Garth Hudson Dies: The Band's Last Surviving Member Was 87🤘

[Old Joad]

he keyboardist, sax player and archivist for Rock and Roll Hall of Famers The Band whose farewell show with the group was memorialized in Martin Scorsese's landmark documentary The Last Waltz, died Tuesday in his sleep at a nursing home in Woodstock, NY. He was 87.

Born Eric Hudson on August 2, 1937, in Windsor, Ontario, and was trained in classical piano and music theory. He played in local bands before hooking up in the late 1950s with rockabilly singer Ronnie Hawkins' The Hawks, which eventually would feature many of his Band mates. The group would back Bob Dylan's on the notorious mid-'60s "Going Electric" tours and, rechristened The Band, they collaborated on groundbreaking album The Basement Tapes, helping to invent the Americana genre.

he Band broke out with its 1968 debut album Music from Big Pink, which made the U.S. Top 30, went gold and featured such classic tracks as "The Weight" and the Dylan cover "I Shall Be Released."

"The Weight" was featured in nearly two dozen movies, playing an integral role in classics such as Easy Rider, The Big Chill and as well as in projects as diverse as Patch Adams, Starsky & Hutch, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and The King of Staten Island.

In 1969, The Band played at Woodstock and became the first North American rock group to appear on the cover of Time magazine.

Rick Danko and Richard Manuel and American drummer Levon Helm - released its sophomore album The Band in 1969, which included its biggest pop single, "Up on Cripple Creek," along with the Civil War-set folk tale "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down." The disc was its first Top 10 album, reaching No. 9 on the Billboard 200, and remains its only million-seller without Dylan.

The Band went on to release several other albums through the 1970s. Stage Fright (1970) reached No. 5 and featured the title track and "The Shape I'm In." Cahoots (1971, No. 21) had "Life Is a Carnival," and the Top 10 double live set Rock of Ages (1972) followed.

Its other albums include Moondog Matinee (1973), Northern Lights-Southern Cross (1975) and Islands (1977). Along with 1975's The Basement Tapes, The Band also released a pair of Top 10 albums with Dylan the year before: Planet Waves and Before the Flood. The soundtrack to The Last Waltz - which was recorded in November 1976 at the Winterland in San Francisco and released with the movie in April 1978 - also featured Dylan, Hawkins, Eric Clapton, Neil Young, Ringo Starr, Emmylou Harris, Van Morrison, The Staples Singers, Neil Diamond and many others. The album reached No. 13 in the U.S. and went gold.

[pwalpwal]

Ah **** ripgh