goodbye to The Band who deserved to own that name

Garth Hudson's death and an appreciation of his band's special alchemy

What a time to be alive for us Dylan freaks!

There is the biopic A Complete Unknown, which is an undeniably enjoyable guilty pleasure. But it’s been even cooler to see subcultural engagement with all things Bob Dylan matching the mainstream exposure. We can watch Timothée Chalamet, America’s reigning young movie star, portray Bob on film and then geek out while he goes crate-digging with Nardwuar¹ and then watch him perform Dylan deep cuts on Saturday Night Live, accompanied by James Blake?!?² Even my Substack feed has been a little Bob-pilled.³

Also: What a time of dying it is for those in Bob Dylan’s circle…

Perhaps the surge of canonical happenings and fascinating marginalia is driven by the grim sense that mortality will soon bring many threads of the Bob Dylan saga to a natural conclusion? Last week, death arrived for two keyboardists most famous for their work with him—Barry Goldberg and Garth Hudson, the last surviving member of The Band.

That group is what today’s post is about. The Band was the most consequential back-up unit Dylan ever had, the one that generated his “thin white mercury sound” in 1966, and then expanded upon that alchemical aesthetic across a pair of stone-cold classic albums.⁴

The Band's 'Music from Big Pink' (1968) & 'self-titled' aka The Brown One (1969)

The group’s style was ground zero for the genre that would come to be known as Americana. (The footnote to that being that their membership was 4/5ths Canadian.) It’s ballsy to name yourself something so generic, and even bolder to embody the concept and pull it off.⁵ I am re-sharing what I wrote about the group in 2002, memorializing a then-comprehensive reissue of their catalog. Rarely am I inspired to go full poet about a musician’s output at this length, but they take me places no one else does—their sound is so transformative, and their historical arc so singular.

The piece lives elsewhere on this mixtape delivery service (because it also serves as an archive of my culture writing from 2000s). This is me tipping one out. Libations for the dead!⁶

If you’ve never fallen in love with The Band and just want some music, it’s never too late to watch The Last Waltz, the Martin Scorsese-directed documentary taped in 1976 and released 18 months later. It comfortably sits on any list of the greatest concert films of all time. (Here’s a trailer!) A handful of clips from that movie appear below. But if you’re willing to go deeper, I want to recommend a more esoteric starting point: this restored but still raw full concert, which was filmed earlier that year in Asbury Park, New Jersey. In some sections, Manuel’s voice seems shredded—but as anyone who’s been around bands a lot knows, touring is far more like an unpredictable military campaign than a polished Hollywood film. If The Last Waltz captures a cinematic fantasy of 1970s rock stardom, this video shows the messier, but no less compelling, reality.

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Up a Creek: The Band that rings like a bell

WE WANT THINGS TO FIT, LIKE SQUARE PEGS IN square holes. But there are no square holes. There are stones in shoes, bumps in roads, clouds in skies. It rains and pours, and each drop triggers a drum, a fretless bass, a guitar hero, a fiddle, a tuba, a brass band, otherworldly organs, three singers so earnest they sound as if they’re pleading for their lives. It’s like a Disneyland treatment of Deliverance — three hicks singing “It’s a small world after all” in such a way that you can’t tell when one member of the trio lets off and the next one starts.