Everything they gave us before they left

by Rax King

And now Garth Hudson has passed away at 87 in a nursing home and The Band has finally, officially, left the building. I’m more heartsick than I thought I could be at the death of an 87-year-old man. Hopefully that doesn’t sound callous—what I mean is that Hudson had, by any reasonable metric, an exceptionally bounteous life, and it’s possible to find a somber beauty in this final closing of the circle, to say yes, these men are all gone, but look at everything they gave us before they left! But I just feel sad, because my boys are dead. 

I’ve been a fan of The Band all my life thanks to my father, who had himself been a fan of The Band all his life—well, since they released Music from Big Pink in 1968, anyway. Every Thanksgiving, we would celebrate the holiday with my mother’s family in Richmond, VA, and then my father and I would excuse ourselves after the big meal to partake of our private tradition: watching Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz together, eating two pilfered slices of my grandmother’s chocolate chess pie, no matter how logy we were from the gravy and the sleepy heat of too much family time. 

The Band’s final concert, played on Thanksgiving Day at San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom in 1976, was infamously plagued with tension. According to Levon Helm, The Band’s drummer and singer and only American, none of the boys even wanted to stop touring together except for lead guitarist Robbie Robertson, who was so hellbent on getting off the road that the others had no choice but to give in. But all we saw watching the film was a group of five men (and nearly two dozen of their most famous friends) who know each other cold. They’ve been playing some of these songs for sixteen years, but, despite being so obviously lived-in, their performances never feel rote. Instead, my father and I nestled with pleasure into the coziness of the tunes we knew so well. These were our friends—the men or the songs, we couldn’t have said which—and we only got to see them once a year. The Band may have been pretty sick of each other by 1976, but we never got sick of them.

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