(RNS) — My son and I have a Thanksgiving ritual. Every year, we sit before a wide-screened television, and we watch Martin Scorcese’s classic concert film, “The Last Waltz,” which tells the story of the final concert by the Band. That movie, with its guest appearances from Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Dr. John and a host of others, never fails to move us.
Therefore, it is with a huge sigh that I note the death of Garth Hudson, the Band’s keyboard player, at the age of 87 years old. He was the last surviving member of the group.
Keyboard player does not begin to describe Garth’s talents and passions. As The New York Times noted:
Mr. Hudson did far more than play the organ. A musical polymath whose work room at home included arcana like sheet music for century-old standards and hymns, he played almost anything — saxophone, accordion, synthesizers, trumpet, French horn, violin — and in endless styles that could at various times be at home in a conservatory, a church, a carnival or a roadhouse.
Garth Hudson performs with The Band in Hamburg, Germany, in May 1971. (Photo by Heinrich Klaffs/Wikimedia/Creative Commons)
I thought of the Band recently while on a trip to Woodstock, New York — a quaint, upstate town that has become a very tasteful, subdued rock music shrine. “Want to visit Levon Helm’s grave?” the manager of a local candle store asked me, quite out of the blue. Levon was the drummer and one of the main vocalists of the Band.
“Go up the road, make a left, you’ll find the town cemetery and you can’t miss his grave.” (I skipped her suggested pilgrimage.)
I thought of them again when an ad for a vacation property popped up on my Facebook feed. It was of a pink house, in Saugerties, New York, not far from Woodstock. It was Big Pink, the house that gave its name to the Band’s first album, “Music From Big Pink.”
I spent most of my teen years and my 20s loving the Band, and not only because of their connection to Bob Dylan. I have been proud to pass that love on to my son.
What was it that moved me, in particular, about the Band?
It was their attachment to the land, to North America, to Americana — their love of who they were and what they represented. As Greil Marcus wrote in “Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘n’ Roll Music”:
The Band — four Canadian rockers held together by an Arkansas drummer — staked their claim to an American story from the beginning … The songs captured the yearning for home and the fact of displacement that ruled our lives; we thought that the Band’s music was the most natural parallel to our hopes, ambitions, and doubts, and we were right to think so.
Which brings me to the songs by the Band that moved me the most. Yes, of course: “The Weight,” with its mysterious, unnamed invocation of a burden that one must carry and, if possible, give to another; and “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” with its plea that we remember the sorrows of the defeated South; and pretty much the entire second album, called, simply, “The Band.”
The two songs that are in the playlist in my soul:
“King Harvest (Has Surely Come),” from “The Band” (1969). Here we have one of the finest rock songs of the 1960s, IMHO. It is the narrative of a man who “works for the union, because she’s so good to me.” It is the song of the working class man in rural America, waiting for autumn to come across the fields as King Harvest, almost like an agricultural messianic figure. It is the story of a man (again, Greil Marcus):
whose farm fails and sends him into the bitter mills of the New South; when times are slow the mills shut down, and he runs into the arms of a union, hoping for one last chance. Yet wherever he is driven, he carries his roots with him like a conscience. He cannot escape the feel of the land any more than we can escape its myth.
But, then there is the song that I cannot listen to without weeping:
I am referring to “Acadian Driftwood” from “Northern Lights-Southern Cross” (1975). It was influenced by Longfellow’s poem “Evangeline,” the story of the expulsion of the Acadians from Nova Scotia during the wars between the British and the French, and their long trek to Louisiana, where Cajun culture was born. Check out this video that combines the song with that history.
Here goes:
The war was overAnd the spirit was brokenThe hills were smokin’ As the men withdrewWe stood on the cliffs,Oh and watched the ships,Slowly sinking to their rendezvousThey signed a treatyAnd our homes were takenLoved-ones forsaken,They didn’t give a damn.Try to raise a familyEnd up an enemyOver what went down on the Plains of Abraham.Acadian driftwood, Gypsy tailwindThey call my home, The land of snowCanadian cold front, Movin’ inWhat a way to ride, Oh what a way to go.
It is a song of exile, of what Jews call galut — of a displacement that is not only geographic, but a destruction of a world of meaning.
“How can we sing the LORD’s song in a strange land?” the Psalmist lamented. That singing of songs in strange lands is a human experience that many groups have shared, and it behooves us as Jews to hear all their stories. Whenever I go to Jerusalem, I make a point of going to the Old City, to the Armenian Quarter, to see the maps of the Armenian genocide on its walls, to look, to remember, to be present.
And now, there were none. Jaime Robbie Robertson, Rick Manuel, Rick Danko, Levon Helm and now Garth Hudson: all gone.
Quoting one of the Band’s songs: “When you awake, you will remember everything.”
I sure will.
I always will.