PORT TOWNSEND — Several weeks ago Upstage Restaurant and Bistro owner Mark Cole found a used copy of “Cahoots,” The Band’s 1971 album on a courtyard table and set it behind the bar for the owner to claim.
No one took responsibility, but early last week Cole received a call from guitarist Eric Fridrich, executive director of Savor the Sound, asking whether he could carve out a date for The Band’s Garth Hudson to perform as part of a benefit meant to subsidize musical education in schools.
It was, according to Cole, “uncanny.”
Hudson is scheduled to perform at 8 p.m. on Wednesday at the Upstage, 923 Washington St.
Tickets are $25 and are available by phoning 360-385-2216.
Multi-instrumentalist Hudson, 74, was a co-founder of The Band and was a principal architect of its unique sound, playing the organ, saxophone, accordion and other instruments that were the antithesis of the guitar-based psychedelia that ruled the airwaves when The Band released its first album.
Once they stopped touring eight years later, the five member group had changed the course of popular music, eventually creating the popular style now known as “Americana.”
For this week’s appearance, Hudson’s vast store of instruments will be accompanied by Fridrich and his wife, Maud Hudson, on vocals.
“Maud and I will play what is probably not anywhere near the standard Band repertoire, although we do tributes to [deceased Band members] Richard [Manuel] and Rick [Danko],” Hudson said from his home in Woodstock, N.Y., just before getting on the plane to Seattle earlier this week.
“We are taking part in a program which encourages children to care, and hopefully can do it in a manner that can encourage young people to follow music a little more closely.”
Savor the Sound raises money to pay for instruments and musical instruction in public schools to replace programs that have been cut back because of decreasing education budgets, Fridrich said.
The money raised by Hudson’s performance most likely will support programs in other counties, but the appearance is being used to introduce the program to Jefferson County residents with the hope of establishing it locally, he said.
Aside from its own eight-year career at the top of the charts and a second chapter (without guitarist/composer Robbie Robertson) between 1983 and 1999, The Band is most known for its accompaniment of Bob Dylan, both live and in the studio.
Hudson acknowledges what he calls Dylan’s “mythopoetic power.”
“He was a mystery, he was a singer, he was here, he was gone, and I don’t know anyone else who kept that mystery as consistently as he did,” Hudson said.
“As The Band, we were fortunate to work with a top-notch player and one of the greatest popular songwriters of that era.”
Many musicians from that era continue to play their songs in a revival format, but Hudson is different and is unique, according to Fridrich, who calls Hudson “an inspiration.
“He’s in his 70s, but he’s still developing and playing new stuff,” Fridrich said.
Hudson said it doesn’t come easy.
“Some artists show their talents at age 4 or 5, but some of us have to work at this, and it becomes a lifelong pursuit,” he said.
“There is a competitive aspect to what we are doing as musicians. We are always recognizing and appropriating little snippets from here and there.
“We are all composers and we are all songwriters.”
To understand a musician, understand what influences him, Hudson said.
“If you want to understand Dylan, you shouldn’t just listen to him. You need to find out who he was listening to, what he was reading at the time and what people were singing from the balconies when he was young,” he said.
“Right now I am talking with people about jazz metal, and its incredible reiterative patterns,” he continued.
Black Sabbath’s Tony Iommi “has some masterful guitar fills and great sequences where his grip on the guitar does not cease until the very last note.”
Hudson often answers questions about the 1960s and 1970s with comments about the 1940s and the swing era before guitars took over, a time he finds more interesting.
And the “showbiz” story that most interests Hudson happened more than 300 years ago.
“Bach was so fascinated with [composer Dieterich] Buxtehude that he walked 200 miles from Germany to Denmark just to see how he played his music,” Hudson said.
“That was amazing, walking all that way, especially when you think about what they wore on their feet in those days.”
At the end of the interview with Hudson, the radio coincidentally blared the Band’s last big hit single, “Ophelia.”
It was, to use Cole’s description, “uncanny.”
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Jefferson County Reporter Charlie Bermant can be reached at 360-385-2335 or charlie.bermant@peninsuladailynews.com.
