Jeff Tweedy on Garth Hudson: ‘He Was Like a Sorcerer’
Garth Hudson’s death at age 87 has left fans of the Band grieving. With this loss, none of the five musicians who made everything from ‘Music From Big Pink’ to ‘The Last Waltz’ are still living. “It’s the kind of thing that makes you really want to believe in a heaven,” says Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy. “I don’t know if I do. But it’s a sweet thought, to think of all animosity set aside and a reuniting moment in some idyllic place.”
Tweedy first met Hudson in 1992, when Uncle Tupelo toured with the latter-day lineup of the Band. Hudson went on to appear onstage with Wilco several times over the years, including memorable performances together at Newport Folk Festival in 2004 and on the Bob Dylan/Wilco/My Morning Jacket Americanarama tour in 2013. Tweedy shared his memories of Hudson’s unique musical legacy with RS.
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This interview has been lightly edited and condensed.
It’s hard to imagine Garth being anything other than Garth. Like all my favorite musicians, there’s no one else like him. He was a one-of-a-kind musician. Those are hard to come by, and they’re immensely important to the people that follow in their wake. Those are the bright lights you look at.
My memory is that he didn’t ride on the bus [in the early Nineties] — he rode in the box truck with all the gear, because he liked to get there early and fiddle with his stuff and set up his own rig. I have a distinct memory of getting to the venue in New Haven, Toad’s Place, and he was there. They were setting up the gear onstage. I walked up onstage to say hi. And he was on his knees, taking a file to the threaded part of a drum throne, which is what he sat on. I said, “Garth, how’s it going?” And he said, “Jeff, my machines are indignant generals calling me from Bimini, saying, ‘Send more money.’” And I said, “That’s the coolest thing anybody’s ever said to me.” I have no idea what he meant, but it actually kind of made sense. They were impetuous little rascals, always giving him problems, all of his gear.
We crossed paths quite a few times over the years. He’d come see Wilco, and he’d sit in with us, usually when we were playing Toronto. There’d be some prerequisites for Garth coming down. You need to provide a place for him to take a nap before the show, and I think he wanted pie one time. All reasonable requests in my book. It was always sweet to be embraced by someone like Garth. It really means something when a guy with that much idiosyncratic power comes to your side.
Performing something like “Chest Fever” with him was terrifying, because it’s such an iconic song. My memory is that in rehearsal, backstage, it was really hard for us to keep it in the tempo that he preferred, which was pretty slow. But it was always amazing. I never got the impression that Garth had to think about things too much. He just put his hands on the accordion or the keyboard and sounded like himself, and did things that you wouldn’t expect anybody else in the world to do. He was like a sorcerer or something. Somebody that had a magical connection to their own musicality.
If you listen to any Band record and zero in on the atmosphere being created by the keyboard textures, and then try and imagine the songs without that, it’s kind of amazing how much work they’re doing to hold things together. That’s one of the miracles of the Band — they each had such an important role in shaping that sound. They had one of the most equal distributions of talent, maybe, of any band ever. And Garth added Garthness.
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