The Weight - the Band
- unclestylus
- 13 hours ago
- 5 min read
I always liked the notion that the Band deliberately chose their name to be self-effacing, as though they were just part of the American landscape, while simultaneously implying that they didn't need a name, as they were THE band, the band that backed Bob Dylan, that everyone who was anyone in rock knew was the band behind Dylan's on his legendary "Judas" tour of the UK in 1966 and featured on the legendary 1969 bootleg album "Great White Wonder" later to resurface as a part of "the Basement Tapes".
Back in the 1980's, after a cricket match in a park in London had been aborted due to rain, we all repaired to a team member's nearby flat to watch the golf on tv. Our friend, Jeremy (see elsewhere on Uncle Stylus), had a flatmate who was a nascent sports journalist, and very anxious to impress us with his superior knowledge. He challenged us to say what the full and proper name of the tournament we were watching was. Someone ventured "The Open Golf Championship of Great Britain". He gleefully shook his head "no"! "The Golf Championship of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" was proffered to another smirking "no". Other unsuccessful guesses were made, each proclaimed wrong by our host with ever increasing smugness and condescension.
Finally he put us out of our misery. "It's just called "The Open", he said, condescendingly. "It's so famous, all over the world, that it's just called "The Open". Nothing more, nothing less. Everyone knows what it means." Beer flowed, and as the afternoon wore on, we extracted our cruel revenge. In a conversational lull, my friend Phil asked me what the real name of what we were watching was. I replied "The Open" but he responded that the tournament went by the name of merely "The Ope" and pedantically explained that this was all that was necessary due to its world status. As the afternoon wore on, the byplay continued mercilessly, each rhetorical question resulting in a further shortening of the title, from "The O", through "The" to "Th", and then to the faintest, barely discernible "t", at which point our sports correspondent stormed out of the flat, slamming the door behind him, having thrown his can of lager at the wall. He didn't get to hear the final pronouncement that a silence would suffice, a short silence at that. Nor did he get to see the end of "The Open", unless he found a pub with a tv - a rare facility in those days.
The classic line-up of the Band, Garth Hudson, Robbie Robertson, Levon Helm, Rick Danko and Richard Manuel, released seven studio albums between 1968 and 1977, but by far and away their most famous songs were "The Weight" and "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" from their first two LPs respectively, both written by the group's main songwriter, Robbie Robertson. In recent years, "The Night..." has come in for some bad press for ostensibly supporting the Confederate cause of the American Civil War, but this is unjustifiable, as it is no way racist, rather bemoaning the tragedy of a common sharecropper, too poor to own slaves, and the misery of war.
For the meaning behind "The Weight" I can do no better than quote the succinct description supplied by Wikipedia, that it "...is about a traveller's arrival, visit, and departure from a town called Nazareth, in which the traveller's friend, Fanny, has asked him to look up some of her friends and send them her regards, though with each encounter, he comes away with more favours he must do, and those favours become more favours, until the weight of doing so many unexpected tasks causes him to pick up his bag and leave town altogether and return to Fanny. The singers, led by Helm, vocalize the traveller's encounters with people in the town from the perspective of a Bible Belt American Southerner, like Helm himself, a native of rural Arkansas."
In their search from the essence of America, perhaps this is the closest the Band ever got, side 1, track 5, of their debut album "Music from Big Pink". The phrasing and Old Testament references are pure early Dylan, the narration as picaresque as a road movie, the harmonies like half a barber's shop quartet slumming it in a downtown bar just before midnight.
I love the fact that Robertson is on record as saying that a major influence on the lyrics of "The Weight" were the early films of surrealist Spanish filmmaker Luis Bunuel and and that they critique the role of religion in the lives of ordinary people, giving the ever-decreasing probability of the narrator completing his errands for Fanny, tragicomic proportions.
In their later albums, and in his solo work, Robertson tended to intellectual portentousness, but "The Weight is heading in the opposite direction, exalting the everyday of ordinary Americans, like the best of John Steinbeck, without being patronising or deceitful as is so often the case with the rhetoric of dumbed-down MAGA culture. Sooner, rather than later, many may find the words "You put the load right on me" representing an uncomfortable truth.
But for now, let's all join in. It's back-seat-of-the-bus, singalong bliss,
"I pulled into Nazareth, was feelin' about half past dead.
I just need some place where I can lay my head.
"Hey, mister, can you tell me where a man might find a bed?"
He just grinned and shook my hand, "no" was all he said.
Take a load off Fanny,
take a load for free,
take a load off Fanny,
and you put the load right on me.
I picked up my bag, I went lookin' for a place to hide.
When I saw Carmen and the Devil walkin' side by side.
I said, "Hey, Carmen, come on let's go downtown."
She said, "I gotta go but my friend can stick around."....
Go down, Miss Moses, there's nothin' you can say.
It's just old Luke and Luke's waitin' on the Judgment Day.
"Well, Luke, my friend, what about young Anna Lee?"
He said, "Do me a favour, son, won't you stay and keep Anna Lee company?"....
Crazy Chester followed me and he caught me in the fog.
He said, "I will fix your rack if you take Jack, my dog."
I said, "Wait a minute, Chester, you know I'm a peaceful man."
He said, "That's OK, boy, won't you feed him when you can?"......
Catch a cannon ball now to take me down the line
My bag is sinkin' low and I do believe it's time
to get back to Miss Fanny, you know she's the only one
who sent me here with her regards for everyone.
Take a load off Fanny,
take a load for free,
take a load off Fanny,
and you put the load right on me."