The Weight
A transmission from old, weird America
There is a truism that art makes the strange familiar and makes the familiar strange. The Band’s biggest hit is intimately familiar to every classic rock listener, but it is quite a strange song. The lyrics seem like they are talking about ordinary people in ordinary situations, but they don’t add up to any specific identifiable reality. The devil makes an appearance. There are two different characters named Annie and Fanny. The narrator is on the run, but we don’t know from what. There are three different singers, all of whom sound like backwoodsy Muppets. In photos, the musicians look like Civil War re-enactors, or Bushwick hipsters, or rednecks, or academics, or all of the above. In the days before the internet, everything about them was mysterious, from the band name on down.
“The Weight” appeared on an album called Music From Big Pink because it came out of jam sessions that the Band held with Bob Dylan in the basement of Big Pink, a house deep in the forest outside Woodstock, New York. The house is, you guessed it, big and pink. You can rent it! We took my father-in-law to see it, and even though it’s way out in the boonies, we were not the only fans making a pilgrimage there that day.
My first band in college did a cover of “The Weight”, as has seemingly every other band that has ever existed. Aside from The Band themselves, nobody has done it better than the Staple Singers.
The version that the Staples performed with The Band for The Last Waltz is one of the most magnificent performances ever captured on film. As this guy says in his reaction video, “Ay, if this don’t move your soul, you might be soulless.”
Aretha Franklin’s recording is great too, and includes a scorching slide guitar intro by Duane Allman.
The Chambers Brothers’ version is beautifully funky and smooth.
I also like this version by High Mountain Hoedown, though I have no idea who they are, there is no information about them online.
“The Weight” originates in the era when The Band were working as Bob Dylan’s touring band under the name The Hawks. Here they are in action in 1966.
While Dylan was recovering from his 1967 motorcycle accident, he and the Hawks held extensive jam sessions around Woodstock, at his house and in the basement of Big Pink. They spent months rehearsing and recording folk, country and early rock songs. In A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs, Andrew Hickey tells the story.
[Dylan] and [Robbie] Robertson had had something between friendly discussion and outright arguments about Dylan’s style of songwriting while on tour the year before. Robertson — who, at this time, remember, had a body of songs that mostly consisted of things like “Uh Uh Uh” — thought that Dylan’s songs were too long, and the lyrics were approaching word salad. Why, he wanted to know, did Dylan not write songs that expressed things simply, in words that anyone could understand, rather than this oblique, arty stuff?
Dylan saw the validity of this critique. He started introducing the Band to his older folk repertoire, which was new to them. As Robertson explained:
None of the guys in The Band were about folk music. We were not from that side of the tracks. Folk music was from coffee houses, where people sipped cappuccinos. Where we played as The Hawks, nobody was sipping cappuccino, I’ll tell ya. We were playing hardcore bars.
As Dylan taught folk songs to the Hawks, they adapted them to their playing style. Andrew Hickey again:
While the Hawks were all Canadian, they’d been trained by Ronnie Hawkins and Levon Helm in how to play rock and roll, and that meant that they had picked up the way music was played in the Deep South. Not only that, but they’d played sessions in Nashville with [Roger] Hawkins, and Robertson had played with A-team musicians on the Blonde on Blonde sessions.
The result was that they picked up an instrumental style that sounded like the music that came from what the writer Charles L Hughes refers to as the country-soul triangle of Muscle Shoals, Memphis, and Nashville — a style that comes, ultimately, from white country musicians backing Black soul musicians, and which we’ve seen coming up time and again from Arthur Alexander to Aretha Franklin to Otis Redding. The Hawks’ music doesn’t sound anything like the more uptempo music from those musicians, all slashed guitar chords and stabbing horns, but it sounds very, *very* much like the ballads coming out of Memphis and Muscle Shoals, which were dominated by gospel piano, organ pads, and delicate picked guitar, records like Percy Sledge’s “When a Man Loves a Woman” or James Carr’s “Dark End of the Street”… When sung by white singers, rather than Black ones, and coupled with the folk-style lyrics that Dylan was introducing to the Hawks, that style became known as Americana.
Dylan and the Hawks also wrote some Americana-flavored originals, which formed the eventual basis for the material on Music From Big Pink.
