The last piece of the puzzle is gone. The last remaining member of everyone’s favorite band has passed. A key ingredient in a lost recipe where every ingredient was key. What Garth brought to The Band’s music was uniqueness…and authenticity…and a deep history of musical knowledge that made those songs sound like they could have been written in previous eras. Garth himself was not only from a previous era…he may have been from another planet. I was fortunate to have played with Garth numerous times and each experience was different. His love of improvisation equaled his respect and appreciation for composed music from every century and every part of the globe. And all of this just flowed through him as he played in a stream of consciousness way bringing his personality to whatever music he was immersed in at the moment. The first time I met Garth was in the early nineties when my band opened a few shows forThe Band. I arrived at my soundcheck to discover Garth, the multi-instrumentalist, in one of the dressing rooms, playing accordion by himself as the rest of the Band had known shown up yet. I introduced myself and said “That was beautiful” to which he replied “Thanks. There are a lot of great keyboard players and sax players but there are very few of US great accordion players.” And that is a true statement. We would play together that night and quite a few times years later and got to know each other more, on a casual level. Having lunch one time on The Last Waltz Tour we got into a discussion about alto sax players and I asked him who were his favorites. I asked him about one great jazz alto player, who will remain unnamed, and he responded that he never cared for the guy's playing although someone had recently given him a bunch of his CD’s. The next morning as we met in the hotel lobby to get on the bus Garth walked up to me with a stack of CD”s and said “You can have these If you like.” Irony. One of the last times we played together was a few years ago on The Last Waltz Tour on a night when we had a strict curfew and were being continually reminded that the show had to be done by a certain time. We may have even dropped a song to accommodate the situation. Before the encore Garth would traditionally go off on an improvised musical journey, a la The Genetic Method, which on a nightly basis would vary in length depending on how he was feeling at the moment. This particular night, as the promoters and the rest of the band hoped he would curtail his muse for the sake of the curfew, we all watched side stage while Garth proceeded to play the longest Genetic Method of the tour. Oh well. It was amazing and nobody penalized us. It was a moment in history being offered by one of the greatest to ever do it. RIP Garth.- Warren Haynes
