Saying Goodbye to The Band

Inevitably, all of our favorite rock stars die. It’s a crushing truth, irreversible even. But to grieve is a gift, and I am happy I get to grieve this week. On Tuesday, Garth Hudson, the last living member of the Band, passed away peacefully in his sleep in a Woodstock nursing home. The “quiet one” amongst his bandmates, of course he would depart this lifetime gently. It seems unthinkable, that the Band is gone completely. Sure, we will always have the music. Thank God we’ll always have the music. But I’m sad today and I will be sad tomorrow, knowing that, for the rest of my time here, I must walk with the Band in the past tense. Hudson, Robbie Robertson, Richard Manuel, Levon Helm and Rick Danko were scientists from far greater Heavens than most of us will ever know, pulling art from their bodies in ways that made miracles sound ordinary.

The Band began in 1957, when Helm migrated from Arkansas to Ontario to join Robertson, Danko, Manuel, Hudson and Stan Szelest as Ronnie Hawkins’ backing outfit, the Hawks. Hawkins was a conniving S.O.B., poaching other bands’ best players so his own group could flourish. How funny, that the Band exists because they were too good to keep standing in a rockabilly singer’s way. There was a core faction within the band, as Robertson, Manuel, Danko and Helm were happy to be in Hawkins’ company. But Hudson had other ideas, originally planning on becoming a music teacher. Being in a rock band would be nothing more than a hobby, never a vocation.

But the Hawks needed Hudson. They wanted him. So, after agreeing to pay him $10 per week as their “instructor” and buying him a new Lowrey organ (an instrument that could fetch upwards of $1500 in 1960, equivalent to about $16,000 in today’s money), he joined the stable. He was their “music theory guy.” But the Hawks would quit playing with Hawkins in 1963, citing “personal differences”—they hated playing the same songs every night, didn’t like Hawkins’ style of leadership, were tired of being fined for bringing their girlfriends to shows and wanted to smoke pot without penalty. They changed their name to the Levon Helm Sextet, added a sixth member—saxophonist Jerry Penfound—and then called themselves Levon and the Hawks after Penfound left.

But it was in 1965 when the Hawks found their niche. A fellow named Bob Dylan, who’d just caused a riot at Newport Folk Festival after playing an electric set, hired them as his backing band per the recommendation of John P. Hammond. Mary Martin, Al Grossman’s secretary, told Dylan, “You gotta see these guys,” so he visited them at Le Coq d’Or Tavern in Toronto (Robertson long disputed this claim, saying it was actually Friar’s Tavern, just a few doors down on Yonge Street). Dylan initially only invited Helm and Robertson to play with him and, after playing two shows together, they informed Bob that they’d only work with him if all five Hawks were involved. He agreed, and they accompanied him on a US and world tour spanning nearly a year. Grossman helped move the quintet to Saugerties, to the Big Pink house, where they would record The Basement Tapes with Dylan in 1967.

The Hawks’ tours with Dylan were largely shadowed by his amphetamines addiction, which some members also joined in on. The tours were marred by protests and heckling, largely from folkies who couldn’t get with the times. Helm was especially rattled by the bad response, and he left the tour just a month after it began, going to the Gulf of Mexico to work on an oil rig while his bandmates traveled across Europe. It was at their Manchester gig in May 1966, at the Free Trade Hall, where an audience member called Dylan “Judas.” My favorite moment, and likely yours, too, is when, after the smiting, Dylan turns to the Hawks and calls it like it is: “Play it fucking loud!” Cue the helter-skelter of “Like a Rolling Stone.”

During that period, Dylan and the Hawks tried recording material together, but most of those sessions were disastrous and generated nothing of note, except for the one-off single “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?,” one of Dylan’s most overlooked tracks from an otherwise career-defining, historical part of his life. Robertson, whose finest work with Dylan remains his guitar playing on “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat,” was the only Hawks member to feature on Blonde on Blonde. Dylan’s motorcycle accident would soon come, and he would go into seclusion in Woodstock after his recovery. The Hawks kept on touring, playing bars and roadhouses while backing up other singer-songwriters, notably (and confusingly) Tiny Tim.

But Dylan and the Hawks were never far apart, as if the cord shared between all of them was a Shakespearean one. They joined him at his house in Woodstock and then, later, at Big Pink in West Saugerties—a pink house Danko, Hudson and Manuel rented, where they all would begin recording demos of the soon-to-be-bootlegged Basement Tapes. Helm didn’t join the sessions initially, and the Hawks were credited as the Crackers, but he would eventually make his way to New York and fill out the sound (he was also instrumental in the album’s overdubs ahead of its 1975 release).

After their recordings with Dylan ended, the Hawks took turns writing their own material for the first time, at Big Pink. They ditched their name and, per Manuel’s claims, considered calling themselves the Crackers or the Honkies. Capitol Records nixed both names, so they called themselves the Band, because that’s what Woodstock locals always called them. Rolling Stone called them “the band from Big Pink,” which I quite like myself. Music from Big Pink came out in 1968, and it’s one of the most important debut records of its time and all time. They recorded three Dylan-penned tracks—“This Wheel’s on Fire,” “Tears of Rage” and “I Shall Be Released”—and Marijohn Wilkin and Danny Dill’s “Long Black Veil.” Robertson and Manuel wrote most of the new stuff, including “In a Station,” “Caledonia Mission,” “We Can Talk,” “Chest Fever” and “Lonesome Suzie.”

But Music from Big Pink is oft-remembered for its final entry on side one, “The Weight.” Sung by Helm, with backing harmonies from Danko, it’s undoubtedly one of the most important inclusions in the American songbook—a masterwork of Biblical storytelling entangled in travels across the American South, the films of Luis Buñuel, Helm’s life in Arkansas (“Crazy Chester” was a cap gun-wielding Fayetteville resident) and the beloved Fanny, aka Frances Steloff, the founder of a New York City bookstore that carried some of Buñuel’s scripts. And, thanks to an inclusion in Easy Rider, “The Weight” became an immovable accent in folk music’s changing language.

Upon hearing the word of Hudson’s passing, I immediately began listening to “I Shall Be Released,” a song so dappled in the sun of Manuel’s generous treasure of a falsetto. It’s the kind of singing that could raise hairs on bodies of the dead. It is a song that is 57 years old and, yet, it remains impossibly new and impossibly quixotic, especially within the coil of Hudson’s twinkling piano intro. To hear Music from Big Pink is to emerge—to sing the songs with your brothers and triangulate your hearts into this big, beating dream of ache and joy. The bassline doesn’t thud, it tiptoes, and Hudson’s fingers press ever so delicately against the ivories. I am not a religious person, and I have studied very little scripture, but I’d like to believe that “I Shall Be Released,” the razor-thin version sung by the Band, is a gospel in every lifetime, especially this one.