Garth Hudson's Best Showcase Moment With the Band Might Surprise You
Armies of performers have attempted to reproduce what he did, and they always fall short.
The Band’s “Ophelia,” an onion-like song of deeper and deeper complexities, peaked on the charts this week in 1976. It’s somehow a Dixieland delight and a guttural blues, a close-harmony lament and a 1970s-style R&B groover.
Credit usually goes to Levon Helm’s earthy presence. (He sings with an utterly devastated rapture about a lost and deliciously naughty lover.) Zoom out, however, and you’ll find Garth Hudson creating this splashing masterpiece of sound that would have humbled the typically paint-covered Jackson Pollock.
The song was recorded in their own retrofitted California ranch studio, winkingly dubbed Shangri-La. The Band – and specifically, Hudson – suddenly had the time, and the space on tape, to experiment with the latest musical technology and their own profoundly intriguing muses. In keeping, Hudson was said to have used as many as eight or more tracks just for his asides on Roland and ARP monophonic synthesizers, various assorted horns, the Lowrey Symphonizer, a Mini Moog, and so on.
To put that into perspective, earlier favorites like “This Wheel’s On Fire” on Music From Big Pink only used four total tracks, with all of the instruments on two tracks, vocals on another and the horns on the fourth. The results on songs like “Ophelia,” which remained a key element of Helm and the Band’s live performances and discography from The Last Waltz forward, were a triumph of juxtaposition.
The song boasts all manner of rustic inflections (that boozy Big Easy brass, Helm’s country hoot) coming up against a series of then-modern elements. It’s one of the very best examples of the way the too-often-overlooked Northern Lights-Southern Cross sought to marry the Band’s original sound with technological advances of the time.
“The chord progression on ‘Ophelia,’” Robbie Robertson told me, “was something that could have come out of the 1930s. The storytelling was ancient and modern in the same breath. The full-on modernism in the sound, in the arrangement, was paramount in Garth’s experimentation. It is unquestionably one of his greatest feats, in my opinion, on any Band song.”
Robertson unfurls another pair of lengthy ruminations on the guitar, while Rick Danko gets so deep into a funky little pocket on the bass that he must have emerged from Shangi-La covered in lint. Richard Manuel trails right behind Helm for most of the vocal lines, adding a squeal of delight to “I’d die for you!” Helm, meanwhile, sounds like he might never, ever get over the ecstasy of this bad girl’s disappeared passions.
All of that, however, remains the quantifiable element of this track’s greatness, the parts you can put your finger squarely on. The riddle of “Ophelia,” never solvable and endlessly enthralling, remains Hudson’s performance – or, more particularly, his performances. On stage, entire armies of performers would attempt to reproduce what he did all alone on “Ophelia,” and they’d always fall short.
This song, improbably even more than the typically cited “Chest Fever,” is Hudson’s triumph, his musical testament, his masterpiece.
Amazon best-selling rock band biographer Nick DeRiso’s next book, ‘Forever Young: How the Band and Bob Dylan Made the Only ’60s Music That Still Matters,’ will be released in Spring 2025. www.nickderiso.com.