That's Garth at 1:39 (and Ed Sullivan at 0:01).

Safe travels, Garth Hudson. The last man standing from a, genuine, band of all-stars.

RIP

pic.twitter.com/ad6f6fd6tk

— 𝙱𝚘𝚋𝚋𝚢’𝚜 𝙷𝚎𝚎𝚕 (@SalvadorDafti) January 21, 2025

ADDED (prompted by Leslie Graves):

When I get off of this mountain
You know where I wanna go?
Straight down the Mississippi River
To the Gulf of America

AND: I like this description of Hudson's part in that song: "The bullfrog-like syncopations that tease and cackle as Levon Helm sings the verses are from Hudson’s clavinet. He unfurls organ lines like bunting atop the choruses, but the cackling cheerfully persists." That's Jon Pareles, writing in the NYT, in "Garth Hudson: 11 Essential Songs?The last surviving original member of the Band died on Tuesday. He was a master on keys and saxophones who could conjure a panoply of scenes and eras."

Here's that 11-song playlist:

Goodbye to Garth Hudson.

Rest in peace, Garth Hudson.

Our neighbor and friend; a musical genius who lived and listened on another plane.

Love to everyone here who feels like I do about The Band.

Portrait by Garth's old friend John Scheele, last year.https://t.co/eo130jtJGJ pic.twitter.com/xfRCtTqNUl

— Anne Margaret Daniel 🌻 (@venetianblonde) January 21, 2025

ADDED:

"Ms. Martin was in the crowd at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival when Mr. Dylan first performed with electric instruments."

"She recalled two things from the appearance: the raucous boos and her conviction that he needed a polished backup band. Around the same time, Rick Danko, a friend, sent her a demo tape by the Hawks, in which he played bass. Ms. Martin thought the group would be a perfect match for Mr. Dylan. But the Hawks were a rock band and Mr. Dylan was still considered a folkie, and at first neither side was interested. 'Mary was a rather persevering soul,' Mr. Dylan said in a 1969 interview with Rolling Stone magazine. 'She kept pushing these guys the Hawks to me.' She persuaded Mr. Dylan to try out two of the band’s five members, the drummer Levon Helm and the guitarist Robbie Robertson. After Mr. Helm insisted that the Hawks were a package deal, Mr. Dylan relented, and the Hawks — soon to be known as the Band — went on tour with him, setting in motion one of the greatest collaborations in rock history...."

From "Mary Martin, Who Gave Many Music Stars Their Start, Dies at 85/Her loyalty to artists and her eye for talent made her a force in a male-dominated business. Among her accomplishments: introducing Bob Dylan to the Band" (NYT).

ALSO: "While climbing the ranks within [Albert] Grossman’s office, she became close friends with many of his clients. One weekend at Mr. Grossman’s home in upstate New York, she swam a race against Mr. Dylan. She lost, but as a consolation prize, Mr. Grossman gave her his cat, Lord Growing — the same cat Mr. Dylan holds on the cover of his 1965 album 'Bringing It All Back Home.'"

Hmm. Lord Growing.

Things I talked about with Meade this morning.

1. How Tucker Carlson told Joe Rogan that Bari Weiss is a fraud and not honest at all. She called Tulsi Gabbard a "toady" and she didn't know what "toady" meant.

2. The similarities and differences between the Bob Dylan song "You Got to Serve Somebody" and the Band song "Unfaithful Servant."

3. The use of the tuba in popular music recorded in the last 60 years and why it matters if they had an actual tuba player in the studio as opposed to a digitalized tuba sound.

4. "Tuba players now rehearse around the flagpole."

5. Whether flags of foreign countries should be waved by members of Congress and how the use of the flag may mean different things to different people.

6. It was Richard Nixon who originated the wearing of a flag lapel pin and how everyone followed along and now they can't stop.

7. The way some people these days are calling their loved one "my person." I heard it in Salman Rushdie's new book "Knife" and I opened The New Yorker at random and saw it in a Roz Chast cartoon.

8. Some people call a dog's owner the dog's "person," and that seems related to the old joke "Are you walking him or is he walking you"?

9. Bill Maher asked why people want drag queens reading to children and said it would be better to have disabled people reading, but drag queens are entertainers and disabled people are not. 

10. How little children shouldn't be exposed to overly exciting entertainment and even peekaboo can be too intense for young minds.

11. How it's already too late to go south for warmer weather and we are better off here in the north, where there was frost on the grass this morning.

12. How fluent and funny Tucker Carlson was describing his boss at the New York Post who had a hairy back that he would rub against the door jamb while he talked to Tucker and the 5 or 6 ways that Tucker could have known that the man had a hairy back.

13. What a big part of life hairiness is — for the lower animals and for us, the humans. 

14. Was the hairy-backed man John Podhoretz? Carlson mutters the name.

15. The annoyingness of Carlson's laugh and how hard you have to commit to do a good enough imitation of it.

16. The energy Joe and Tucker had. Doesn't Tucker wear a hairpiece and Joe just shaved off all his hair.

17. Meeting for coffee and not an entire meal so you're free to leave whenever you want and how some people have trouble getting out of small-talk conversations and this one simple trick that's all you need.

18. The perception that a conversation can't end until both participants want it to end and the way some people keep adding new topics as if keeping a conversation going is a game.

19. The very low level of tennis playing that has you just trying to keep the ball in play as long as possible.

20. How all this talk is taking the place of writing on the blog, but I could just make a blog post out of all the topics that didn't make it onto the blog because I was talking about everything with Meade.

Jawbone.

"One day Sampson was walking alone/He looked down on the ground and he saw an old jawbone/He lifted up that jawbone and he swung it over his head/And when he got to moving ten thousand was dead" — Peter, Paul & Mary.

"Oh, Jawbone, when did you first go wrong? Oh, Jawbone, where is it you belong?" — The Band.

From "Moral Suasion" (Wikipedia):

"Jawboning"... is the use of authority to persuade various entities to act in certain ways, which is sometimes underpinned by the implicit threat of future government regulation. In the United States, during the Democratic administrations of Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, officials tried to deal with the mounting inflationary pressures by direct government influence or jawboning.... 

From an amicus brief in National Rifle Association v. Vullo, one of 2 free-speech cases up for oral argument in the Supreme Court today:

"[Dylan] and Robertson had had something between friendly discussion and outright arguments about Dylan’s style of songwriting while on tour the year before."

"Robertson — who, at this time, remember, had a body of songs that mostly consisted of things like 'Uh Uh Uh' — thought that Dylan’s songs were too long, and the lyrics were approaching word salad. Why, he wanted to know, did Dylan not write songs that expressed things simply, in words that anyone could understand, rather than this oblique, arty stuff? He kept holding up Curtis Mayfield songs as a model, like 'People Get Ready'... ... Robertson didn’t know... that that song was in a way the grandchild of one of Dylan’s own songs... [It] was inspired by 'A Change is Gonna Come,' which was in turn inspired by 'Blowin’ in the Wind' — but nonetheless Dylan thought that Robertson had a point. He was getting increasingly disenchanted with the counterculture which he was supposedly the figurehead for, and with psychedelic music. But also, he was aware that you could do a lot even with simple language... [b]ecause the folk tradition he came from had a very different attitude to language than either the Beat poets he’d been recently imitating or the R&B songwriters that the Hawks [i.e., The Band] had been listening to...."

Episode 167 of Andrew Hickey's "A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs" is about "The Weight" by The Band. (It's only by chance that this song came up in the week when Robbie Robertson died.)

"When we found this house, it became, like, the clubhouse, where guys would go every day and hang out... like a street gang."

"And it was a place to go, like a workshop... And this had been a dream of mine: If we could only have the clubhouse, where we could go every day, and we could lock ourselves away from the world and create something that we are meant to do, that we are on a mission to do."

Said Robbie Robertson, on the Marc Maron podcast, in 2017, previously blogged here.

Robertson died today, at the age of 80, I'm reading in the NYT obituary — Robbie Robertson, Guitarist and Songwriter With the Band, Dies at 80/The music he and his bandmates made stood out by inverting the increasing volume and mania of psychedelic rock. 'We just went completely left when everyone else went right,' he once said."

I've assembled 10 TikToks for your delectation. Let me know what you like best.

1. What Ricky Gervais said that got some tweeters calling him transphobic. 

2. And Ricky Gervais explaining cancel culture.

3. "I love Franch."

4. A man imitates his introverted wife (she's filming and laughing).

5. What's really going on this painting?

6. One too many turtles.

7. "The frog is not available...."

8. When The Band was The Crackers.

9. That nod!

10. Inside the twee cabin.

"Cathy was a great lady. Men were drawn to her, and she used to make me jealous. But I don’t have a bad thing to say about her."

Said Gordon Lightfoot, quoted in a NY Post item teased on the front page as "Back-up singer best known for killing John Belushi dead at 73." The more dignified headline at the link is "Cathy Smith, who injected John Belushi with fatal overdose, dies at 73."

Until Belushi’s death, Smith was known in rock music circles for singing back-up for Levon Helm, Rick Danko and Richard Manuel, later founding members of The Band, and in the early 1970s becoming Lightfoot’s girlfriend and muse. Lightfoot wrote the #1 1974 hit “Sundown” about his tumultuous, extramarital and occasionally violent relationship with Smith, the dark lyrics masked by a lilting, bluesy melody: “[I can see her lyin' back in her satin dress/In a room where ya do what ya don't confess/]Sundown you better take care/If I find you been creepin’ ’round my back stairs.”

Smith claimed the Band song "The Weight" was about her.

"Then, as if to match this anachronistic sound, their lyrics were written from the perspective of various characters in distant-past American settings..."

"... Dust Bowl farmers ('King Harvest [Has Surely Come]'), Civil War soldiers ('The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down'), Manifest Destiny fulfillers ('Across the Great Divide').... ... The Band is an album about America as written by a Canadian band (with the notable exception of Helm, who was from Arkansas). And it’s within the complications of that dynamic that perhaps The Band’s best song, 'The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,' lives, wrought with a particular type of humanity and heartbreak that’s increasingly hard to reckon with, given that its foundation lies within the perspective of a Confederate.... These stories weren’t really theirs to begin with -- they were just there to be plucked. And part of what makes it such a compelling, enduring, and difficult artifact of popular music to grapple with is this feeling that it’s a document of the country’s thorny past without being a strict endorsement of it."

From "Fifty Years of 'The Band,' an Album that Didn't Fit the Mold Then or Now" (Billboard).

Here, you can listen to the "Last Waltz" performance of "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down." This much-up-voted comment is more enlightening than Billboard's dumb explanation for dummies (that the song isn't "a strict endorsement" of America's "thorny past"):

---I was a young urban Black kid going to a suburban school. A White friend played this for me in his car. On a cassette.
----I almost cried right there, because the level of pain and stress in the lyrics. As a Northerner they did not teach us anything about the aftermath of that war.
------Forgive me, but I thought Levon was Black. Just the grit, power and Southern soul in his voice.
2018------It still moves me to tears. Absolutely the best history lesson of the post Civil War South.

I remember — as a college student — staring at that picture on album cover, listening to the music, and feeling like the men had magically arrived from the past and were bringing us song stories from the 19th century. It wasn't easy, in 1969, to look up who they actually were and why they were singing like this. You just had the music and the notions and images that arose in your mind. These were so powerful to me that I don't really like to read the true story now. The experience of the art was already everything.

"Cocktails for Two."

I'm watching that because for some reason, in the comments to "Let's explore ADHD with owls," tim in vermont said:

If you want to be a writer that Althouse enjoys, make sure you are born with the right voice, and I am not using ‘voice’ figuratively. You have to have that Spike Jones type voice mentioned in “Up On Cripple Creek” that tuned on Bessie.

Tuned on? I think that was supposed to be "turned on," but you know what they say, "tune on, turn in, drop over."

Anyway, I love the old Band song, with the lines "Now, me and my mate were back at the shack/We had Spike Jones on the box/She said, 'I can't take the way he sings/But I love to hear him talk.'

So I was looking for a video with Jones talking and not singing, and "Cocktails for Two" has no singing by Jones but it also has no talking. Ah, here — you can hear him talk:



He's explaining how he got the idea for his sound-effects and music routine watching Igor Stravinsky conducting "Firebird" while wearing squeaky shoes. Another thing I learned in that clip is that the opposite of "corny" is "subtle." Which makes perfect sense.

I didn't set an endpoint in that video, so watch as long as you want. Hang in long enough and — trigger warning — there will be Nazi salutes. Lots of them.



Now that just gave my heart a throb/To the bottom of my feet....

Scott Walker in the Colosseum saluting the Brewers.

Sorry. I just love this picture:

#BrewersRoadCrew 🇮🇹 pic.twitter.com/QzqcQR3jfo

— Milwaukee Brewers (@Brewers) May 28, 2018

I love nonpolitics.

I had to check the spelling of "Colosseum." I had "Coliseum," which seems to contain 2 mistakes, and yet I see it is also a correct spelling. But I chose "Colosseum" because it seems more expressive of grandeur — the colossal. Something about double letters and "o"s above "i"s.

Song lyric:

Oh, the hours I’ve spent inside the Coliseum
Dodging lions and wastin’ time
Oh, those mighty kings of the jungle, I could hardly stand to see ’em
Yes, it sure has been a long, hard climb

Here's the great — colossal — recording of that song by The Band.

Walker looks super-young in the baseball gear. Something about the hat. And... those shorts. Boyish. That's the crux of my problem with men in shorts. They look like boys. But sometimes it's nice. And it's hot in Rome.

"Might it be that non-Southerners, for cultural reasons, simply cannot understand why it’s difficult for Southerners to execrate their ancestors, even if their ancestors did bad things?"

"That thought came back to me after listening to this amazing episode of Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History podcast. It’s about country music, and what sets it apart from other American musical genres. Malcolm Gladwell is not the first person I would go to for insight into how country music works, but boy, was this great."

Writes Rod Dreher at The American Conservative in "Sad Songs." I haven't listened to Gladwell's podcast yet, but Dreher ends his column with an invitation to listen to The Band’s “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”:

Listen especially to the third verse — the land, family, death, defeat — and know that for very many of us, that is the South. It’s not the whole South. “Strange Fruit” is also the South. But it’s one true story of the South, and if you can’t feel the tragedy and the heartbreak of a poor, proud Southern man laid low in this song, friend, I cannot help you:

I can't embed that without thinking of something I read in The New Yorker this week: "Who Owns the Internet?/What Big Tech’s monopoly powers mean for our culture," by Elizabeth Kolbert:

Consider the case of Levon Helm. He was the drummer for the Band, and, though he never got rich off his music, well into middle age he was supported by royalties. In 1999, he was diagnosed with throat cancer. That same year, Napster came along, followed by YouTube, in 2005. Helm’s royalty income, which had run to about a hundred thousand dollars a year... dropped “to almost nothing.” When Helm died, in 2012, millions of people were still listening to the Band’s music, but hardly any of them were paying for it. (In the years between the founding of Napster and Helm’s death, total consumer spending on recorded music in the United States dropped by roughly seventy per cent.) Friends had to stage a benefit for Helm’s widow so that she could hold on to their house....

Here's the album. You can still buy it.

By the way, the 3rd verse that Dreher talks about is the one with the lines: "Like my father before me, I will work the land/And like my brother above me, who took a rebel stand/He was just eighteen, proud and brave/But a Yankee laid him in his grave...." It made me think of the 140 Confederate soldiers whose nearby graves I visited the other day, after Madison's mayor, Paul Soglin, got a memorial removed. I took photographs...



... but only later did I learn that the headstones do not mark individual graves. What's under the ground is, in fact, a mass grave. The individual stones are a later effort at imposing dignity — an effort that corresponds to the effort we are experiencing today, the withdrawal of dignity.

"This is a progressive disease. And I thought, 'We've gotta deal with this, and we've gotta get out of the way to deal with it.'"

"So we came up with the idea of 'The Last Waltz.'"



40 Thanksgivings ago.

That's 27-and-a-third million dollars per Elvis.

Andy Warhol's "Triple Elvis" sells for $82 million.

That makes me want to do a search in one of my favorite books, "The Andy Warhol Diaries":

Sunday, May 18, 1980 

John Powers called and told me the prices at the art auctions, and the Triple Elvis went for $ 75,000 and he said he thought that was a fair price so I felt okay, but then he told me that the Lichtenstein went for $ 250,000 so I felt bad. Oh, and the three Jackies went for only $ 8,000, so that was a bargain.

Hey. Did Andy Warhol invent the "Oh, and..." locution that has infected American writing?

Purchase of the day.

From the April 4, 2013 Amazon Associates Earnings Report:

Share Your Love With Me (2001 Digital Remaster)
The Band | Format: MP3 Music

The Althouse Amazon portal: the shame-free way to share your love.

Saturday Cinema Verité...

... in 3 scenes.

I'm wondering about why so many people over at Metafilter are wondering about...

... why the song "The Weight" is such a big deal.

"He was my bosom buddy friend to the end, one of the last true great spirits of my or any other generation."

"This is just so sad to talk about. I still can remember the first day I met him and the last day I saw him. We go back pretty far and had been through some trials together. I'm going to miss him, as I'm sure a whole lot of others will too."

Bob Dylan, on the death of Levon Helm.

From a list of links at that link, I see that Rolling Stone once rated Levon Helm the 91st greatest singer of all time. From the explanation why:

Since Papa Garth Hudson didn't really sing, I always felt that, vocally, Levon was the father figure in the Band. He always seems strong and confident, like a father calling you home, or sometimes scolding you. The beauty in Richard Manuel's singing was often the sense of pain and darkness he conveyed. Rick Danko had a lot of melancholy to his voice as well, but he could also be a little more goofy. They were all different shades of color in the crayon box, and Levon's voice is the equivalent of a sturdy old farmhouse that has stood for years in the fields, weathering all kinds of change yet remaining unmovable.

I don't follow the bands today. Do they still have bands where different singers sing differently?

"Levon Helm, who helped to forge a deep-rooted American music as the drummer and singer for the Band..."

"... died on Thursday in Manhattan. He was 71 and lived in Woodstock, N.Y."

Mr. Helm gave his drums a muffled, bottom-heavy sound that placed them in the foundation of the arrangements, and his tom-toms were tuned so that their pitch would bend downward as the tone faded. Mr. Helm didn’t call attention to himself. Three bass-drum thumps at the start of one of the Band’s anthems, “The Weight,” were all that he needed to establish the song’s gravity.

Beautiful. So sorry to lose this man.