Saying Goodbye to The Band
With Garth Hudson’s passing on Tuesday, the rock ‘n’ roll giants have left us for good. While they were together, 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.
Photo by Gijsbert Hanekroot/Redferns
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.
But I return most often to the Band’s 1969-70 period, when they reunited with Dylan at the Isle of Wight Festival, made their eponymous second LP, wrote Civil War songs, appeared on the cover of TIME Magazine, established (alongside Gram Parsons and the Byrds) a still-relevant country-rock blueprint (that yielded the Eagles’ mainstream excess and an alt-country template conquered by the Jayhawks, Son Volt and, decades later, MJ Lenderman, whose song “You Don’t Know the Shape I’m In” is a Band reference) and made the under-loved but beautiful, Todd Rundgren-engineered Stage Fright. When I consider the lineage of “dad rock” and where it may have started, it’s obvious to me that those roots strengthened when tracks like “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” “Up On Cripple Creek” and “Look Out Cleveland” entered circulation. The Band were so damn impressive that Eric Clapton wanted to join the lineup (he settled for hiring them to play on his 1976 record, No Reason to Cry, instead). Their fusion of jazz, Americana and country music inspired everyone from the Grateful Dead to George Harrison and Elton John. They were the epitome of “your favorite band’s favorite band.”
Stage Fright marked a turning point in the Band’s work, as Robertson assumed the responsibilities of being the group’s primary songwriter. His controlling attitude was borne from of his bandmates’ collective heroin addiction, with Manuel’s drug abuse raising an especially high level of concern from Robertson. The Band would make more records in the following years, including Cahoots and Moondog Matinee. The latter’s material was mostly cover songs, a callback to their early years but in a far less novel way. They reunited with Dylan again in 1974, serving as his backing band on Planet Waves and a tour that led to the oft-lauded live album Before the Flood.
Robertson, Helm, Danko, Manuel and Hudson ditched Big Pink for Shangri-La in Malibu, where they’d make the career-resurrecting Northern Lights – Southern Cross in 1975, their first LP of original material in half-a-decade, all of which was composed by Robertson alone. Thanks to “Acadian Driftwood,” “It Makes No Difference” and “Jupiter Hollow,” Northern Lights was an ambitious pivot by the Band, as Hudson turned to using synthesizers, but it also was, by most accounts, a commercial failure. It was a goodbye caught on 24-track tape. It’s sugary but tragic, warmed by the nearby Pacific Ocean yet hurt by a nearing finale. There is so much music to be heard, and I feel lucky that the Band made a record like Northern Lights – Southern Cross. Few acts ever get to begin, but the Band got to begin twice.
As I mourn this true ending of the Band, however, I am most remembering their very first ending, which came in 1976 during The Last Waltz—their “farewell concert” at San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom on Thanksgiving Day. A crowd of 5,000 ate turkey dinners and watched an all-star lineup eulogize the greatest Canadian band of all time, including Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, Dylan, Dr. John, Muddy Waters, Paul Butterfield and Neil Diamond. Martin Scorsese filmed the whole thing and released it two years later via Warner Bros., after the Band released Islands, their seventh studio album (which fulfilled their contract with Capitol).
While the claim that The Last Waltz is the greatest concert film ever captured has been made so often that such a truth exists beyond reiteration, I want to say that the film repeatedly works because the Band play so beautifully off of Hudson’s obvious genius. There are very few documented performances as rich as the 1976 version of “It Makes No Difference,” and that is thanks to Hudson’s keyboard playing. Rough-around-the-edges yet masterfully crafted all at once, the Band were shepherds of one of the smartest sounds in all of history. Listen to them tinker with “The Weight” and “Rag Mama Rag” and “Ophelia” in real time on that stage—the groove they lock into is finer than any description your or I could come up with. Someone once called The Last Waltz a “living biography” of the Band, and I think that is true. But I especially love that the recordings don’t just make a case for the Band being one of the greatest rock acts of our time. No, The Last Waltz makes a compelling argument that rock ‘n’ roll’s biggest names are as brilliant as they are because the Band existed.
I don’t know if it was tragic, or predetermined, or the price of playing rock ‘n’ roll, or what, but the Band experienced multiple endings, first after The Last Waltz and again when Islands came out. Robertson started a solo career and found success there and as a producer in Hollywood, and the Band resumed touring without him in 1983. Jim Weider took the guitarist’s place, but the group had been long exiled from the zeitgeist, so they wound up playing headliner shows in small clubs and theaters—taking support jobs for the Grateful Dead and Crosby, Stills and Nash in the interim. And then the Band ended again in 1986, after Manuel, at the age of 42, hanged himself in a Florida motel room after a performance in Winter Park. He’d been sober for six years, from 1978 through 1984, but his heavy drinking and drugging resumed again. Szelest would return to the band to fill Danko’s place, but he would pass away soon after.
Robertson reunited with the rest of his former bandmates in 1989 when they were inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame, and the Band would make an appearance at Bob Dylan’s 30th anniversary concert in 1992. Then, without Robertson, they recorded their first album in 17 years, Jericho, in 1993. Their cover of Bruce Springsteen’s “Atlantic City” should have bought them another 30 years, but they only lasted six, ending for good once Danko passed away in his sleep in December 1999. And, of course, we lost Helm in 2012, and Robertson followed behind him 11 years later.
I have been listening to the Last Waltz performance of “It Makes No Difference” this morning. It is my favorite of all of the Band’s songs, because it illustrates their five-part success better than anything else they made, beginning when Rick Danko sings, “Well, I love you so much, and it’s all I can do,” and his bandmates sing, “Just to keep myself from telling you that I’ve never felt so alone before” back to him. Once the syllables settle, Robertson melts into a guitar solo while Hudson’s saxophone cuts through the autumnal, smoke-infested air. And the Winterland Ballroom drapes the quintet in this miserable, gaudy shade of red. But isn’t it funny, that there are too many atoms among us to count, and yet, for seven minutes, the Band’s cells remembered each other and produced something like that? I like to imagine that Robertson, Danko, Helm, Manuel and Hudson find each other in every life. The Band may be gone from us now, but I’d bet they’re just getting started someplace greater.
Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.