THE STORY OF A SONG: The Band - "The Weight" (1968)

[the artist credit on the record is “Jaime Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, Garth Hudson, Levon Helm.”]

    Anyone who loves rock music of the late 1960s loves The Weight; given an appreciation for that one, it’s simply impossible not to cherish the other. Before this mighty quintet became The Band, they were a rowdy, four- fifths Canadian (excepting Arkansas-born Helm) outfit known as the Hawks who backed up rocker Ronnie Hawkins in the early 1960s. It was when Bob Dylan hired them to back him up at die 1965 Newport Folk Festival that they entered rock history; their musical chemistry was so powerful that when Dylan suffered his motorcycle accident in 1967 and wanted a quiet place to jam while he recuperated, he and the former Hawks began cooking up wild and crazy music together at the Woodstock, New York, house they maintained; long before the music ever saw the light of day legally, The Basement Tapes were the stuff of legend. So, when the quintet cut their debut album, Music from Big Pink (their affectionate name for the Woodstock house), expectations were high —and completely surpassed. It was a democratic ensemble, free of ego (at least at the beginning), with musical roots that stretched deep into North American history, touching on folk, country, blues, and ancient nineteenth-century stories. What better name for them than simply The Band?

    Ed Ward writes of their musical mixture: Robbie Robertson (whose furious soloing at age eighteen on Hawkins’ frenzied 1963 version of Bo Diddley’s Who Do You Love made it a cult classic) was “one of the dirtiest, most inventive guitarists” in rock. Richard Manuel and Garth Hudson “were extending black gospel music’s piano and organ texture into something completely unique, and Rick Danko played a Motown-influenced bass that was a perfect counterpoint to Helm’s loose but snappy drum style.”- Robertson, the composer or co-writer of most of their own songs, was the only one who rarely sang lead. Here, Helm sings the verse, Danko the bridge, and all together on the chorus.

    The Weight, Robertson would say later, “had a kind of American mythology I was reinventing using my connection to the universal language.” The story is set in Nazareth, Pennsylvania—although the implication to the Nazareth of Jesus was surely not accidental, for it’s a song with strong religious overtones. It’s about one friend agreeing to do a favor for another, and that simple act turning into a predicament. The tale is filled with colorful characters based closely on people the group members had known—Luke (again, a name with Biblical implications, particularly since he’s “waitin’ for the Judgment Day”), young Anna Lee, and Crazy Chester. Time magazine once suggested that the song can be seen as a meeting between a character from the Old Testament and a rock musician.

    Group biographer Barney Hoskyns writes that The Weight was “recorded only as an afterthought” for Big Pink. “Inspired by the films of the Spanish director Luis Bunuel, Robbie penned a laid-back country-gospel parable about ‘the impossibility of sainthood,’ the story of a poor schmuck who does a friend a favor that only leads to people asking further favors . . . The Weight was stuffed with enough characters for a short story by William Faulkner or Carson McCullers.” Words and music “combined to create a place . . . that felt vividly real in the singing and telling.”—

    Whatever the song’s meaning, the chorus is glorious; when they break into three-part harmonies on “and you put the load right on me,” not singing along is simply not an option.

    Chart debut Aug. 31, 1968 (#63 peak on Billboard)