Garth Hudson, the last remaining founder member of the Band, has died aged 87.

Hudson’s variously spirited and melancholy organ lines were a key part of the Band’s sound – including his psychedelically vamping intro to Chest Fever – and he was also an accordionist, including on the Dylan-penned When I Paint My Masterpiece. Hudson was also responsible for recording and archiving the sessions that became The Basement Tapes, with the Band and Dylan playing ad-hoc songs in a house in upstate New York.

His high forehead and long, bushy beard, suggestive of a country preacher or a backwoods boffin, offered an early sign that Garth Hudson, was bringing something different to the world of rock music in the 1960s.

 As the organist with the Hawks, who backed Bob Dylan on a famous series of concerts before turning into the Band, he looked and sounded like a figure from a different age, or perhaps one in whom many ages and cultures were being magically combined.

Music from Big Pink, the Band’s widely influential first album, released in 1968, bore witness to a process to which each of the five musicians – four Canadians and an American – made a distinctive and equal contribution. Levon Helm, the drummer, awakened memories of the old South. Robbie Robertson played guitar with a rare and pointed economy. Rick Danko, the bassist, evoked the intimacy of backporch music-making. Richard Manuel, the pianist, sang with an aching fragility. And Hudson, an enigmatic figure half-hidden behind his organ console, brought the sound of mystery.

An inveterate tinkerer with the technology at his disposal, Hudson used it to create sounds both ancient and modern. On Acadian Driftwood (1975), the Band’s last masterpiece, he used accordion, piccolo and bagpipe chanter to conjure a lost world of fife and drum bands as it faded into history.

 Born Eric Hudson into a family of musicians in Windsor, Canada, in 1937, Hudson played church organ, piano and accordion during his childhood and had written his first song by the age of 11. Still in his teens, he joined a band – later called the Kapers – in London, Ontario, where his family had moved.

Ronnie Hawkins and Levon Helm saw Hudson perform and wanted to recruit him to their group the Hawks – though Hudson initially resisted as he was planning on becoming a music teacher. After agreeing to teach music theory to the rest of the band as part of his employment with them, he joined the lineup, also featuring Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko and Richard Manuel – minus Hawkins, who they split from in 1963, they later became the Band.

Still as the Hawks, they were hired by Dylan to be his backing band (in part after being recommended by Dylan’s manager’s secretary). Dylan had recently moved away from his folk roots and embraced electric guitar, to the anger of some – Hudson was in the band when an audience member shouted “Judas!” at Dylan in Manchester’s Free Trade Hall.

The group remained close to Dylan on their return, moving up to a big pink house in Saugerties in rural New York in 1967, ahead of the summer of love. It was here that they wrote the Band’s debut album Music from Big Pink, and where they recorded songs with Dylan that were much bootlegged until they were compiled on The Basement Tapes in 1975. These included Dylan classics such as I Shall Be Released, as well as songs with Dylan for the Band, such as Tears of Rage and This Wheel’s on Fire.

Hudson created the recording setup there, with stereo mixers, tape recorder and microphones. Hudson also archived the tapes himself in a wooden box of his own design.

The group recorded seven studio albums between 1968 and 1977 – their self-titled 1969 album and 1970’s Stage Fright both reached the US Top 10 – and bowed out of touring with The Last Waltz, an all-star concert documented on film by Martin Scorsese. Hudson then joined the reunited Band in 1983, and released three more albums with them during the 1990s.

By the time Martin Scorsese filmed them for The Last Waltz in 1976, they were being torn apart by internal disputes. Addictions had eroded their discipline and Robertson, the ambitious one, had assumed a greater organisational and creative role, opening a rift with Helm that was never closed. Without Robertson and his songwriting input, the Band reformed to tour and record in the 1980s, before the successive deaths of Manuel in 1986, Danko in 1999 and Helm in 2012.

 Hudson released a solo album, The Sea to the North, in 2001; Live at the Wolf, a duo set with his wife, the actor and singer Maud Hudson, in 2005.

In 1978, Hudson’s ranch in Malibu, which included a recording studio, was destroyed by wildfires. Later he went bankrupt several times. In 2013 a landlord sold the contents of a loft space in upstate New York which had been used for storage and on which rent had not been paid for seven years; the items included handwritten sheet music and an uncashed royalty cheque for $26,000 dating from 1979.