The fourth track in the Brown Album holds a special place in my esteem; I get some kind of fatherly wisdom out of it whenever I need to clear my head, like it's talking directly to me. It's called "When You Awake", and it's got Danko on lead.
Ollie told me I'm a fool.
So I walked on down the road a mile,
Went to the house that brings a smile
Sat upon my grandpa's knee,
And what do you think he said to me?
When You Awake you will remember everything,
You will be hangin' on a string from your...
When you believe, you will relieve the only soul
That you were born with to grow old and never know
Ollie showed me the fork in the road.
You can take to the left or go straight to the right,
Use your days and save your nights,
Be careful where you step, and watch wha-cha eat,
Sleep with the light on and you got it beat.
When You Awake you will remember everything,
You will be hangin' on a string from your...
When you believe, you will relieve the only soul
That you were born with to grow old and never know
Ollie warned me it's a mean old world,
The street don't greet ya, yes, it's true;
But what am I supposed to do:
Read the writing on the wall,
I heard it when I was very small.
When You Awake you will remember everything,
You will be hangin' on a string from your...
When you believe, you will relieve the only soul
That you were born with to grow old and never know
Wash my hand in lye water,
I got a date with the captains daughter.
You can go and tell your brother,
We sure gonna love one another, Oh!
You may be right and ya might be wrong,
I ain't gonna worry all day long.
Snow's gonna come and the frost gonna bite,
My old car froze up last night.
Ain't no reason to hang your head
I could wake up in the mornin' dead. Oh!
And if I thought it would do any good,
I'd stand on the rock where Moses stood.
Let's hand it off to Peter Viney and see what he has to say:
When You Awake is by no means a prominent song from The Band. It’s missing from all the compilation albums. 1 However, on the Classic Albums video it’s one of the songs that Robbie and Rick devote most time to. It had a special place for me, because I couldn’t get it out of my head in the winter of 1970. There’s a reason. I had a beaten-up, hand-painted 1953 car, a Vauxhall Wyvern. It was the most American-looking car from the British branch of General Motors and had a peeling chrome grill like a classic Studebaker. Much loved as it was, I spent weeks trying to keep it going. As I was living in the icy winds of East Anglia, that line My old car froze-up last night wouldn’t leave my head. Because it often did. I became adept at replacing the water pump with scrap-yard components, while humming / muttering the last verse to myself. I’d forgotten all about this until I was talking to an old friend from the same era who asked if it was still my favourite song. Well, no, it isn’t. It wasn’t then either, but I did keep singing it to myself. But any song from the brown album is worthy of consideration.
This is a strange song in that it breaks up the full blast Americana of the three preceding tracks and the following one. Listen to it again, and it hardly sounds like any kind of rock song at all. Like all their best tracks you grab images as you relisten but you’re hard put to connect these images together (cf We Can Talk, Chest Fever).
Robbie Robertson
It’s a story about someone who passes something on to you, and you pass it on to someone else. But it’s something you take to heart and carry with you your whole life. 2
The link here is that we have a narrator’s voice (the little boy) in the verse, and Grandpa’s voice in the chorus. The narrator begins each verse with reporting something that ‘Ollie’ said: Ollie told me … / Ollie showed me … / Ollie warned me … .
Barney Hoskyns
This enchanting Manuel-Robertson song concerned a young boy picking up sage advice from his Grandpa and from Ollie, who may or may not be the same person. 3
I just can’t see how Ollie and Grandpa are the same person. It starts out:
Ollie told me , I’m a fool
So I walked on down the road a mile
went to the house that brings a smile
sat upon my Grandpa’s knee
What do you think he said to me?
That sounds as if the narrator is retreating from Ollie, and seeking solace a mile away at Grandpa’s. I think that’s pretty transparent! Ollie is mainly a voice that sets out problems, while Grandpa’s tone is soothing (it’s hard to work out what Grandpa’s words mean). Without thinking I saw Ollie as parental - but maybe a stepfather or uncle.
Franko
When I was a kid I thought it to be a simple song about family, the relationship between a grandfather and his grandson, a place for the boy to go to listen and fall asleep to the comforting words of his grandfather. Upon further listenings it seem like 'Ole' gives as much advice as the grandfather does. I'm perplexed. Who is Ole? My guess is Ole is the singer's older brother. I don't know why. 4
Everyone seems to agree that it’s ‘Ollie’ though it’s pronounced ‘Owe-lee’ and every Oliver I knew had a short ‘o’ sound as in ‘got’ at the start of Ollie, not the longer ‘o’ sound in ‘note’.
I was perplexed when I saw this on the lyrics as I’d always heard it as ‘Oh, they …’ (Oh, they told me … /Oh, they showed me / Oh, they warned me …) which utilises the general ‘they’ and seemed to make a lot more sense to me. It’s the ‘they’ that we often use to talk about government organizations:
They ought to do something about road deaths.
They should do something about teenage crime.
We never define who ‘they’ are; but ‘they’ have the wisdom and power to do "something" about a problem. "they" also give advice. When I asked for comments in the Band Guestbook I was pleased to see that it wasn’t just me:
Ragtime Willie
The ('official') lyrics as noted by Jan say: "Ollie told me", but for many years I heard Rick sing "Oh, they told me", "Oh, they showed me", "Oh, they warned me". Who is Ollie? 5
Stanley Landau
By the way on the issue of "Ollie" vs. "Oh they", I too for many years thought it was "Oh they", but then some time in the early 70’s I got hold of a Band songbook which indicated that the correct lyric is "Ollie". 6
Pat Brennan
The songbook that covered the Brown Album has "Ollie told me..." as the first line 7
When I first read Hoskyns saying it was "Ollie" I thought ‘What an idiot,’ but that’s what appears in the lyrics. So I’m wrong. It’s clearer in the solo version (not that this is accurate elsewhere, but he couldn’t get this bit wrong). Pity. They works better! Anyway, Pete Rivard comes up with one plausible explanation of 'Owlie':
Pete Rivard
I'm another one who always heard "Oh, they told me..." in When You Awake. When I moved out here to the Upper Midwest, I discovered a whole genre of joketelling concerning a Scandinavian couple called Ole and Lena. Typically, the jokes center around Ole, or his wife's, cluelessness, and sometimes are inverted to make Ole the smart one among some of his oafish friends. Now, Ole is pronounced Oh lee, in these stories. I wonder if Robbie had picked up some of these tales from Dylan, a native Minnesotan, or someone else from this area, never bothered to check on the spelling, and used him as a character dispensing folksy advice. 8
Stu Huska comes up with another:
Stu Huska
Several years ago I heard Rick Danko perform "When You Awake" in a small intimate venue. Rick asked for requests and as he started to sing he said " My mother's name, God rest her soul, was Leyola and her friends used to call her 'Ole'" He then went directly into this wonderful rendition of "When You Awake" Perhaps Rick's bandmates were also thinking of Leyola Danko when they penned this whimsical tale. 9
Stu's note is supported by the Classic Albums solo version where Danko sings:
Ollie showed me, the fork in the road
she said take to your left …
which seemed to change Ollie’s perceived gender, and was something I'd wondered about. It would seem that this was deliberate. So why did we all see Ollie as male? Looking back, there's no reason. Ronnie Hawkins allegedly once freaked out because Robbie was reading The Way of Zen on the road and though no one would claim that these were zen aphorisms, they are homilies - odd pieces of advice strung together and recalled by the narrator, with the soothing voice of Grandpa on the chorus functioning in much the way that the chorus’s soothing voice does later in King Harvest. It would be interesting to know how Robbie and Richard divided the task.
Phil from California
Always sounded to me like two songs joined together. The"Wash my hands in lye water" part onward (sounds like) maybe a song idea by Richard tagged onto a RR song? And how about fading out on a line so rich as "If I thought it would do any good I'd stand on the rock where Moses stood". Pete Townsend would have written a whole concept album around a line like that and The Band fades on it. Great stuff. Great guitar picking by RR too. 10
The snatches of advice and the way things don’t quite fit together, but resonate well in phrases, reminds me of We Can Talk, which is Richard’s lyrics. I agree that it sounds like two songs welded together, but I'd guess the other way round, with the Manuel part first and the Robertson second.
Ollie (or ‘they’) is a critical voice - Ollie told me I’m a fool ….
In verse 2, Ollie showed the fork in the road and added a list of parental style advice…
Use your days and save your nights …
Be careful where you step and watch what you eat …
Sleep with the light on and you got it beat … (fear?)
In verse 3, Ollie warns that it’s a mean old world … the street don’t greet you, yes, it’s true and the verse ends with:
Read the writing on the wall
I heard it when I was very small …
Which means this stream of advice is pretty continual.
This is what Grandpa has to say, as it’s transcribed:
When You Awake
You will remember everything
You will be hanging on a string … from your …
When you believe you will relieve (be? / relive?)the only soul
That you were born to grow old and never know
I don’t believe this is necessarily an accurate transcription, but nothing I come up with makes any more sense. The solo version on Classic Albums is clearer:
When You Awake
You will remember everything
You will be hanging on a string
When you believe you will relieve the only soul
That you were born with, to grow old and never know
The with is on the printed lyrics. It’s just not very prominent on the original.
Stanley Landau
On the "Before the Flood" tour I heard the song performed twice and the line "You will be hangin’ on a string from your…" was finished with the word "heart" ie. "you will be hanging on a string from your heart". 11
This is the soothing advice from Grandpa and it’s set as part of a dream.
Confused? You will be because at this point, after three verses and choruses, we suddenly get a different refrain which is repated twice and seems to have little connection.
The next section is jaunty:
Wash my hand in lye water
I got a date with the captain’s daughter …
Sounds like the boy is growing up now. No need for more advice from Ollie and Grandpa, and he’s making sure his hands are disinfected, bleached even, before his date with the (presumably luscious) Captain’s daughter. I suppose this is an extreme version of the kid continually checking for under-arm excretions before the first date. 'lye' is a strong, caustic alkaloid. I've never seen the phrase 'lye water' elsewhere and it's not listed in Websters either.
But again refer to the Rick Danko solo version:
I got a date with the Captain’s doctor
Sounds less fun! And if this song is so personal, why such a change? The official lyrics say daughter and there's no doubt in my mind that is what was on the original.
He changes:
You may be right and you might be wrong
to
You might be right and you might be wrong
which is hardly crucial, though a tad less subtle.
Even worse he changes my classic line:
My old car froze up last night
to
My old car broke down last night
And, to me at least, this is crucial. He makes a lot of fluffs on the guitar as well, which makes you wonder about the intent of the direct cut to Robbie picking out the same song expertly on the video. But then the quote above would indicate that the song has special relevance to Rick Danko, so you have to consider that these changes are not necessarily slips. (But Danko is not usually too accurate on lyrics).
This is followed by a reference to the problems that made them move south from Canada to record the album:
Snow’s gonna come and the frost’s gonna bite
My old car froze up last night …
Ain’t no reason to hang your head
I could wake up in the morning dead, Oh, oh!
And if I thought it would do any good
I’d stand on the Rock where Moses stood …
with a fast fade on the last line. The last line is a direct quote from the chorus of the traditional spiritual I Bowed My Head and Cried Holy:
If I could, I surely would
Stand on that rock where Moses stood. 12
The rock where Moses stood is either old time religion, and/or the Ten Commandments … but the fast fade into nothingness is a comment in itself, and the singer would only stand there if he thought it would do any good. Greil Marcus was critical of the reproduction of this fade on live shows:
Greil Marcus
They presented perfect replicas of their records - to the point where Rick Danko would back off from the mike at the end of When You Awake, imitating the studio fade - the surest way to please an audience without really moving it. 13
Greil (most uncharacteristically) fails to get the point. This fade into oblivion is crucial to the song, and Rick Danko was absolutely correct to maintain it.
It’s got something to do with advice and choices but as a text it crumbles into pieces the more you try to dissect or analyse it. Yet as a song it makes perfect sense, and that is the point.
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Rag Mama Rag
The second track on the Brown Album hints at a certain aspect of relationships with the fairer sex that not many songs touch on. It's called Rag Mama Rag, and it can be interpreted in a multitude of ways, assuming you have a versed understanding of the way "rag" can be used. But that's best left to Wikipedia, no? As for the song itself, the fiddle that underlines the melody really accentuates the theme of living the past that the group was trying to accomplish with the concept of the album. Let's you have a listen, yeah?
Rag Mama Rag,
I can't believe its true.
Rag Mama Rag,
A - what did you do?
I crawled up to the railroad track,
Let the four nine-teen scratch my back.
Shag Mama Shag,
now whats come over you.
Rag Mama Rag,
I'm a-pulling out your gag.
Gonna turn you lose like an old caboose, got a tail I need a drag.
I ask about your turtle, and you ask about the weather,
Well, I can't jump the hurdle and we can't get to-gether.
We could be relaxing in my sleeping bag,
But all you want to do for me mama is a
Rag Mama Rag
Theres no-where to go,
Rag Mama Rag
Come on resin up the bow.
Rag Mama Rag, where do ya roam?
Rag Mama Rag, bring your skinny little body right home.
Its dog eat dog and cat eat mouse, you can
Rag Mama Rag all over my house.
Hail stones beatin on the roof,
The bourbon is a hundred proof.
It's you and me and the telephone
Our destiny is quite well known.
We don't need to sit and brag.
All we gotta do is Rag Mama Rag.
Rag Mama Rag. Where do you roam?
Rag Mama Rag, bring your skinny little body back home
During Robertson's last performance with the Band, The Last Waltz, two versions of this track were recorded; one for the audience and one during rehearsal. Since I'm such a nice guy, I'll let you listen to both of em RIGHT HERE!
Rag Mama Rag,
I can't believe its true.
Rag Mama Rag,
A - what did you do?
I crawled up to the railroad track,
Let the four nine-teen scratch my back.
Shag Mama Shag,
now whats come over you.
Rag Mama Rag,
I'm a-pulling out your gag.
Gonna turn you lose like an old caboose, got a tail I need a drag.
I ask about your turtle, and you ask about the weather,
Well, I can't jump the hurdle and we can't get to-gether.
We could be relaxing in my sleeping bag,
But all you want to do for me mama is a
Rag Mama Rag
Theres no-where to go,
Rag Mama Rag
Come on resin up the bow.
Rag Mama Rag, where do ya roam?
Rag Mama Rag, bring your skinny little body right home.
Its dog eat dog and cat eat mouse, you can
Rag Mama Rag all over my house.
Hail stones beatin on the roof,
The bourbon is a hundred proof.
It's you and me and the telephone
Our destiny is quite well known.
We don't need to sit and brag.
All we gotta do is Rag Mama Rag.
Rag Mama Rag. Where do you roam?
Rag Mama Rag, bring your skinny little body back home
During Robertson's last performance with the Band, The Last Waltz, two versions of this track were recorded; one for the audience and one during rehearsal. Since I'm such a nice guy, I'll let you listen to both of em RIGHT HERE!
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Across the Great Divide
Here we'll take a look at the first track of the group's self-titled second album, The Band, called "Across the Great Divide". The fan title of this album, named for the color scheme of the cover, is The Brown Album, in the same vein as the Beatles' White Album. The association of this album with the Band, incidentally, is why the scheme of this blog is brown.
"Perhaps the best album by any Rock and Roll group ever. Timeless, soulful, seamless, a work that goes far beyond and yet is front-porch friendly."
--M.E. Cooper
"Music from Big Pink had been a fine, even superior debut; The Band was their masterpiece. Robbie Robertson's songwriting had grown by leaps and bounds. As players, all five musicians had reached a completely new level of ensemble cohesion. The sum was very much greater than the parts, and the parts were as good as any that existed. The album's single, 'Up on Cripple Creek,' became the Band's first and only Top 30 release. It was one of several songs on the album that had an 'old-timey' feel. Other highlights on this masterpiece include 'Rag Mama Rag,' 'The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,' and 'King Harvest.'"
--Rob Bowman, All-Music Guide
Now, let's get to it. Of note, every song posted from this point forward was written and composed by Robbie Robertson (even if a certain drummer of a certain Band would disagree).
Standin by your window in pain, A pistol in your
hand, And I beg you, dear Molly, girl,
Try and understand your man the best you can.
Across The Great Divide, Just grab your hat, and take that ride
Get yourself a bride, And bring your children down to the river side.
I had a goal in my younger days, I nearly wrote my will
But I changed my mind for the better, I'm at the still, had my fill and I'm fit to kill
Pinball machine, and a queen, I nearly took a bust
Tried to keep my hands to myself, Ya say it's a must, but who can ya trust?
Harvest moon shinin' down from the sky, A weary sign for all
I'm gonna leave this one horse town, Had t' stall till the fall, now I'm gonna crawl!
Now Molly dear, don't ya shed a tear
Your time will surely come, you'll feed your man
chicken ev'ry Sunday, Now tell me, hon, what-cha done with the gun
Across The Great Divide, Just grab your hat, and take that ride
Get yourself a bride, And bring your children down to the river side.
"Perhaps the best album by any Rock and Roll group ever. Timeless, soulful, seamless, a work that goes far beyond and yet is front-porch friendly."
--M.E. Cooper
"Music from Big Pink had been a fine, even superior debut; The Band was their masterpiece. Robbie Robertson's songwriting had grown by leaps and bounds. As players, all five musicians had reached a completely new level of ensemble cohesion. The sum was very much greater than the parts, and the parts were as good as any that existed. The album's single, 'Up on Cripple Creek,' became the Band's first and only Top 30 release. It was one of several songs on the album that had an 'old-timey' feel. Other highlights on this masterpiece include 'Rag Mama Rag,' 'The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,' and 'King Harvest.'"
--Rob Bowman, All-Music Guide
Now, let's get to it. Of note, every song posted from this point forward was written and composed by Robbie Robertson (even if a certain drummer of a certain Band would disagree).
Standin by your window in pain, A pistol in your
hand, And I beg you, dear Molly, girl,
Try and understand your man the best you can.
Across The Great Divide, Just grab your hat, and take that ride
Get yourself a bride, And bring your children down to the river side.
I had a goal in my younger days, I nearly wrote my will
But I changed my mind for the better, I'm at the still, had my fill and I'm fit to kill
Pinball machine, and a queen, I nearly took a bust
Tried to keep my hands to myself, Ya say it's a must, but who can ya trust?
Harvest moon shinin' down from the sky, A weary sign for all
I'm gonna leave this one horse town, Had t' stall till the fall, now I'm gonna crawl!
Now Molly dear, don't ya shed a tear
Your time will surely come, you'll feed your man
chicken ev'ry Sunday, Now tell me, hon, what-cha done with the gun
Across The Great Divide, Just grab your hat, and take that ride
Get yourself a bride, And bring your children down to the river side.
Sunday, March 21, 2010
The Weight
Probably the most famous tune in the Band's entire portfolio.
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, and "No!", was all he said.
(Chorus:)
Take a load off Fanny, take a load for free;
Take a load off Fanny, And (and) (and) you can 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 m'friend can stick around."
(Chorus)
Go down, Miss Moses, there's nothin' you can say
It's just ol' Luke, and Luke's waitin' on the Judgement Day.
"Well, Luke, my friend, what about young Anna Lee?"
He said, "Do me a favor, son, woncha stay an' keep Anna Lee company?"
(Chorus)
Crazy Chester followed me, and he caught me in the fog.
He said, "I will fix your rack, if you'll take Jack, my dog."
I said, "Wait a minute, Chester, you know I'm a peaceful man."
He said, "That's okay, boy, won't you feed him when you can."
(Chorus)
Catch a cannon ball now, t'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.
(Chorus)
An article by Peter Viney on the song, which originally appeared in the Band fanzine Jawbone in 1996:
The Weight is the centrepiece of the album, both musically and lyrically. First, Robbie Robertson on The Weight:
Robbie Robertson:
I just wrote it. It’s just one of those things. I thought of a couple of words that led to a couple more, and the next thing I knew I wrote the song. That song was the only song on ‘Music From Big Pink’ that we never did rehearse. We just figured that it was a simple song, and when it came up we gave it a try and recorded it three or four times. We said that’s fine, maybe we’ll use it. We didn’t even know if we were going to use it, and it turned out to be the album.1
Robbie Robertson:
When I wrote ‘The Weight’, the first song for ‘Music From Big Pink’, it had a kind of American mythology I was reinventing using my connection to the universal language. The Nazareth in ‘The Weight’ was Nazareth, Pennsylvania. It was a little off-handed - ‘I pulled into Nazareth’. Well I don’t know if the Nazareth that Jesus came from is the kind of place you pull into, but I do know that you pull into Nazareth, Pennsylvania! I’m experimenting with North American mythology. I didn’t mean to take sacred, precious things and turn them into humour.2
(On the album, The Weight closes side one, so Robertson must mean it was the first song written for Big Pink. )
Robbie Robertson:
(Buñuel) did so many films on the impossibility of sainthood. People trying to be good in ‘Viridiana’ and ‘Nazarin’, people trying to do their thing. In ‘The Weight’ it’s the same thing. People like Buñuel would make films that had these religious connotations to them but it wasn’t necessarily a religious meaning. In Buñuel there were these people trying to be good and it’s impossible to be good. In ‘The Weight’ it was this very simple thing. Someone says, ‘Listen, would you do me this favour? When you get there will you say “hello” to somebody or will you give somebody this or will you pick up one of these for me? Oh? You’re going to Nazareth, that’s where the Martin guitar factory is. Do me a favour when you’re there.’ This is what it’s all about. So the guy goes and one thing leads to another and it’s like ‘Holy Shit, what’s this turned into? I’ve only come here to say “hello” for somebody and I’ve got myself in this incredible predicament.’ It was very Buñuelish to me at the time.
The Weight has been painting pictures for me for over thirty-five years now; it’s an intensely visual song, and my pictures aren’t of anywhere in Pennsylvania. My Nazareth is a dusty western town sometime in the late 19th century. Neighbouring towns might be called Jerusalem or Babylon … or Jericho (which was a deliberate reference in the Band’s comeback album title in 1993). Carmen and the devil are strutting their stuff in red silk dresses, fringed with black cat fur, along a wooden sidewalk. Chester is the town character straight out of the TV series Gunsmoke which was set in Dodge City in the 1880s.4 Gunsmoke ran from 1955 to 1975 and was the archtypal TV western. Chester Goode was the name of the deputy marshall in the series who spent his time limping rapidly along the dusty main street dragging his ramrod-stiff gammy leg. In the TV series, Chester had a catch-phrase. As he limped after the town marshall, Matt Dillon, he used to shout out ‘Marshall Dillon!’, ‘Marshall Dillon!’ (Marshall Dylan! Marshall Dylan? 5). Carmen might be the programme’s Miss Kitty, who owned the Longbranch Saloon - a tart with a heart. Old Luke’s another town character (not from the TV series this time) whose rockin’ chair ain’t goin’ nowhere, as he puffs his pipe waiting on the judgement day. The Cannonball steams into the station, a great cow-catcher across the front. Pure Americana…
OK, a Cannonball summons up a streamlined 1930’s train, as well as the folk song Wabash Cannonball, and a wild west Carmen wouldn’t be invited ‘Come on let’s go downtown’ because the one-street town I see wouldn’t distinguish between town and downtown. Chester caught the narrator in the fog, which doesn’t conjure the west much either. John Simon, who produced the album says that ‘Crazy Chester’ was a real person, known to the members of the Band.6 Levon Helm maintains that everyone in the song was known to them.
Levon Helm:
The song was full of our favorite characters. ‘Luke’ was Jimmy Ray Paulman (of The Hawks). ‘Young Anna Lee’ was Anna Lee Williams from Turkey Scratch. ‘Crazy Chester’ was a guy we all knew from Fayetteville who came into town on Saturdays wearing a full set of cap guns on his hips … he was like Hopalong Cassidy and a friend of The Hawk’s. 7
This was confirmed by a website post from Arkansas:
Sheila from Fayetteville:
My father in law told me about Crazy Chester. Chester used to walk everywhere. He wore a cheap red dime-store cowboy hat and wore his britches legs tucked into his cowboy boots. He knew everyone, and everyone knew him. It amazes me that I've been singing along with the lyrics of these songs for a long time and I'm just now learning that some of these people were right in my own backyard! The Band frequented the Iris Hotel, Tastee Freeze and the Rockwood Club here in Fayetteville. My mom in law was a waitress at the Rockwood and has met them all! Crazy Chester is from here too! Everyone here knows about him. WOW!
Robbie has acknowledged that characters in songs had their basis in people they’d met ‘along the road’, but crucially added in a TV interview, when asked if there really was a Chester and a Bessie, that “each character in a song could be a combination of more than one person.” This is how most novelists work too.
Levon’s quote places Luke in the Wild West as well, albeit a fake Wild West. It doesn’t matter. Other people place the town in the post war Deep South:
Mike Chivers:
My own vision, is of a Post Civil war venue when everything is screwed up and scattered and the main character is trying to find shelter and make some sense of a world turned upside down. I considered the possibility that the verse about "Miss Moses" was a reference to Harriet Tubman, an escaped slave who returned south several times to lead slaves to freedom. "Old Luke" would be a slave not interested in being delivered from freedom other than by "the judgement day." Anna Lee would be a reference to his daughter or niece and Luke invites the main character (A white, possibly Rebel soldier) to stay and keep her "company" as an expression of his regard for the end of slavery and a lack of concern for retaining hatred against whites9.
The lyrics are impressionistic and will live with your picture as well as my picture and Mike’s picture and whatever Robbie’s picture and Levon’s pictures might have been.
Pulling into Nazareth
A Time magazine article in 1970 read the beginning of the song as a meeting between an Old Testament character and a 1970 rock musician10:
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
And ‘no’ was all he said. 11
It sounds pretty New Testament - no room at the inn, but this Nazareth is set in an American landscape. The guy he meets is a town booster - a-skinnin’ and a-grinnin’, but has zero to offer. It might be that a rock musician pulls into Nazareth, Pennsylvania but if so, Nazareth warps itself into the biblical town then into a western town before his eyes. Robbie liked playing with time and place. In Up On Cripple Creek he leaps from Cripple Creek (whether the 1890s Colorado gold rush or the Appalachian folk festival) to Lake Charles, Louisiana watching Spike Jones on the box in the 1950s.
Clive James:
In a typical Robertson lyric, a century or so of chronological time is abruptly made to collapse between us and an event. Suddenly we are involved in it, hearing the contemporary voices, seeing things happen. And a crucial part of the strategy is that the event tends to remain uninterpreted: we might be given a dramatic interchange between two partially specified characters, or an unbroken monologue from some onlooker to an occurrence of which the details are clear but the pattern incomplete, and from this we try to sort out what is going on, unaided by any logical commentary.12
Take a load off Fanny
This chorus is so incredibly well-known, yet readers of the earlier version have e-mailed me regularly saying ‘I thought it was Annie … because later there’s ‘What about Miss Anna Lee’. I had my Annie / Fanny doubts at first too. I’ve heard a few interpretations - a Canadian musician swore to me in 1971 that ‘Take a load off Fanny’ was all about catching and disseminating the clap (= a load), and that there was a double take - ‘off’ could also be ‘of’ (presumably using the English frontal sense of the word ‘fanny’ rather than the American posterior one) - Take a load off Fanny/of Fanny, and you put the load right on me. The clap is Miss Fanny’s regards to everyone. Of course, being Canadian, he claimed to have been told this directly by a member of The Band. Twenty years later, another Canadian asured me that this was perfectly true, again tracing the explanation directly to an un-named Band member. I can easily believe that a Band member told someone this, but it doesn’t mean it’s true, as none of them ever betrayed a lack of a sense of humour. I’m interested that this particular story is so widespread, and yet so ignored by Robertson when he’s talking about the lyrics. While we’re worrying about intepretations of a load, move over to The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary :
Load:
A burden of affliction, sin, responsibility etc; a thing which weighs down, opresses or impedes a person.
Load:
A material object or force which acts or is conceived as a weight, cog etc.
Load:
= DOSE slang, 20th century (dose= an infection with venereal disease)
So maybe a dose of clap is part of the weight, or more likely, a symbol of the weight. This was expanded by another internet post :
‘Rosalind’:
I always thought that "Fannie" might have come from the song that Levon always looked forward to singing during The Hawks wild years. He mentioned on the Conan O'Brien Show back in 1993 that his very favorite song to sing every night way back then was "Short Fat Fannie" It was also the song that he used to tease Cathy Evelyn (Smith) with. She mentioned that in her book "Chasing The Dragon" She said she would turn red and run away cause every time he sang it, he would look over at her and grin. Since "The Weight" was swamped with real-life folks and memories...13
Cathy Smith was an early close associate of The Hawks as well as a later associate of The Band going right up to The Last Waltz, and is mentioned in Levon Helm’s autobiography as the girl who helped them out of a drug bust:
Rick Danko:
So Levon spoke to this chick he was dating. Her name was Kathy and she was the most beautiful girl in Toronto… 16 years old when he met her, and she was a gorgeous, gorgeous lady. She looked beautiful and no one could resist her. Anyway, Levon explained the situation to her, and she kindly gave this cop who was trying to crucify us a blow job. Then she told him she was 14 years old. He was the chief witness against us, but this was some weird shit for him, and he disappeared, we never saw him again. In the end everyone else got off, and I received a year’s suspended sentence on probation.14
Rosalind’s comment got this reply:
Bill Munson:
I never found Cathy Smith’s Chasing The Dragon, but some pertinent bits of it are quoted in The Seahorse Motel chapter in Rock & Roll Toronto. The event, which was the sort of thing British Premiership footballers have gained recent notoriety for, involved three Band (or rather Hawks) members and resulted in the birth of “The Band baby” quoted elsewhere. According to the book, Richard (who it appears was not in fact responsible) stood up and offered to take the ‘load’- or consequences. In the light of Ros’s quote about “Short Fat Fannie” it does ring bells with the themes Robbie has stated that The Weight is about – sharing a load, guilt and ‘the impossibility of’ redemption and would make some sense of the chorus.15
I’ve never managed to find Cathy Smith’s book either, but for the prurient, here is the relevant passage as quoted in Rock and Roll Toronto.
Cathy Smith, from Rock and Roll Toronto:
“One night a few months after I met them, they rented a few rooms in the Seahorse Motel down on the lakeshore. We partied on into the night, and at one point I ended up in bed with Rick Danko, In the middle of making love, Rick found out I wasn’t on the pill and things (as it were) ground to a halt. He got out of bed and wandered on down the hall, leaving me lying there hurt and confused, then Levon walked into the room, climbed into bed with me.” Six weeks later, Smith discovered she was pregnant. Levon was the father, she insists, although she also says that she ‘didn’t belong particularly to Levon’. Richard Manuel offered to marry her, but she turned him down.16
In all the correspondence I got since writing The Weight article years and years ago, Rosalind is the first to point out the Cathy Smith connection, and it covers the shared load theme without necessarily dismissing the clap reference either. Going back too her involvement in the drug bust, a weight is also slang for a kilo (or is it a pound) of dope. Again, the idea of a shared responsibility emerges – they were all busted for an offence that was eventually pinned on just one of them.
SaDavid:
And what's all this "take a load off Fanny" riff? The whole thing becomes only a little less cryptic when we learn, in the very last lines, that the pilgrim is traveling under instructions, has, in fact, been sent by the mysterious Miss Fanny. The "weight" of the title is the load of her obligations the pilgrim has been sent to discharge. The irony, of course, is that he leaves with a heavier load than the one he brought with him - "my bag is sinkin' low."17
A more inocuous meaning came from B Molson:
B.Molson:
Robbie Robertson had a knack for incorporating common sayings into his songs. I assume it means is a shorter way of saying, "lets take a load off my feet and put it on my fanny"
But if it’s a common saying, it’s managed to escape me. A further reading from far left field:
Joab Jackson:
As you might know, The word "fanny" is also slang for "butt" or, to be blunt,"a**hole." So, "Take a load off, Fanny" can be read as a very euphemistic way of saying "thanks a lot, a**hole." In each of the verses, the narrator is thwarted by some other character. Someone refuses him lodging. A friend leaves him with the devil, he must take care of a child and a dog. In each case, the narrator is dumped on by someone else. In effect, in each verse, some one else has taken a load off themselves and put it on the narrator. The final verse (and here is where I am stretching the most) is about, and I will be blunt here as well, a fart. It is the perfect response to dealing with a "Fanny": "Miss Fanny ... sent me here with regards to everyone."
I don’t get that one at all, but then again a lot of correspondents don’t get my pictures. The Hawks had been to England. They knew fanny meant the other end, or what Dawn French calls ‘the front bottom’.
Carmen and the Devil
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."
Verse two still has the traveller looking for a place to sleep … or more ominously to hide. Robertson brings in the temptress, Carmen. The choice of a Hispanic name is a further push to a Western setting for me, as well as conjuring up the operatic figure (with a knife at the ready). Whether the Devil is the real Devil at her shoulder symbolizing the temptations of the flesh (echoing the chorus interpretation), or whether Carmen’s companion is so stunning that she out-tempts the temptress is in question. It’s a great image, and if it’s the devil in Robert Johnson terms, he / she’s sticking around. In most versions, that is. While the lyrics in all transcriptions have My friend can stick around, later live versions appear to drift into my friend just stick around.
Mike Chivers (Civil war theme):
The verse about Carmen seems to be about a prostitute but the reference to her going means she is mending her ways altho' given the reference to "her friend sticking around" implies that the real trouble (Reconstruction) will be around for a long time.
An interpretation I hadn’t seen was this one, where ‘the devil’ means that Carmen’s friend is hugely unattractive.
SaDavid:
He knows Carmen's not gonna go downtown, and he knows he's gonna get stuck with the friend, and he knows it's all going to hell, and you can hear it in his voice.
It’s rather like the two boys in a dance hall looking at two unknown girls on the far side of the room, and one says ‘Mine’s alright, but I don’t fancy yours.’
Go Down Moses
Go down, Miss Moses,
there's nothin' you can say
It's just ol' Luke,
and Luke's waitin' on the Judgement Day.
"Well, Luke, my friend,
what about young Anna Lee?"
He said, "Do me a favor, son,
won’t you stay and keep Anna Lee company?"
The same Canadian ‘clap’ source for the load thought that verse 3 was about a bordello (Go Down Miss Moses … there’s nothing you can say …). If you follow the Cathy Smith version of Fanny, then the story of her going down on the set-up law officer above gives a potential inside joke to Go Down Miss Moses. Most Robertson lyrics are complex, and simplistic interpretations along American Pie lines (The Marching Band = The Beatles, The Jester = Dylan etc) will nearly always be misguided. To repeat his statement, most characters are based on more than one person.
‘Go Down Moses’ is a classic Negro spiritual, and Len Adams kindly sent me the full lyrics as well as a recording. The chorus goes:
Go down, Moses / Way down in Egypt's Land
Tell ol' Pharoah / Let my people go.18
‘Go Down Moses’ gave the title to a short story by William Faulkner, which in a turn gives its name to a collection of seven stories about the South. Robbie has mentioned a fondness for Faulkner. Barney Hoskyns says the characters in the song are like characters from a story by William Faulkner or Carson McCullers19.
Faulkner’s story is about an African-American small-town crook, Samuel Beauchamp, who is on death row in Chicago (about to ‘go down’ for first degree murder). His grandmother in Mississippi is trying to pay for his body to be brought home after execution . The story is told through the eyes of a newspaper man who visits her house just before the execution (waiting on the judgment day?) and everyone’s chanting:
‘He could hear a third voice, which would be that of Hamp’s wife - a true constant soprano which ran without words beneath the strophe and antistrophe of the brother and sister:
‘Sold him in Egypt and now he dead.’
‘Oh, yes, Lord. Sold him in Egypt …’
… ‘Sold him to Pharoah
‘And now he dead.’20
This semi-gospel song has a wordless soprano running behind it, then. (Richard Manuel’s part in The Weight?). When they’re talking about raising the money for a coffin, the newspaper man says:
‘And I understand that old Luke Beauchamp had some money in the bank.’
Critics argue that all seven stories in ‘Go Down Moses’ form an episodic novel.21 Five of the stories feature the same family, which has both white and black descendants. Race relations are central to the book, and of course The Weight blends black gospel and white country. Lucas Beauchamp (old Luke), was black, the central character and the grandfather of the condemned man. He features most heavily in ‘The Fire and The Hearth’. I don’t for a moment think that Robbie was making a deliberate and directly parallel literary reference, but there could be some atmosphere derived from the Faulkner collection. I don’t even know why the last story is called ‘Go Down Moses’ as it was Joseph who was sold into captivity.
But Luke, according to the Levon quote above, referred to Jimmy Ray Paulman of the early Hawks, who it is said was not known for his speed of reaction or movement, which figures with waiting for the judgement day. Anna Lee is supposed to be another character based on a known original from Turkey Scratch, Arkansas. Some feel that Anna Lee is the irresistible temptress who was walking along with Carmen – remember Rick Danko’s line from Levon Helm’s book No one could resist her. By the time they got to the 1970 tour filmed in Festival Express (and finally released in 2004), Levon had added Miss to keep Miss Anna Lee company and even switched young Anna Lee to old Anna Lee in the previous line. But even the most gorgeous get older!
I will fix your rack …
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."
Websters Dictionary gives rack as ‘a cause of anguish or pain or the resulting suffering.’ It also gives an obsolete meaning ‘the shock of meeting’. Both of those figure. Some commentators swear that The Weight was all about dope dealing (assuming the literal and mundane sense of ‘a weight’ and interpreting ‘fix your rack’ as ‘fix your pain … by giving you a fix’).
SaDavid:
I can hear this as a song with drug connections; I hear an echo of, "you're the one - who called on them, to call on me, to get you your favors done" from "This Wheel's on Fire." And that song always recalls "Nothing Was Delivered," which I've never been able to hear but as the remonstrance of an out-of-pocket customer to his large-talking dealer. Delivered with perfect courtesy, as is the veiled threat of "Wheel." I think this interpretation is a little too narrow, though.
Pondering the weighty matters of obligations and favors done, I was reminded of the passage in Levon Helm's This Wheel's On Fire where he speaks of the network of Toronto pros and semi-pros that protected The Hawks when things got complicated. Woodstock has been noted for protecting its artists, too. The rowdy fellas up in the hills - 'the band' - must also have benefited from their association with the Dylan/Grossman axis, in Woodstock and beyond. The Band moved in circles where favors done and obligations incurred were legal tender. On a bad day in a world like that, the weight can get heavy.22
This is a major point, and it goes way back. Ronnie Hawkins and The Hawks had been managed by Morris Levy, a well-known Mafia associate, who even had the songwriter character in The Sopranos based on him. Levy or his girlfriend ‘Magill’ appeared on many record sleeves as a songwriter, including most of Hawkins stuff. Not that he ever wrote anything. With Hawkins they’d played Jack Ruby’s club in Dallas. When Dylan recruited the Hawks they were playing the New Jersey shore. So they were well used to networks where ‘favours were done and obligations incurred’. This might also be why the reformed Band’s most effective track was Bruce Springsteen’s Atlantic City, set in exactly this milieu.
However, this line caused more correspondence than any other. The most popular interpretation is that a rack is a navy or army bunk, which were in racks.
Pete Rivard:
"Fix your rack" is nothing more or less than "set you up with a place to sleep." Rack is military parlance for bed, based on the "racked" beds or bunk beds used in barracks and on shipboard. In the late 60's, especially with the infusion of Vietnam era vets into the general population, the term was in common usage, at least in the States. Listen to the lyrics of the song. The narrator is looking for some shuteye all through verse 1 "...I just need to find a place where I can lay my head/Mister, can you tell me where a man might find a bed..." The offer to "fix your rack" is to give the narrator a place to sleep, so long as he accepts the burden of taking responsibility for "jack, my dog".
By extension, a bunk in a Western bunkhouse could be a rack too, so that the offer is to find the bed and it makes the most sense to me. There is a contrary school of thought:
Dean Jackman:
I have been listening to the band since "Big Pink". My own mental vision of the parable 'The Weight" has included, under many different circumstances of set and setting, that of a hay rack. These Rube Goldberg-like contraptions are still used here in rural Montana for stacking hay and I have no doubt that they were used in the past in rural Ontario. Of course I have no idea what Robbie had in mind but I have never doubted that Crazy Chester was indeed going to "fix your rack" because due to their construction they do indeed require maintainence if not "fixin"
Except that there was no reason for a traveller to have a hay rack (or ‘hay rick’ in Britain.) Another rack was a gun rack:
Ingrid Spangler:
To me ‘fix your rack’ in that song always brought to mind a gun rack on a pick up truck, despite my mid 19th century setting for the rest of the song.
Jeremy D. Goodwin;
It's funny how different things jump out at different people. I have no trouble believing that Chester is "offering" to fix the narrator's gun rack. It is not really a genuine offer, and is just an excuse to receive a favor...a favor disguised as a trade. Remember the narrator's unheeded reply: "Wait a minute Chester, you know I'm a peaceful man". That is, I don't have a gun rack, I don't need one fixed. Chester ignores the response: his offer was not useful, and was not intended to be. Just take the dog, goodbye. Since (as you report) the "real life" Chester is purported to have gone around with toy guns in holsters, it seems that this offer might be in character.
Mike Chivers continues on the post Civil war theme:
Mike Chivers (Civil War theme):
The verse about Crazy Chester is about a shell shocked individual who knows he is losing it and alternately threatens to "fix your Rack" (knock your teeth out) if you take Jack my dog And immediately thereafter invites the hero to take the dog and "feed him when you can." Even in American slang, referring to one's set of teeth as a "rack" is an obscure expression but not entirely uncommon. "Fix” can also be taken to mean to cause someone an injury.
But what’s the dog got to do with any of it? If we’re intent on identification with known characters, remember that the Band’s dog, Hamlet, was around throughout recording. For the addiction interpreters, the dog that needs feeding is obvious. I tend to the theory that Chester is crazy anyway and that the story the traveller is in is becoming progressively more like dreamlike and this is the verse when the narrator is in full bizarre dream mode. It doesn’t have to make sense.
SaDavid:
Both Peter Viney and Robbie Robertson speak of the song in terms of cinema, and Peter Viney calls it "an intensely visual song." And yet, beyond the narrator's feeling "half past dead," there is virtually no descriptive language. It's true that this leaves every listener free to conjure their own movie, but for me, the song seems less like a movie than like one of those disjointed, episodic dreams - or that head-bobbing, hallucinatory state that accompanies sleep deprivation. In fact, it reminds me very much of one's state of mind at the end of a thirty-hour Greyhound ride, stumbling off the bus in the middle of the night, a stranger in a strange land23. You might need your wits, but they don't seem to be working that well. You speak, and people reply, but they seem to be talking about something else. Add this stuff about hiding, and a cameo appearance by the devil, and the trip takes on a decidedly nightmarish aspect.
Catch a Cannonball
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.
The transcriptions all have cannon ball as two words which ,makes no sense to me. It must be Cannonball as in the song and train name The Wabash Cannonball. I’ll put that down to bad transcription. If you subscribe to it all being about people they knew and real incidents, even this line has possibilities. The Wabash Cannonball is an Americana song 24 which graced album after album by the ‘strummers’ as The Hawks called the folkies they looked down on … that is until they met Dylan. Catching the Cannonball could be getting on board the Dylan / folk band wagon (!) or getting back to the music and out of the bizzare world the narrator’s landed in.
Utah Phillips:
In the 1880's the Wabash Cannonball was a mythological train made up by some bum somewhere, the train any old hobo would ride on the way to his reward, wherever that might be. There never was a train called the Wabash Cannonball that went from the great Atlantic Ocean to the wide Pacific shore. And there never was a train where a bum could get breakfast on the club car. As the song got more popular, the Wabash system in the Midwest thought it was the smart thing to do to name its express run the Wabash Cannonball. It ran between Detroit and St. Louis until about three years ago. Norfolk & Western bought the Wabash system about six years ago and ran it right into the ground.
Utah Phillips touches on American mythology, an established Robertson obsession, and for me that nails the reference solidly to a train.
On the other hand, some posters noted the old Canadian TV series about truckers, Cannonball, which harks back to the Gunsmoke reference, and that would have our narrator hitching a ride.
Jan Haust:
There are some possible Canadian cultural references that, being English, you may not be aware of in reference to The Weight. During the early to mid sixties, there was a program aired for young Canadians just after school. It was half an hour in length and filmed in black & white. The story was about two truckers and their various exploits on the lonely Canadian highways. Ours is quite a large country with few people... fewer then. Travel and loneliness on our highways, railroads and jetplanes surface as themes in many of our singers' songs from this era. At any rate the two truckers' names were Mike and Cannonball. Mike was the younger less experienced one while Cannonball was of the older, wiser variety. There was even a theme song for the program...the program itself was entitled CANNONBALL. There were constant adventures as they drove their ‘loads’ back and forth between cities ( much like the Hawks roaring back'n forth from Ontario to Arkansas to Oklahoma and back...) Is it possible that the weight of Cannonball's load at the weigh station along the highway was a constant worry while he thought of loved ones back home and looked for a night's lodging along the way?25
SaDavid:
I never thought of a train, either incoming or outgoing. "I pulled into Nazareth" suggests driving, with Greyhound or hitchhiking less likely candidates (although I have heard of the thumb being used to "pull" a ride). (And what a great opening line for a song! The juxtaposition of the homely and the holy catches the ear, and hooks the attention.) "The Cannonball" says "train," "A cannonball" doesn't. I always heard it as invented jive talk ("I'm gonna catch a cannonball outta here!") with a violent edge. This wheel shall explode. I'd forgotten about the trucker TV show, I can barely recall it.
Personally, I can’t see that the definite / indefinite article makes that much difference, but I’m assuming various trains called ‘Cannonball. Maybe there was only ever one.
Then Dave Marsh talks about ‘Luke with his bag sinking low’ which has got to be a misinterpretation. 26 A couple of the e-mails I received were sure that this line was about ballsache, perhaps after unrequited encounters with Carmen, her friend and Anna Lee. For example:
SaDavid:
There's nothing in the text that requires the reading, but I (or the eternal internal adolescent) hear a double entendre in "my bag is sinking low." "Bag" is recognized as slang for "scrotum," and (again in military company) I've heard the phrase "bag drag" used to describe an exhausting experience, say a long forced march.
OK, but they could easily have sung ‘My bags are …’ and they clearly sang, ‘My bag is …’ so I’ll go simply for the bag he picked up in verse two.
David Hatch and Stephen Millward think the mistress-hired hand theme is central (with Miss Fanny as the mistress who sent the narrator on the errand), and that it reoccurs in Unfaithful Servant from the second album.27 If you want to get really heavy (and you have majored in American Literature) you can even say that the narrator fits into the classic myth of the American Adam, the innocent abroad, the seeker with eyes wide open walking into situations of threat and confusion. Greil Marcus has convincingly followed this Adamic theme through the first three Band albums.28 I feel myself that the load is something deeper and darker and more unnameable than the responsibility of bearing a message.
We again return to the question of how much an artist operates at the concious level, and Todd Durand e-mailed me some thoughts and word associations related to the song in 1998.
Todd Durand:
I believe that Robbie’s comments regarding the "...guilt of relationships," "...stumbling through life,""trying to do what's right," make up the essence of the song. Moreover, I believe it is one's ego and the difficulty of actually having to share one's self to another is more to the point of his lyrical intent. In the end of the song the writer appears to come to understand this. I support this by noticing the interest Mr. Robertson expresses in "words."I think he means "definitions."
HEAD: mental or emotional control, culminating point of action
BED: supporting surface or structure, foundation (see LOAD), and,interestingly, earthwork supporting a railroad (see CANNON BALL).
BAG: something one likes or does well, a way of life
HIDE: why is he wanting to hide? He was looking for a place to sleep? I think not, and I think this supports the concepts alluded to in the definitions above.
CARMEN AND THE DEVIL: "... my friend can stick around," great lyric and I think it has something to do with the notion that he was attempting to stray from his true love and for this he is stuck with the devil. TEMPTATION
LOAD: burdensome responsibility, to weight with factors influencing outcomes. The latter being quite important. A relationship can be quite burdensome to "a peaceful man."
FOG: state of bewilderment or confusion.
RACK: under great mental or emotional stress.
JACK: servant, raise level or quality of.
DOG: to worry, to hound, a worthless person
See a common theme threaded throughout this tale? It seems to me that the LOAD is the giving-up of ones self to a relationship, the weight of which scares the individual away into a sort of purgatory where all sorts of dreamlike visions lead to the discovery that it becomes all-important "...to get back to Miss Fanny, you know she's the only one." His "... bag (way of life before having to share it with another) is sinking low, and I do believe it's time." In fact, in light of this realization, it is not only time to return, it's time to "...Catch a cannon ball now, t'take me on down the line." He wants to return with a newfound soul and a new definition of his "bag." And he wants to be sure to pass along Miss Fanny's "...regards for everyone." Her "thank-you."29
In the end, you don’t have to see anyone else’s pictures, but all the levels can co-exist. Robbie has said forcibly that he doesn’t believe in putting lyrics on the sleeve:
Robbie Robertson:
I hate having (lyrics on albums) now. I say ‘Is my diction so bad?’ People piss and moan about it, but I don’t like it. When I read other people’s lyrics on their sleeves I think they look stupid. If I read the lyrics to some of my favourite songs, they don’t mean shit to me. But if I hear ‘When A Man Loves A Woman’, it is so powerful and emotional. All I want out of any of these songs is the right emotion. I don’t give a shit what the lyrics are. Dylan rambled on way too much for my liking. I remember years ago saying to him: ‘listen to ‘When A Man Loves A Woman’; I like this more than any of the songs we’re playing. This is emotional to me; our songs are clever. I don’t care for clever. Let’s try and get somewhere that has an emotional thing.30
Robbie Robertson:
I have a funny attitude to words though. I grew up on rock ‘n’ roll music and there were no words on the back of the album. I learned the words to all of Little Richard’s songs the best I could, and what I couldn’t figure out didn’t matter. 31
Greil Marcus:
When the music (on Big Pink) is most exciting - when the guitar is fighting for space in the clatter while voices yelp and wail as one man finishes another man’s line or spins it off in a new direction - the lyrics are blind baggage and they emerge only in snatches. This is the finest rock ‘n’ roll tradition.32
So we should expect that the lyrics should remain enigmatic. Robbie broke his rule on Cahoots, where his worst ever lyrics got printed on the sleeve (Mind you, a lot of writers would give their right arms for Robbie’s worst lyrics). I’m still not sure what ‘I will fix your rack, if you’ll take Jack my dog’ is about… and I don’t really know if I ever want to know.
The Music
The Weight was recorded at A&R Studios, New York in sessions starting on 10th January 1968. It was one of six songs recorded, like Sergeant Pepper, on four track, while the rest of the album was done on eight track in Los Angeles. It’s also Levon Helm’s only lead vocal on Music From Big Pink, reflecting that he had missed most of the basement gestation of the album, having returned only in the late Fall of 1967, after leaving The Hawks in Washington DC in November 1965. The song was a comparatively late addition to the album too.
Kevin Ransom:
I always thought "The Weight" was The Band's most stirring, most beautifully-constructed song--but I understand it was on the "B" list during the Big Pink sessions.
Robbie Robertson:
That's true, it was. We'd tried it a number of different ways, but we weren't that excited about it. So our attitude was, "Well, just in case something else isn't working, we've got this song to fall back on." So we were in the studio, and just out of trying to not be boring, we said, "Well, let's give that `Take a load off Fanny' song a shot." And very quickly, someone suggested that maybe Garth should play piano and Richard should play organ, because it seemed like there was room for some fills that would sound more natural coming from the piano than the guitar. So they swapped, and we recorded it, and it wasn't until we listened back to it that we realized, "Holy shit, this song's really got something.33
The Band’s trademark of swopping lead on the vocals is here. In the original studio version, there are two voices for the narrator of the song - Levon does most of it (verses 1, 2, 3, 5), but Rick takes the fourth verse (Crazy Chester …), and joins Levon on parts of the fifth. Richard Manuel is taking the high, often wordless, part in the background.
Robbie Robertson:
I didn’t want screaming vocals. I wanted sensitive vocals where you can hear the breathing and other voices coming in. This whole thing of discovering the voices – don’t everybody come in together. Everybody on records was working on getting all the voices together until it neutralizes itself. I like voices coming in one at a time, in a chain reaction kind of thing like the Staple Singers did. But, because we were all men, it will have a different effect. All these ideas came to the surface and what becomes the clear picture is that this isn’t just clever. This is emotional and this is story telling. You can see this mythology. This is the record that I wanted to make.34
In later versions by The Band, we get Richard preceding Levon as narrator on the third verse (Go Down Miss Moses …) then still Rick on the fourth (Crazy Chester …). Randy Ciarlante replaced Richard Manuel’s part in the 1990s line-up. With The Staples (Last Waltz), with Ringo Starr and ther All-Star Band (featuring Rick Danko and Levon Helm) and by Robbie Robertson alone (Guitar Legends concert in Seville 1992), the song becomes a vehicle for turn-taking. I’ve never seen it as multiple narrators expressed by multiple voices, but rather different aspects of the same narrative voice.
In solo concerts, Levon, Rick and Richard have all done the whole song on their own. Robbie has done verses 1 and 5 in solo concerts. Rick, irritatingly, tended to do it as an audience singalong accompanied by stacatto rhythm guitar, except for the rare Deadheads Tribute to Jerry Garcia concert from Japan. There he was backed by a full band and dropped the guitar after a couple of lines and took it on, looking surprisingly like Ronnie Hawkins. Garth has performed it with Maud Hudson singing in 2004, and used a pastiche of the guitar intro on The Breakers from The Sea to the North. He also performed it on tour with Burrito DeLuxe in 2004.
Instrumentally there were changes too. Garth played the piano on the studio version, and on the road Richard Manuel was adding an organ part and Garth was still playing piano. This is what was happening on their first recorded live version, the Woodstock outtake which finally appeared on Woodstock Diaries and it was what they were still doing in 1976 at The Last Waltz. But sometimes they didn’t bother to switch seats. At Festival Express, filmed in July 1970, Garth is doing his lead part on organ, with Richard filling on piano. Given the hassle of operating PA systems in that era, plus the pressures of a show with many different groups, it may have been expediency. However, they’d been on the road consistently and they were playing it faster and louder, so the switch may have been for that reason.
In the 1990s reformed Band, Richard Bell took over on piano and Garth adds an organ solo, or where it’s too much hassle to set up his organ (e.g. Ringo Starr tour guest spot, The Letterman show) produces accordion instead.
Robbie moved from acoustic guitar (Big Pink, Woodstock ), to electric guitar (Festival Express, The Last Waltz), which changed the whole underpinning of the song, and for the worse, I think.
Does it scan?
The lyrics shift as the years go by and further versions emerge - it’s on every Band live album except Watkins Glen. If you listen to later live versions they’re altering lines all the way through - ‘Miss Carmen and the devil’, ‘Come on let’s shake it downtown’, ‘won’t you feed him when you want’ (instead of ‘can’ which rhymes with ‘man’) and even Rick’s ‘won’t you feed old Chester whenever you can’ which makes even less sense than the original (The Complete Last Waltz 1976). We also get a number of ‘feed him’ and a number of ‘feed me’ for the same line, but both are better than ‘feed old Chester’. At Woodstock 1969 they even try call and response as Levon calls out ‘What did he say?’ answered by Rick ‘He said, that’s OK boy …’ In Festival Express, Levon introduces the chorus with extra words: And won’t you take … / And you can take … while on Woodstock 69 we get I want you to take …
Adding words makes it easier to scan the lines, and both Levon and Rick seem to have sung easier by padding out the lines. It was and is harder to do it in the 1968 version, but Robbie Robertson’s broadcast solo versions are notably lyrically closer to the original.
But the song is theirs to do as they wish with, and after hundreds of performances, I can’t believe any musician is analyzing the lyrics closely, if they ever did in the first place. Remember what Richard Manuel said about Tears of Rage:
Richard Manuel:
(Dylan) came down to the basement with a piece of typewritten paper - and it was typed out - in line form - and he just said ‘Have you got any music for this?’ I had a couple of musical movements that fit, that seemed to fit, so I just elaborated a little bit, because I wasn’t sure what the lyrics meant. I couldn’t run upstairs and say, ‘What’s this mean Bob? Now the heart is filled with gold as if it was a purse.’35
I would think the same held true for The Weight, and once it was recorded and stuck in the mind, freely adapting the lyrics a little was natural.
So who wrote it?
The feud between Robbie Robertson and Levon Helm revolves around credits and money. Helm says that he never gets paid for uses of The Weight, and that it was written communally in a woodshed atmosphere. Granted, drummers agree that Helm’s drums on the track are one of the greatest pieces of rock drumming committed to tape.36 Hudson’s piano is majestic. Danko’s bass burbles through the song and propels it. But sadly, all these great things are ‘arrangement’ in songwriting terms. Copyright consists of the lyric and the top line (basic melody). Therefore, other versions of the song by Diana Ross or Aretha Franklin which dispense with all of the wonderful Band communal arrangement are still recognizably The Weight. So what it says on the label, Jaime Robbie Robertson, is the legal fact of the matter. Whether it’s fair or not is another question. As Robbie has said, arrangement in bringing their parts to the mix are what musicians do. What songwriters do precedes that. And gets paid better.
John Simon:
Robbie was fair based on an old system … That's the system under which Robbie determined that he would be songwriter of those songs. And its true, Robbie was the one who wrote the lyrics and wrote the music. Wrote the lyrics on legal paper, or whatever he wrote it on, and figured out the chords to the song and dictated the melody and chords to the other players. Okay. But in the new system you'll see that when a song is written its a much more co-operative thing in a band. You'll see five or six writers on a song that'll say, on a band song on an album, it'll list everybody who's in the band on the song, you know. And you know that, or you may suspect that the bass player and the drummer or somebody - the keyboard player, one of them just had nothing to do with the song. But they're on it because its a sort of democracy and they just happend to be around … So, Robbie was working in the old system. And he's absolutely right in working with the old system. Levon is pissed about that and wishes that Robbie had been working in the new system. But if they hadn't agreed on that ahead of time, you know … on the other hand a good deal of the inspiration on the songs that Robbie wrote came from Levon's personal experience.37
We can also discount the late sixties rumours that Dylan had a hand in it. They arose because it was published through Dylan’s company, Dwarf Music, as were the other songs on Music From Big Pink. In 1968 people couldn’t believe that such mature songwriting had appeared seemingly from nowhere and cast around for other involvement. By the next album the world was aware of Robertson’s abilities and the rumours died.
The last word …
It’s interesting that Ronnie Hawkins saw Big Pink as a return to country roots by The Band. Look at the roster of performers who have covered The Weight. Aretha Franklin, The Supremes, The Temptations, King Curtis, The Staples - none of those names sound country, do they? Even so, the soul versions like to introduce a jangly mock-C&W guitar. The Weight is more complex than R & B at the same time. It’s only in recent years that the song has been reclaimed by country artists. My favourite version? The original 1968 cut, not that I haven’t enjoyed hearing all the changes.
Last word to Robbie, talking about the filming of the 1976 version of the song used in The Last Waltz, where The Band performed with The Staple Singers, seen here:
Robbie Robertson:
The biggest thing was the religious connotation of the song. I remember there was this huge argument between Marty (Martin Scorsese, the director) and Michael Chapman about the mood and the lighting for ‘The Weight’. Marty was insistiting that it was a very Catholic vision, it had to be. And Michael was saying ‘No, this is a very Protestant story, it’s Baptist, Marty.’ He was explaining to Marty the gospel music connotations.
I liked everything they were saying because I had never thought of any of it, though I was brought up Catholic. I thought it was quite brilliant the credit they were giving me. For me it was a combination of Catholocism and gospel music. The story told in the song is about the guilt of relationships, not being able to give what’s being asked of you. Someone is stumbling through life, going from one situation to another, with different characters. In going through these catacombs of experience. you’re trying to do what’s right, but it seems that with all the places you have to go, it’s just not possible. In the song, all this is ‘the load.’
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, and "No!", was all he said.
(Chorus:)
Take a load off Fanny, take a load for free;
Take a load off Fanny, And (and) (and) you can 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 m'friend can stick around."
(Chorus)
Go down, Miss Moses, there's nothin' you can say
It's just ol' Luke, and Luke's waitin' on the Judgement Day.
"Well, Luke, my friend, what about young Anna Lee?"
He said, "Do me a favor, son, woncha stay an' keep Anna Lee company?"
(Chorus)
Crazy Chester followed me, and he caught me in the fog.
He said, "I will fix your rack, if you'll take Jack, my dog."
I said, "Wait a minute, Chester, you know I'm a peaceful man."
He said, "That's okay, boy, won't you feed him when you can."
(Chorus)
Catch a cannon ball now, t'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.
(Chorus)
An article by Peter Viney on the song, which originally appeared in the Band fanzine Jawbone in 1996:
The Weight is the centrepiece of the album, both musically and lyrically. First, Robbie Robertson on The Weight:
Robbie Robertson:
I just wrote it. It’s just one of those things. I thought of a couple of words that led to a couple more, and the next thing I knew I wrote the song. That song was the only song on ‘Music From Big Pink’ that we never did rehearse. We just figured that it was a simple song, and when it came up we gave it a try and recorded it three or four times. We said that’s fine, maybe we’ll use it. We didn’t even know if we were going to use it, and it turned out to be the album.1
Robbie Robertson:
When I wrote ‘The Weight’, the first song for ‘Music From Big Pink’, it had a kind of American mythology I was reinventing using my connection to the universal language. The Nazareth in ‘The Weight’ was Nazareth, Pennsylvania. It was a little off-handed - ‘I pulled into Nazareth’. Well I don’t know if the Nazareth that Jesus came from is the kind of place you pull into, but I do know that you pull into Nazareth, Pennsylvania! I’m experimenting with North American mythology. I didn’t mean to take sacred, precious things and turn them into humour.2
(On the album, The Weight closes side one, so Robertson must mean it was the first song written for Big Pink. )
Robbie Robertson:
(Buñuel) did so many films on the impossibility of sainthood. People trying to be good in ‘Viridiana’ and ‘Nazarin’, people trying to do their thing. In ‘The Weight’ it’s the same thing. People like Buñuel would make films that had these religious connotations to them but it wasn’t necessarily a religious meaning. In Buñuel there were these people trying to be good and it’s impossible to be good. In ‘The Weight’ it was this very simple thing. Someone says, ‘Listen, would you do me this favour? When you get there will you say “hello” to somebody or will you give somebody this or will you pick up one of these for me? Oh? You’re going to Nazareth, that’s where the Martin guitar factory is. Do me a favour when you’re there.’ This is what it’s all about. So the guy goes and one thing leads to another and it’s like ‘Holy Shit, what’s this turned into? I’ve only come here to say “hello” for somebody and I’ve got myself in this incredible predicament.’ It was very Buñuelish to me at the time.
The Weight has been painting pictures for me for over thirty-five years now; it’s an intensely visual song, and my pictures aren’t of anywhere in Pennsylvania. My Nazareth is a dusty western town sometime in the late 19th century. Neighbouring towns might be called Jerusalem or Babylon … or Jericho (which was a deliberate reference in the Band’s comeback album title in 1993). Carmen and the devil are strutting their stuff in red silk dresses, fringed with black cat fur, along a wooden sidewalk. Chester is the town character straight out of the TV series Gunsmoke which was set in Dodge City in the 1880s.4 Gunsmoke ran from 1955 to 1975 and was the archtypal TV western. Chester Goode was the name of the deputy marshall in the series who spent his time limping rapidly along the dusty main street dragging his ramrod-stiff gammy leg. In the TV series, Chester had a catch-phrase. As he limped after the town marshall, Matt Dillon, he used to shout out ‘Marshall Dillon!’, ‘Marshall Dillon!’ (Marshall Dylan! Marshall Dylan? 5). Carmen might be the programme’s Miss Kitty, who owned the Longbranch Saloon - a tart with a heart. Old Luke’s another town character (not from the TV series this time) whose rockin’ chair ain’t goin’ nowhere, as he puffs his pipe waiting on the judgement day. The Cannonball steams into the station, a great cow-catcher across the front. Pure Americana…
OK, a Cannonball summons up a streamlined 1930’s train, as well as the folk song Wabash Cannonball, and a wild west Carmen wouldn’t be invited ‘Come on let’s go downtown’ because the one-street town I see wouldn’t distinguish between town and downtown. Chester caught the narrator in the fog, which doesn’t conjure the west much either. John Simon, who produced the album says that ‘Crazy Chester’ was a real person, known to the members of the Band.6 Levon Helm maintains that everyone in the song was known to them.
Levon Helm:
The song was full of our favorite characters. ‘Luke’ was Jimmy Ray Paulman (of The Hawks). ‘Young Anna Lee’ was Anna Lee Williams from Turkey Scratch. ‘Crazy Chester’ was a guy we all knew from Fayetteville who came into town on Saturdays wearing a full set of cap guns on his hips … he was like Hopalong Cassidy and a friend of The Hawk’s. 7
This was confirmed by a website post from Arkansas:
Sheila from Fayetteville:
My father in law told me about Crazy Chester. Chester used to walk everywhere. He wore a cheap red dime-store cowboy hat and wore his britches legs tucked into his cowboy boots. He knew everyone, and everyone knew him. It amazes me that I've been singing along with the lyrics of these songs for a long time and I'm just now learning that some of these people were right in my own backyard! The Band frequented the Iris Hotel, Tastee Freeze and the Rockwood Club here in Fayetteville. My mom in law was a waitress at the Rockwood and has met them all! Crazy Chester is from here too! Everyone here knows about him. WOW!
Robbie has acknowledged that characters in songs had their basis in people they’d met ‘along the road’, but crucially added in a TV interview, when asked if there really was a Chester and a Bessie, that “each character in a song could be a combination of more than one person.” This is how most novelists work too.
Levon’s quote places Luke in the Wild West as well, albeit a fake Wild West. It doesn’t matter. Other people place the town in the post war Deep South:
Mike Chivers:
My own vision, is of a Post Civil war venue when everything is screwed up and scattered and the main character is trying to find shelter and make some sense of a world turned upside down. I considered the possibility that the verse about "Miss Moses" was a reference to Harriet Tubman, an escaped slave who returned south several times to lead slaves to freedom. "Old Luke" would be a slave not interested in being delivered from freedom other than by "the judgement day." Anna Lee would be a reference to his daughter or niece and Luke invites the main character (A white, possibly Rebel soldier) to stay and keep her "company" as an expression of his regard for the end of slavery and a lack of concern for retaining hatred against whites9.
The lyrics are impressionistic and will live with your picture as well as my picture and Mike’s picture and whatever Robbie’s picture and Levon’s pictures might have been.
Pulling into Nazareth
A Time magazine article in 1970 read the beginning of the song as a meeting between an Old Testament character and a 1970 rock musician10:
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
And ‘no’ was all he said. 11
It sounds pretty New Testament - no room at the inn, but this Nazareth is set in an American landscape. The guy he meets is a town booster - a-skinnin’ and a-grinnin’, but has zero to offer. It might be that a rock musician pulls into Nazareth, Pennsylvania but if so, Nazareth warps itself into the biblical town then into a western town before his eyes. Robbie liked playing with time and place. In Up On Cripple Creek he leaps from Cripple Creek (whether the 1890s Colorado gold rush or the Appalachian folk festival) to Lake Charles, Louisiana watching Spike Jones on the box in the 1950s.
Clive James:
In a typical Robertson lyric, a century or so of chronological time is abruptly made to collapse between us and an event. Suddenly we are involved in it, hearing the contemporary voices, seeing things happen. And a crucial part of the strategy is that the event tends to remain uninterpreted: we might be given a dramatic interchange between two partially specified characters, or an unbroken monologue from some onlooker to an occurrence of which the details are clear but the pattern incomplete, and from this we try to sort out what is going on, unaided by any logical commentary.12
Take a load off Fanny
This chorus is so incredibly well-known, yet readers of the earlier version have e-mailed me regularly saying ‘I thought it was Annie … because later there’s ‘What about Miss Anna Lee’. I had my Annie / Fanny doubts at first too. I’ve heard a few interpretations - a Canadian musician swore to me in 1971 that ‘Take a load off Fanny’ was all about catching and disseminating the clap (= a load), and that there was a double take - ‘off’ could also be ‘of’ (presumably using the English frontal sense of the word ‘fanny’ rather than the American posterior one) - Take a load off Fanny/of Fanny, and you put the load right on me. The clap is Miss Fanny’s regards to everyone. Of course, being Canadian, he claimed to have been told this directly by a member of The Band. Twenty years later, another Canadian asured me that this was perfectly true, again tracing the explanation directly to an un-named Band member. I can easily believe that a Band member told someone this, but it doesn’t mean it’s true, as none of them ever betrayed a lack of a sense of humour. I’m interested that this particular story is so widespread, and yet so ignored by Robertson when he’s talking about the lyrics. While we’re worrying about intepretations of a load, move over to The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary :
Load:
A burden of affliction, sin, responsibility etc; a thing which weighs down, opresses or impedes a person.
Load:
A material object or force which acts or is conceived as a weight, cog etc.
Load:
= DOSE slang, 20th century (dose= an infection with venereal disease)
So maybe a dose of clap is part of the weight, or more likely, a symbol of the weight. This was expanded by another internet post :
‘Rosalind’:
I always thought that "Fannie" might have come from the song that Levon always looked forward to singing during The Hawks wild years. He mentioned on the Conan O'Brien Show back in 1993 that his very favorite song to sing every night way back then was "Short Fat Fannie" It was also the song that he used to tease Cathy Evelyn (Smith) with. She mentioned that in her book "Chasing The Dragon" She said she would turn red and run away cause every time he sang it, he would look over at her and grin. Since "The Weight" was swamped with real-life folks and memories...13
Cathy Smith was an early close associate of The Hawks as well as a later associate of The Band going right up to The Last Waltz, and is mentioned in Levon Helm’s autobiography as the girl who helped them out of a drug bust:
Rick Danko:
So Levon spoke to this chick he was dating. Her name was Kathy and she was the most beautiful girl in Toronto… 16 years old when he met her, and she was a gorgeous, gorgeous lady. She looked beautiful and no one could resist her. Anyway, Levon explained the situation to her, and she kindly gave this cop who was trying to crucify us a blow job. Then she told him she was 14 years old. He was the chief witness against us, but this was some weird shit for him, and he disappeared, we never saw him again. In the end everyone else got off, and I received a year’s suspended sentence on probation.14
Rosalind’s comment got this reply:
Bill Munson:
I never found Cathy Smith’s Chasing The Dragon, but some pertinent bits of it are quoted in The Seahorse Motel chapter in Rock & Roll Toronto. The event, which was the sort of thing British Premiership footballers have gained recent notoriety for, involved three Band (or rather Hawks) members and resulted in the birth of “The Band baby” quoted elsewhere. According to the book, Richard (who it appears was not in fact responsible) stood up and offered to take the ‘load’- or consequences. In the light of Ros’s quote about “Short Fat Fannie” it does ring bells with the themes Robbie has stated that The Weight is about – sharing a load, guilt and ‘the impossibility of’ redemption and would make some sense of the chorus.15
I’ve never managed to find Cathy Smith’s book either, but for the prurient, here is the relevant passage as quoted in Rock and Roll Toronto.
Cathy Smith, from Rock and Roll Toronto:
“One night a few months after I met them, they rented a few rooms in the Seahorse Motel down on the lakeshore. We partied on into the night, and at one point I ended up in bed with Rick Danko, In the middle of making love, Rick found out I wasn’t on the pill and things (as it were) ground to a halt. He got out of bed and wandered on down the hall, leaving me lying there hurt and confused, then Levon walked into the room, climbed into bed with me.” Six weeks later, Smith discovered she was pregnant. Levon was the father, she insists, although she also says that she ‘didn’t belong particularly to Levon’. Richard Manuel offered to marry her, but she turned him down.16
In all the correspondence I got since writing The Weight article years and years ago, Rosalind is the first to point out the Cathy Smith connection, and it covers the shared load theme without necessarily dismissing the clap reference either. Going back too her involvement in the drug bust, a weight is also slang for a kilo (or is it a pound) of dope. Again, the idea of a shared responsibility emerges – they were all busted for an offence that was eventually pinned on just one of them.
SaDavid:
And what's all this "take a load off Fanny" riff? The whole thing becomes only a little less cryptic when we learn, in the very last lines, that the pilgrim is traveling under instructions, has, in fact, been sent by the mysterious Miss Fanny. The "weight" of the title is the load of her obligations the pilgrim has been sent to discharge. The irony, of course, is that he leaves with a heavier load than the one he brought with him - "my bag is sinkin' low."17
A more inocuous meaning came from B Molson:
B.Molson:
Robbie Robertson had a knack for incorporating common sayings into his songs. I assume it means is a shorter way of saying, "lets take a load off my feet and put it on my fanny"
But if it’s a common saying, it’s managed to escape me. A further reading from far left field:
Joab Jackson:
As you might know, The word "fanny" is also slang for "butt" or, to be blunt,"a**hole." So, "Take a load off, Fanny" can be read as a very euphemistic way of saying "thanks a lot, a**hole." In each of the verses, the narrator is thwarted by some other character. Someone refuses him lodging. A friend leaves him with the devil, he must take care of a child and a dog. In each case, the narrator is dumped on by someone else. In effect, in each verse, some one else has taken a load off themselves and put it on the narrator. The final verse (and here is where I am stretching the most) is about, and I will be blunt here as well, a fart. It is the perfect response to dealing with a "Fanny": "Miss Fanny ... sent me here with regards to everyone."
I don’t get that one at all, but then again a lot of correspondents don’t get my pictures. The Hawks had been to England. They knew fanny meant the other end, or what Dawn French calls ‘the front bottom’.
Carmen and the Devil
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."
Verse two still has the traveller looking for a place to sleep … or more ominously to hide. Robertson brings in the temptress, Carmen. The choice of a Hispanic name is a further push to a Western setting for me, as well as conjuring up the operatic figure (with a knife at the ready). Whether the Devil is the real Devil at her shoulder symbolizing the temptations of the flesh (echoing the chorus interpretation), or whether Carmen’s companion is so stunning that she out-tempts the temptress is in question. It’s a great image, and if it’s the devil in Robert Johnson terms, he / she’s sticking around. In most versions, that is. While the lyrics in all transcriptions have My friend can stick around, later live versions appear to drift into my friend just stick around.
Mike Chivers (Civil war theme):
The verse about Carmen seems to be about a prostitute but the reference to her going means she is mending her ways altho' given the reference to "her friend sticking around" implies that the real trouble (Reconstruction) will be around for a long time.
An interpretation I hadn’t seen was this one, where ‘the devil’ means that Carmen’s friend is hugely unattractive.
SaDavid:
He knows Carmen's not gonna go downtown, and he knows he's gonna get stuck with the friend, and he knows it's all going to hell, and you can hear it in his voice.
It’s rather like the two boys in a dance hall looking at two unknown girls on the far side of the room, and one says ‘Mine’s alright, but I don’t fancy yours.’
Go Down Moses
Go down, Miss Moses,
there's nothin' you can say
It's just ol' Luke,
and Luke's waitin' on the Judgement Day.
"Well, Luke, my friend,
what about young Anna Lee?"
He said, "Do me a favor, son,
won’t you stay and keep Anna Lee company?"
The same Canadian ‘clap’ source for the load thought that verse 3 was about a bordello (Go Down Miss Moses … there’s nothing you can say …). If you follow the Cathy Smith version of Fanny, then the story of her going down on the set-up law officer above gives a potential inside joke to Go Down Miss Moses. Most Robertson lyrics are complex, and simplistic interpretations along American Pie lines (The Marching Band = The Beatles, The Jester = Dylan etc) will nearly always be misguided. To repeat his statement, most characters are based on more than one person.
‘Go Down Moses’ is a classic Negro spiritual, and Len Adams kindly sent me the full lyrics as well as a recording. The chorus goes:
Go down, Moses / Way down in Egypt's Land
Tell ol' Pharoah / Let my people go.18
‘Go Down Moses’ gave the title to a short story by William Faulkner, which in a turn gives its name to a collection of seven stories about the South. Robbie has mentioned a fondness for Faulkner. Barney Hoskyns says the characters in the song are like characters from a story by William Faulkner or Carson McCullers19.
Faulkner’s story is about an African-American small-town crook, Samuel Beauchamp, who is on death row in Chicago (about to ‘go down’ for first degree murder). His grandmother in Mississippi is trying to pay for his body to be brought home after execution . The story is told through the eyes of a newspaper man who visits her house just before the execution (waiting on the judgment day?) and everyone’s chanting:
‘He could hear a third voice, which would be that of Hamp’s wife - a true constant soprano which ran without words beneath the strophe and antistrophe of the brother and sister:
‘Sold him in Egypt and now he dead.’
‘Oh, yes, Lord. Sold him in Egypt …’
… ‘Sold him to Pharoah
‘And now he dead.’20
This semi-gospel song has a wordless soprano running behind it, then. (Richard Manuel’s part in The Weight?). When they’re talking about raising the money for a coffin, the newspaper man says:
‘And I understand that old Luke Beauchamp had some money in the bank.’
Critics argue that all seven stories in ‘Go Down Moses’ form an episodic novel.21 Five of the stories feature the same family, which has both white and black descendants. Race relations are central to the book, and of course The Weight blends black gospel and white country. Lucas Beauchamp (old Luke), was black, the central character and the grandfather of the condemned man. He features most heavily in ‘The Fire and The Hearth’. I don’t for a moment think that Robbie was making a deliberate and directly parallel literary reference, but there could be some atmosphere derived from the Faulkner collection. I don’t even know why the last story is called ‘Go Down Moses’ as it was Joseph who was sold into captivity.
But Luke, according to the Levon quote above, referred to Jimmy Ray Paulman of the early Hawks, who it is said was not known for his speed of reaction or movement, which figures with waiting for the judgement day. Anna Lee is supposed to be another character based on a known original from Turkey Scratch, Arkansas. Some feel that Anna Lee is the irresistible temptress who was walking along with Carmen – remember Rick Danko’s line from Levon Helm’s book No one could resist her. By the time they got to the 1970 tour filmed in Festival Express (and finally released in 2004), Levon had added Miss to keep Miss Anna Lee company and even switched young Anna Lee to old Anna Lee in the previous line. But even the most gorgeous get older!
I will fix your rack …
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."
Websters Dictionary gives rack as ‘a cause of anguish or pain or the resulting suffering.’ It also gives an obsolete meaning ‘the shock of meeting’. Both of those figure. Some commentators swear that The Weight was all about dope dealing (assuming the literal and mundane sense of ‘a weight’ and interpreting ‘fix your rack’ as ‘fix your pain … by giving you a fix’).
SaDavid:
I can hear this as a song with drug connections; I hear an echo of, "you're the one - who called on them, to call on me, to get you your favors done" from "This Wheel's on Fire." And that song always recalls "Nothing Was Delivered," which I've never been able to hear but as the remonstrance of an out-of-pocket customer to his large-talking dealer. Delivered with perfect courtesy, as is the veiled threat of "Wheel." I think this interpretation is a little too narrow, though.
Pondering the weighty matters of obligations and favors done, I was reminded of the passage in Levon Helm's This Wheel's On Fire where he speaks of the network of Toronto pros and semi-pros that protected The Hawks when things got complicated. Woodstock has been noted for protecting its artists, too. The rowdy fellas up in the hills - 'the band' - must also have benefited from their association with the Dylan/Grossman axis, in Woodstock and beyond. The Band moved in circles where favors done and obligations incurred were legal tender. On a bad day in a world like that, the weight can get heavy.22
This is a major point, and it goes way back. Ronnie Hawkins and The Hawks had been managed by Morris Levy, a well-known Mafia associate, who even had the songwriter character in The Sopranos based on him. Levy or his girlfriend ‘Magill’ appeared on many record sleeves as a songwriter, including most of Hawkins stuff. Not that he ever wrote anything. With Hawkins they’d played Jack Ruby’s club in Dallas. When Dylan recruited the Hawks they were playing the New Jersey shore. So they were well used to networks where ‘favours were done and obligations incurred’. This might also be why the reformed Band’s most effective track was Bruce Springsteen’s Atlantic City, set in exactly this milieu.
However, this line caused more correspondence than any other. The most popular interpretation is that a rack is a navy or army bunk, which were in racks.
Pete Rivard:
"Fix your rack" is nothing more or less than "set you up with a place to sleep." Rack is military parlance for bed, based on the "racked" beds or bunk beds used in barracks and on shipboard. In the late 60's, especially with the infusion of Vietnam era vets into the general population, the term was in common usage, at least in the States. Listen to the lyrics of the song. The narrator is looking for some shuteye all through verse 1 "...I just need to find a place where I can lay my head/Mister, can you tell me where a man might find a bed..." The offer to "fix your rack" is to give the narrator a place to sleep, so long as he accepts the burden of taking responsibility for "jack, my dog".
By extension, a bunk in a Western bunkhouse could be a rack too, so that the offer is to find the bed and it makes the most sense to me. There is a contrary school of thought:
Dean Jackman:
I have been listening to the band since "Big Pink". My own mental vision of the parable 'The Weight" has included, under many different circumstances of set and setting, that of a hay rack. These Rube Goldberg-like contraptions are still used here in rural Montana for stacking hay and I have no doubt that they were used in the past in rural Ontario. Of course I have no idea what Robbie had in mind but I have never doubted that Crazy Chester was indeed going to "fix your rack" because due to their construction they do indeed require maintainence if not "fixin"
Except that there was no reason for a traveller to have a hay rack (or ‘hay rick’ in Britain.) Another rack was a gun rack:
Ingrid Spangler:
To me ‘fix your rack’ in that song always brought to mind a gun rack on a pick up truck, despite my mid 19th century setting for the rest of the song.
Jeremy D. Goodwin;
It's funny how different things jump out at different people. I have no trouble believing that Chester is "offering" to fix the narrator's gun rack. It is not really a genuine offer, and is just an excuse to receive a favor...a favor disguised as a trade. Remember the narrator's unheeded reply: "Wait a minute Chester, you know I'm a peaceful man". That is, I don't have a gun rack, I don't need one fixed. Chester ignores the response: his offer was not useful, and was not intended to be. Just take the dog, goodbye. Since (as you report) the "real life" Chester is purported to have gone around with toy guns in holsters, it seems that this offer might be in character.
Mike Chivers continues on the post Civil war theme:
Mike Chivers (Civil War theme):
The verse about Crazy Chester is about a shell shocked individual who knows he is losing it and alternately threatens to "fix your Rack" (knock your teeth out) if you take Jack my dog And immediately thereafter invites the hero to take the dog and "feed him when you can." Even in American slang, referring to one's set of teeth as a "rack" is an obscure expression but not entirely uncommon. "Fix” can also be taken to mean to cause someone an injury.
But what’s the dog got to do with any of it? If we’re intent on identification with known characters, remember that the Band’s dog, Hamlet, was around throughout recording. For the addiction interpreters, the dog that needs feeding is obvious. I tend to the theory that Chester is crazy anyway and that the story the traveller is in is becoming progressively more like dreamlike and this is the verse when the narrator is in full bizarre dream mode. It doesn’t have to make sense.
SaDavid:
Both Peter Viney and Robbie Robertson speak of the song in terms of cinema, and Peter Viney calls it "an intensely visual song." And yet, beyond the narrator's feeling "half past dead," there is virtually no descriptive language. It's true that this leaves every listener free to conjure their own movie, but for me, the song seems less like a movie than like one of those disjointed, episodic dreams - or that head-bobbing, hallucinatory state that accompanies sleep deprivation. In fact, it reminds me very much of one's state of mind at the end of a thirty-hour Greyhound ride, stumbling off the bus in the middle of the night, a stranger in a strange land23. You might need your wits, but they don't seem to be working that well. You speak, and people reply, but they seem to be talking about something else. Add this stuff about hiding, and a cameo appearance by the devil, and the trip takes on a decidedly nightmarish aspect.
Catch a Cannonball
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.
The transcriptions all have cannon ball as two words which ,makes no sense to me. It must be Cannonball as in the song and train name The Wabash Cannonball. I’ll put that down to bad transcription. If you subscribe to it all being about people they knew and real incidents, even this line has possibilities. The Wabash Cannonball is an Americana song 24 which graced album after album by the ‘strummers’ as The Hawks called the folkies they looked down on … that is until they met Dylan. Catching the Cannonball could be getting on board the Dylan / folk band wagon (!) or getting back to the music and out of the bizzare world the narrator’s landed in.
Utah Phillips:
In the 1880's the Wabash Cannonball was a mythological train made up by some bum somewhere, the train any old hobo would ride on the way to his reward, wherever that might be. There never was a train called the Wabash Cannonball that went from the great Atlantic Ocean to the wide Pacific shore. And there never was a train where a bum could get breakfast on the club car. As the song got more popular, the Wabash system in the Midwest thought it was the smart thing to do to name its express run the Wabash Cannonball. It ran between Detroit and St. Louis until about three years ago. Norfolk & Western bought the Wabash system about six years ago and ran it right into the ground.
Utah Phillips touches on American mythology, an established Robertson obsession, and for me that nails the reference solidly to a train.
On the other hand, some posters noted the old Canadian TV series about truckers, Cannonball, which harks back to the Gunsmoke reference, and that would have our narrator hitching a ride.
Jan Haust:
There are some possible Canadian cultural references that, being English, you may not be aware of in reference to The Weight. During the early to mid sixties, there was a program aired for young Canadians just after school. It was half an hour in length and filmed in black & white. The story was about two truckers and their various exploits on the lonely Canadian highways. Ours is quite a large country with few people... fewer then. Travel and loneliness on our highways, railroads and jetplanes surface as themes in many of our singers' songs from this era. At any rate the two truckers' names were Mike and Cannonball. Mike was the younger less experienced one while Cannonball was of the older, wiser variety. There was even a theme song for the program...the program itself was entitled CANNONBALL. There were constant adventures as they drove their ‘loads’ back and forth between cities ( much like the Hawks roaring back'n forth from Ontario to Arkansas to Oklahoma and back...) Is it possible that the weight of Cannonball's load at the weigh station along the highway was a constant worry while he thought of loved ones back home and looked for a night's lodging along the way?25
SaDavid:
I never thought of a train, either incoming or outgoing. "I pulled into Nazareth" suggests driving, with Greyhound or hitchhiking less likely candidates (although I have heard of the thumb being used to "pull" a ride). (And what a great opening line for a song! The juxtaposition of the homely and the holy catches the ear, and hooks the attention.) "The Cannonball" says "train," "A cannonball" doesn't. I always heard it as invented jive talk ("I'm gonna catch a cannonball outta here!") with a violent edge. This wheel shall explode. I'd forgotten about the trucker TV show, I can barely recall it.
Personally, I can’t see that the definite / indefinite article makes that much difference, but I’m assuming various trains called ‘Cannonball. Maybe there was only ever one.
Then Dave Marsh talks about ‘Luke with his bag sinking low’ which has got to be a misinterpretation. 26 A couple of the e-mails I received were sure that this line was about ballsache, perhaps after unrequited encounters with Carmen, her friend and Anna Lee. For example:
SaDavid:
There's nothing in the text that requires the reading, but I (or the eternal internal adolescent) hear a double entendre in "my bag is sinking low." "Bag" is recognized as slang for "scrotum," and (again in military company) I've heard the phrase "bag drag" used to describe an exhausting experience, say a long forced march.
OK, but they could easily have sung ‘My bags are …’ and they clearly sang, ‘My bag is …’ so I’ll go simply for the bag he picked up in verse two.
David Hatch and Stephen Millward think the mistress-hired hand theme is central (with Miss Fanny as the mistress who sent the narrator on the errand), and that it reoccurs in Unfaithful Servant from the second album.27 If you want to get really heavy (and you have majored in American Literature) you can even say that the narrator fits into the classic myth of the American Adam, the innocent abroad, the seeker with eyes wide open walking into situations of threat and confusion. Greil Marcus has convincingly followed this Adamic theme through the first three Band albums.28 I feel myself that the load is something deeper and darker and more unnameable than the responsibility of bearing a message.
We again return to the question of how much an artist operates at the concious level, and Todd Durand e-mailed me some thoughts and word associations related to the song in 1998.
Todd Durand:
I believe that Robbie’s comments regarding the "...guilt of relationships," "...stumbling through life,""trying to do what's right," make up the essence of the song. Moreover, I believe it is one's ego and the difficulty of actually having to share one's self to another is more to the point of his lyrical intent. In the end of the song the writer appears to come to understand this. I support this by noticing the interest Mr. Robertson expresses in "words."I think he means "definitions."
HEAD: mental or emotional control, culminating point of action
BED: supporting surface or structure, foundation (see LOAD), and,interestingly, earthwork supporting a railroad (see CANNON BALL).
BAG: something one likes or does well, a way of life
HIDE: why is he wanting to hide? He was looking for a place to sleep? I think not, and I think this supports the concepts alluded to in the definitions above.
CARMEN AND THE DEVIL: "... my friend can stick around," great lyric and I think it has something to do with the notion that he was attempting to stray from his true love and for this he is stuck with the devil. TEMPTATION
LOAD: burdensome responsibility, to weight with factors influencing outcomes. The latter being quite important. A relationship can be quite burdensome to "a peaceful man."
FOG: state of bewilderment or confusion.
RACK: under great mental or emotional stress.
JACK: servant, raise level or quality of.
DOG: to worry, to hound, a worthless person
See a common theme threaded throughout this tale? It seems to me that the LOAD is the giving-up of ones self to a relationship, the weight of which scares the individual away into a sort of purgatory where all sorts of dreamlike visions lead to the discovery that it becomes all-important "...to get back to Miss Fanny, you know she's the only one." His "... bag (way of life before having to share it with another) is sinking low, and I do believe it's time." In fact, in light of this realization, it is not only time to return, it's time to "...Catch a cannon ball now, t'take me on down the line." He wants to return with a newfound soul and a new definition of his "bag." And he wants to be sure to pass along Miss Fanny's "...regards for everyone." Her "thank-you."29
In the end, you don’t have to see anyone else’s pictures, but all the levels can co-exist. Robbie has said forcibly that he doesn’t believe in putting lyrics on the sleeve:
Robbie Robertson:
I hate having (lyrics on albums) now. I say ‘Is my diction so bad?’ People piss and moan about it, but I don’t like it. When I read other people’s lyrics on their sleeves I think they look stupid. If I read the lyrics to some of my favourite songs, they don’t mean shit to me. But if I hear ‘When A Man Loves A Woman’, it is so powerful and emotional. All I want out of any of these songs is the right emotion. I don’t give a shit what the lyrics are. Dylan rambled on way too much for my liking. I remember years ago saying to him: ‘listen to ‘When A Man Loves A Woman’; I like this more than any of the songs we’re playing. This is emotional to me; our songs are clever. I don’t care for clever. Let’s try and get somewhere that has an emotional thing.30
Robbie Robertson:
I have a funny attitude to words though. I grew up on rock ‘n’ roll music and there were no words on the back of the album. I learned the words to all of Little Richard’s songs the best I could, and what I couldn’t figure out didn’t matter. 31
Greil Marcus:
When the music (on Big Pink) is most exciting - when the guitar is fighting for space in the clatter while voices yelp and wail as one man finishes another man’s line or spins it off in a new direction - the lyrics are blind baggage and they emerge only in snatches. This is the finest rock ‘n’ roll tradition.32
So we should expect that the lyrics should remain enigmatic. Robbie broke his rule on Cahoots, where his worst ever lyrics got printed on the sleeve (Mind you, a lot of writers would give their right arms for Robbie’s worst lyrics). I’m still not sure what ‘I will fix your rack, if you’ll take Jack my dog’ is about… and I don’t really know if I ever want to know.
The Music
The Weight was recorded at A&R Studios, New York in sessions starting on 10th January 1968. It was one of six songs recorded, like Sergeant Pepper, on four track, while the rest of the album was done on eight track in Los Angeles. It’s also Levon Helm’s only lead vocal on Music From Big Pink, reflecting that he had missed most of the basement gestation of the album, having returned only in the late Fall of 1967, after leaving The Hawks in Washington DC in November 1965. The song was a comparatively late addition to the album too.
Kevin Ransom:
I always thought "The Weight" was The Band's most stirring, most beautifully-constructed song--but I understand it was on the "B" list during the Big Pink sessions.
Robbie Robertson:
That's true, it was. We'd tried it a number of different ways, but we weren't that excited about it. So our attitude was, "Well, just in case something else isn't working, we've got this song to fall back on." So we were in the studio, and just out of trying to not be boring, we said, "Well, let's give that `Take a load off Fanny' song a shot." And very quickly, someone suggested that maybe Garth should play piano and Richard should play organ, because it seemed like there was room for some fills that would sound more natural coming from the piano than the guitar. So they swapped, and we recorded it, and it wasn't until we listened back to it that we realized, "Holy shit, this song's really got something.33
The Band’s trademark of swopping lead on the vocals is here. In the original studio version, there are two voices for the narrator of the song - Levon does most of it (verses 1, 2, 3, 5), but Rick takes the fourth verse (Crazy Chester …), and joins Levon on parts of the fifth. Richard Manuel is taking the high, often wordless, part in the background.
Robbie Robertson:
I didn’t want screaming vocals. I wanted sensitive vocals where you can hear the breathing and other voices coming in. This whole thing of discovering the voices – don’t everybody come in together. Everybody on records was working on getting all the voices together until it neutralizes itself. I like voices coming in one at a time, in a chain reaction kind of thing like the Staple Singers did. But, because we were all men, it will have a different effect. All these ideas came to the surface and what becomes the clear picture is that this isn’t just clever. This is emotional and this is story telling. You can see this mythology. This is the record that I wanted to make.34
In later versions by The Band, we get Richard preceding Levon as narrator on the third verse (Go Down Miss Moses …) then still Rick on the fourth (Crazy Chester …). Randy Ciarlante replaced Richard Manuel’s part in the 1990s line-up. With The Staples (Last Waltz), with Ringo Starr and ther All-Star Band (featuring Rick Danko and Levon Helm) and by Robbie Robertson alone (Guitar Legends concert in Seville 1992), the song becomes a vehicle for turn-taking. I’ve never seen it as multiple narrators expressed by multiple voices, but rather different aspects of the same narrative voice.
In solo concerts, Levon, Rick and Richard have all done the whole song on their own. Robbie has done verses 1 and 5 in solo concerts. Rick, irritatingly, tended to do it as an audience singalong accompanied by stacatto rhythm guitar, except for the rare Deadheads Tribute to Jerry Garcia concert from Japan. There he was backed by a full band and dropped the guitar after a couple of lines and took it on, looking surprisingly like Ronnie Hawkins. Garth has performed it with Maud Hudson singing in 2004, and used a pastiche of the guitar intro on The Breakers from The Sea to the North. He also performed it on tour with Burrito DeLuxe in 2004.
Instrumentally there were changes too. Garth played the piano on the studio version, and on the road Richard Manuel was adding an organ part and Garth was still playing piano. This is what was happening on their first recorded live version, the Woodstock outtake which finally appeared on Woodstock Diaries and it was what they were still doing in 1976 at The Last Waltz. But sometimes they didn’t bother to switch seats. At Festival Express, filmed in July 1970, Garth is doing his lead part on organ, with Richard filling on piano. Given the hassle of operating PA systems in that era, plus the pressures of a show with many different groups, it may have been expediency. However, they’d been on the road consistently and they were playing it faster and louder, so the switch may have been for that reason.
In the 1990s reformed Band, Richard Bell took over on piano and Garth adds an organ solo, or where it’s too much hassle to set up his organ (e.g. Ringo Starr tour guest spot, The Letterman show) produces accordion instead.
Robbie moved from acoustic guitar (Big Pink, Woodstock ), to electric guitar (Festival Express, The Last Waltz), which changed the whole underpinning of the song, and for the worse, I think.
Does it scan?
The lyrics shift as the years go by and further versions emerge - it’s on every Band live album except Watkins Glen. If you listen to later live versions they’re altering lines all the way through - ‘Miss Carmen and the devil’, ‘Come on let’s shake it downtown’, ‘won’t you feed him when you want’ (instead of ‘can’ which rhymes with ‘man’) and even Rick’s ‘won’t you feed old Chester whenever you can’ which makes even less sense than the original (The Complete Last Waltz 1976). We also get a number of ‘feed him’ and a number of ‘feed me’ for the same line, but both are better than ‘feed old Chester’. At Woodstock 1969 they even try call and response as Levon calls out ‘What did he say?’ answered by Rick ‘He said, that’s OK boy …’ In Festival Express, Levon introduces the chorus with extra words: And won’t you take … / And you can take … while on Woodstock 69 we get I want you to take …
Adding words makes it easier to scan the lines, and both Levon and Rick seem to have sung easier by padding out the lines. It was and is harder to do it in the 1968 version, but Robbie Robertson’s broadcast solo versions are notably lyrically closer to the original.
But the song is theirs to do as they wish with, and after hundreds of performances, I can’t believe any musician is analyzing the lyrics closely, if they ever did in the first place. Remember what Richard Manuel said about Tears of Rage:
Richard Manuel:
(Dylan) came down to the basement with a piece of typewritten paper - and it was typed out - in line form - and he just said ‘Have you got any music for this?’ I had a couple of musical movements that fit, that seemed to fit, so I just elaborated a little bit, because I wasn’t sure what the lyrics meant. I couldn’t run upstairs and say, ‘What’s this mean Bob? Now the heart is filled with gold as if it was a purse.’35
I would think the same held true for The Weight, and once it was recorded and stuck in the mind, freely adapting the lyrics a little was natural.
So who wrote it?
The feud between Robbie Robertson and Levon Helm revolves around credits and money. Helm says that he never gets paid for uses of The Weight, and that it was written communally in a woodshed atmosphere. Granted, drummers agree that Helm’s drums on the track are one of the greatest pieces of rock drumming committed to tape.36 Hudson’s piano is majestic. Danko’s bass burbles through the song and propels it. But sadly, all these great things are ‘arrangement’ in songwriting terms. Copyright consists of the lyric and the top line (basic melody). Therefore, other versions of the song by Diana Ross or Aretha Franklin which dispense with all of the wonderful Band communal arrangement are still recognizably The Weight. So what it says on the label, Jaime Robbie Robertson, is the legal fact of the matter. Whether it’s fair or not is another question. As Robbie has said, arrangement in bringing their parts to the mix are what musicians do. What songwriters do precedes that. And gets paid better.
John Simon:
Robbie was fair based on an old system … That's the system under which Robbie determined that he would be songwriter of those songs. And its true, Robbie was the one who wrote the lyrics and wrote the music. Wrote the lyrics on legal paper, or whatever he wrote it on, and figured out the chords to the song and dictated the melody and chords to the other players. Okay. But in the new system you'll see that when a song is written its a much more co-operative thing in a band. You'll see five or six writers on a song that'll say, on a band song on an album, it'll list everybody who's in the band on the song, you know. And you know that, or you may suspect that the bass player and the drummer or somebody - the keyboard player, one of them just had nothing to do with the song. But they're on it because its a sort of democracy and they just happend to be around … So, Robbie was working in the old system. And he's absolutely right in working with the old system. Levon is pissed about that and wishes that Robbie had been working in the new system. But if they hadn't agreed on that ahead of time, you know … on the other hand a good deal of the inspiration on the songs that Robbie wrote came from Levon's personal experience.37
We can also discount the late sixties rumours that Dylan had a hand in it. They arose because it was published through Dylan’s company, Dwarf Music, as were the other songs on Music From Big Pink. In 1968 people couldn’t believe that such mature songwriting had appeared seemingly from nowhere and cast around for other involvement. By the next album the world was aware of Robertson’s abilities and the rumours died.
The last word …
It’s interesting that Ronnie Hawkins saw Big Pink as a return to country roots by The Band. Look at the roster of performers who have covered The Weight. Aretha Franklin, The Supremes, The Temptations, King Curtis, The Staples - none of those names sound country, do they? Even so, the soul versions like to introduce a jangly mock-C&W guitar. The Weight is more complex than R & B at the same time. It’s only in recent years that the song has been reclaimed by country artists. My favourite version? The original 1968 cut, not that I haven’t enjoyed hearing all the changes.
Last word to Robbie, talking about the filming of the 1976 version of the song used in The Last Waltz, where The Band performed with The Staple Singers, seen here:
Robbie Robertson:
The biggest thing was the religious connotation of the song. I remember there was this huge argument between Marty (Martin Scorsese, the director) and Michael Chapman about the mood and the lighting for ‘The Weight’. Marty was insistiting that it was a very Catholic vision, it had to be. And Michael was saying ‘No, this is a very Protestant story, it’s Baptist, Marty.’ He was explaining to Marty the gospel music connotations.
I liked everything they were saying because I had never thought of any of it, though I was brought up Catholic. I thought it was quite brilliant the credit they were giving me. For me it was a combination of Catholocism and gospel music. The story told in the song is about the guilt of relationships, not being able to give what’s being asked of you. Someone is stumbling through life, going from one situation to another, with different characters. In going through these catacombs of experience. you’re trying to do what’s right, but it seems that with all the places you have to go, it’s just not possible. In the song, all this is ‘the load.’
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
Chest Fever
In my opinion, Garth Hudson, primarily known as the Band's organ player, was the real heart of the group. He was the only one of the five who never tried to sing (Robbie Robertson TRIED to sing, but he can't sing lyrics as well as he can write em), but Hudson didn't need to use his voice to sing out loud. It was Hudson's melodies within the songs of the Band that made the group unique, and elevated them into a level of technical experimentation and expertise that put them on an equal footing with their contemporary British psychedelic counterparts like the Beatles and Pink Floyd. In Music from Big Pink, Hudson's contribution is most evident in the track called "Chest Fever", written by Robbie Robertson (officially... more on that below).
I know she's a tracker, any scarlet would back her
They say she's a chooser, but I just can't refuse her
She was just there, but then she can't be here no more
And as my mind unweaves, I feel the freeze down in my knees
But just before she leaves, she receives
She's been down in the dunes and she's dealt with the goons
Now she drinks from the bitter cup, I'm trying to get her to give it up
She was just here, I fear she can't be here no more
And as my mind unweaves, I feel the freeze down in my knees
But just before she leaves, she receives
It's long, long when she's gone, I get weary holding on
Now I'm coldly fading fast, I don't think I'm gonna last
Very much longer
"She's stoned" said the Swede, and the moon calf agreed
I'm like a viper in shock with my eyes in the clock
She was just there somewhere and here I am again
And as my mind unweaves, I feel the freeze down in my knees
But just before she leaves, she receives
From Peter Viney's reflections on the song:
After "The Weight", "Chest Fever" is the Big Pink track that has appeared on most subsequent live albums and compilations. It survived the loss of Richard Manuel, to appear in later versions with Levon singing, more recently joined by Randy Ciarlante. It rapidly became an on-stage showpiece for Garth's organ, and as such it was an essential song. The intro was originally from Bach's Tocatta and Fugue in D minor.
Garth Hudson
"...after that it becomes more unqualifiable, more ethnic."
It soon grew into a lengthy organ solo piece prefacing the song on live performances, which was eventually called "The Genetic Method."
(One of the most famous instances of The Genetic Method accompanying Chest Fever is in the 1971 live album Rock of Ages. Chest Fever immediately follows The Genetic Method, so to get the full effect of Garth's stamina, it's best to listen to them together)
I was stuck behind some guys who rattled on loudly about Genesis and Yes all the way through the Band's 1973 Wembley set. A few seconds into "The Genetic Method" they suddely hushed. "Oh, Wow!," said one, "that's brilliant, just like Pink Floyd!" British audiences have always loved a touch of flash instrumental pyrotechnics. I'm sure the same people were upset by the absence of a lengthy drum solo. But the intro to "Chest Fever" was always much better than that. Check out Garth's astonishing four-minute intro from 1976 on the Italian Live in Washinton (sic) CD (which is the 1976 King Biscuit Flower Hour performance) or the one from The Complete Last Waltz.
The lyrics were dummy words, simply designed to fill the gaps while the instrumental tracks were put down. Robbie had intended to rewrite them at a later stage.
Robbie Robertson
"I'm not sure that I know the words to 'Chest Fever'; I'm not even so sure there are words to 'Chest Fever'.
He says that the song was a reaction to the mysticism and myth-making of the other lyrics on the album:
Robbie Robertson
'Chest Fever' was like here's the groove, come in a little late. Let's do the whole thing so it's like pulling back, then it gives in and kind of kicks in and goes with the groove a little bit. If you like 'Chest Fever' it's for God knows what reason, it's just in there somewhere, this quirky thing. But it doesn't make particularly any kind of sense in the lyrics, in the music, in the arrangement, in anything.
You can snatch ideas from the words though, and though obscure, they remain consistent in live versions. Robbie has been more forthcoming on the lyrics elsewhere (Sleeve notes to Anthology Volume 1):
Robbie Robertson
"It's kind of a hard love song, but it's a reversal on that old rock n' roll thing where they're always telling the girl, you know, He's a rebel, he'll never be any good,. This time it's the other way round, people are telling him about this girl and it effects him physically. These things they're telling him move him incredibly, and he's really a victim of that."
Even so, some of the lyrics printed on the web site were a surprise to me. I'd never interpreted "any scarlet would back her" in years of listening to it. I reckon I'd given up trying to comprehend by the end, and I'd dispute one or two of them anyway. Robbie was intent on not having lyrics on the sleeve until Cahoots, pointing out that half the joy of Chuck Berry songs was puzzling out the words. What's there fits his "bad girl" interpretation and there are a number of drug references: tracker, drinking from the bitter cup, "She's stoned" said the Swede", "like a viper in shock", "feel the freeze down to my knees." I always reckoned the transcribed "They say she's a chooser" was "They say she's a juicer" which echoed the line "I know she's a tracker" with a switch to alcohol. But when I listen to the post-Big Pink versions I have to agree it sounds much more like "chooser". And I've no real idea what "chooser" means, presumably someone who picks and chooses as they please (men? drugs?).
Apart from Garth's state-of-the-art organ playing, there is the almost hilarious bridge, where Rick plays violin against wheezing sax from Garth and belching baritone horn from John Simon before the vocal hammers back in. Robbie says it was a deliberately pathetic kind of sound, building the surprise as they kick back into the song.
When Levon Helm has complained about the share out of royalties at this period, this is the song he quotes. His theme is that Garth's contribution was always grossly under-estimated and under-credited. As he says, "what do you remember about Chest Fever - the lyrics or the organ part?" Well, you remember both. And there's the tune and the rhythm as well. In general I love Robbie's lyrics, but it's never bothered me that I can only pick up odd snatches from this one. A close comparison is "We Can Talk" which is Richard Manuel's song, but is just about as disjointed. But the snatches you do grab certainly stick.
On live versions it's usually the most interesting track, because Garth never plays the same thing twice. If you're into Band live tapes, you can get fed up with some other songs because of the lack of variation in versions which are years apart. A particularly interesting live "Chest Fever" is Richard Manuel solo at The Getaway in Woodstock in 1985, where he does the organ part on frenetic piano.
The next entry in this blog finishes off Big Pink, as we take a look at what could probably be considered the most famous track the Band ever cut.
I know she's a tracker, any scarlet would back her
They say she's a chooser, but I just can't refuse her
She was just there, but then she can't be here no more
And as my mind unweaves, I feel the freeze down in my knees
But just before she leaves, she receives
She's been down in the dunes and she's dealt with the goons
Now she drinks from the bitter cup, I'm trying to get her to give it up
She was just here, I fear she can't be here no more
And as my mind unweaves, I feel the freeze down in my knees
But just before she leaves, she receives
It's long, long when she's gone, I get weary holding on
Now I'm coldly fading fast, I don't think I'm gonna last
Very much longer
"She's stoned" said the Swede, and the moon calf agreed
I'm like a viper in shock with my eyes in the clock
She was just there somewhere and here I am again
And as my mind unweaves, I feel the freeze down in my knees
But just before she leaves, she receives
From Peter Viney's reflections on the song:
After "The Weight", "Chest Fever" is the Big Pink track that has appeared on most subsequent live albums and compilations. It survived the loss of Richard Manuel, to appear in later versions with Levon singing, more recently joined by Randy Ciarlante. It rapidly became an on-stage showpiece for Garth's organ, and as such it was an essential song. The intro was originally from Bach's Tocatta and Fugue in D minor.
Garth Hudson
"...after that it becomes more unqualifiable, more ethnic."
It soon grew into a lengthy organ solo piece prefacing the song on live performances, which was eventually called "The Genetic Method."
(One of the most famous instances of The Genetic Method accompanying Chest Fever is in the 1971 live album Rock of Ages. Chest Fever immediately follows The Genetic Method, so to get the full effect of Garth's stamina, it's best to listen to them together)
I was stuck behind some guys who rattled on loudly about Genesis and Yes all the way through the Band's 1973 Wembley set. A few seconds into "The Genetic Method" they suddely hushed. "Oh, Wow!," said one, "that's brilliant, just like Pink Floyd!" British audiences have always loved a touch of flash instrumental pyrotechnics. I'm sure the same people were upset by the absence of a lengthy drum solo. But the intro to "Chest Fever" was always much better than that. Check out Garth's astonishing four-minute intro from 1976 on the Italian Live in Washinton (sic) CD (which is the 1976 King Biscuit Flower Hour performance) or the one from The Complete Last Waltz.
The lyrics were dummy words, simply designed to fill the gaps while the instrumental tracks were put down. Robbie had intended to rewrite them at a later stage.
Robbie Robertson
"I'm not sure that I know the words to 'Chest Fever'; I'm not even so sure there are words to 'Chest Fever'.
He says that the song was a reaction to the mysticism and myth-making of the other lyrics on the album:
Robbie Robertson
'Chest Fever' was like here's the groove, come in a little late. Let's do the whole thing so it's like pulling back, then it gives in and kind of kicks in and goes with the groove a little bit. If you like 'Chest Fever' it's for God knows what reason, it's just in there somewhere, this quirky thing. But it doesn't make particularly any kind of sense in the lyrics, in the music, in the arrangement, in anything.
You can snatch ideas from the words though, and though obscure, they remain consistent in live versions. Robbie has been more forthcoming on the lyrics elsewhere (Sleeve notes to Anthology Volume 1):
Robbie Robertson
"It's kind of a hard love song, but it's a reversal on that old rock n' roll thing where they're always telling the girl, you know, He's a rebel, he'll never be any good,. This time it's the other way round, people are telling him about this girl and it effects him physically. These things they're telling him move him incredibly, and he's really a victim of that."
Even so, some of the lyrics printed on the web site were a surprise to me. I'd never interpreted "any scarlet would back her" in years of listening to it. I reckon I'd given up trying to comprehend by the end, and I'd dispute one or two of them anyway. Robbie was intent on not having lyrics on the sleeve until Cahoots, pointing out that half the joy of Chuck Berry songs was puzzling out the words. What's there fits his "bad girl" interpretation and there are a number of drug references: tracker, drinking from the bitter cup, "She's stoned" said the Swede", "like a viper in shock", "feel the freeze down to my knees." I always reckoned the transcribed "They say she's a chooser" was "They say she's a juicer" which echoed the line "I know she's a tracker" with a switch to alcohol. But when I listen to the post-Big Pink versions I have to agree it sounds much more like "chooser". And I've no real idea what "chooser" means, presumably someone who picks and chooses as they please (men? drugs?).
Apart from Garth's state-of-the-art organ playing, there is the almost hilarious bridge, where Rick plays violin against wheezing sax from Garth and belching baritone horn from John Simon before the vocal hammers back in. Robbie says it was a deliberately pathetic kind of sound, building the surprise as they kick back into the song.
When Levon Helm has complained about the share out of royalties at this period, this is the song he quotes. His theme is that Garth's contribution was always grossly under-estimated and under-credited. As he says, "what do you remember about Chest Fever - the lyrics or the organ part?" Well, you remember both. And there's the tune and the rhythm as well. In general I love Robbie's lyrics, but it's never bothered me that I can only pick up odd snatches from this one. A close comparison is "We Can Talk" which is Richard Manuel's song, but is just about as disjointed. But the snatches you do grab certainly stick.
On live versions it's usually the most interesting track, because Garth never plays the same thing twice. If you're into Band live tapes, you can get fed up with some other songs because of the lack of variation in versions which are years apart. A particularly interesting live "Chest Fever" is Richard Manuel solo at The Getaway in Woodstock in 1985, where he does the organ part on frenetic piano.
The next entry in this blog finishes off Big Pink, as we take a look at what could probably be considered the most famous track the Band ever cut.
Sunday, February 28, 2010
One Dylan, one Dylan/Danko
Bob Dylan's contributions to the Band are probably greater than any other artist not actually in the group; according to both Levon Helm and Richard Manuel, after all, Dylan is the one who gave them their moniker. More important than that, their time with Dylan helped them cultivate their sound. Two sides of this sound are in two of their most famous tracks, both on Music from Big Pink. Those tracks are "I Shall Be Released", which is a cover from one of Dylan's albums, and "This Wheel's on Fire" (that's the name of this blog! Coooooooooool), which is an original track co-written by Bob Dylan and Band bassist Rick Danko.
They say everything can be replaced
They say every distance is not near
So I remember every face
Of every man who put me here
(Chorus:)
I see my light come shinin'
From the west unto the east
Any day now, any day now
I shall be released
They say ev'ry man needs protection
They say that ev'ry man must fall
Yet I swear I see my reflection
Somewhere so high above this wall
(Chorus)
Now yonder standing there in this lonely crowd
A man who swears he's not to blame
All day long I hear him shouting so loud
Just crying out that he was framed
If your memory serves you well
We're going to meet again and wait
So I'm going to unpack all my things
And sit before it gets too late
No man alive will come to you
With another tale to tell
And you know that we shall meet again
If your memory serves you well
CHORUS:
This wheel's on fire, rolling down the road
Best notify my next of kin
This wheel shall explode!
If your memory serves you well, I was going to confiscate your lace
And wrap it up in a sailor's knot and hide it in your case
If I knew for sure that it was yours, and it was oh so hard to tell
And you know that we shall meet again if your memory serves you well
(CHORUS)
If your memory serves you well, you'll remember that you're the one
Who called on them to call on me to get you your favours done
And after every plan had failed and there was nothing more to tell
And you know that we shall meet again if your memory serves you well
(CHORUS)
From Peter Viney's reflections:
During the 1965 / 1966 Dylan tours there was a double shock for the folkies. While they were still getting used to the electric sound of The Hawks, they were hit with someone actually joining Dylan on backing vocal in One Too Many Mornings when Rick Danko sang "… Behind!" When Dylan and The Hawks retired to the basement, it was at Big Pink, the house that Danko rented. When you listen through either the official set, or the five volume The Genuine Basement tapes, Danko's bass is omnipresent, loping its way loudly and proudly through every song. Danko is the voice who comes in behind Dylan most often, and like Dylan he had the encyclopaedic knowledge of folk and country music. It was fitting that like Richard Manuel he received the call to collaborate with Dylan. Danko also co-wrote Bessie Smith with Robbie Robertson.
Rick Danko
We would come together every day and work and Dylan would come over. He gave me the typewritten lyrics to 'This Wheel's On Fire'. At that time I was teaching myself to play the piano. … Some music I had written on the piano the day before just seemed to fit with Dylan's lyrics. I worked on the phrasing and the melody. Then Dylan and I wrote the chorus together.
Three basement songs made it to Big Pink, Tears of Rage, This Wheel's On Fire, and I Shall Be Released and in all cases they were radically improved; vocals, arrangements and backing all show a major leap from the basement versions. Half of Music From Big Pink was done in New York City over just two sessions - Tears of Rage, Chest Fever, We Can Talk, This Wheel's On Fire and The Weight. They were recorded on a four track machine (as was Sergeant Pepper). The Band laid down the instrumental live on tracks 1 and 2, put horns on track three and vocals and tambourine on the fourth track. Producer John Simon has mentioned the wonderful acoustics of A & R studio where it was recorded.
Levon Helm
Garth got some distinctive sounds on that track by running a telegraph key through a Roxochord toy organ. Garth just hit that key when he wanted on that song. I thought we'd cut a pretty good take on it, but when we got back to New York from California, there were problems.
John Simon
The snare drum wasn't loud enough on our four track recording, so Levon had to go back into the studio and overdub the snare, an awful chore. When it was over, Levon growls at me, 'Don't lemmee ever have to do that again."
Greil Marcus has commented that This Wheel's On Fire and I Shall Be Released seem not to fit the mood and style of the album. He even says that they sound like fillers on an album that needs nothing of the sort. Hoskyns repeats the same criticisms. I entirely disagree. Perhaps Marcus had got fixed onto the basement interpretations with Dylan before he heard Big Pink. (The acetate was known, though the bootlegs weren't). I think that both Marcus and Hoskyns are showing (or repeating in Hoskyns case) the normal prejudices of Dylan snobs. Only an elite few can have heard the Dylan version first. For most of the world, the Julie Driscoll, Band and Byrds versions were familiar before they found someone to sell them a bootleg of the basement tapes.
My first meeting with This Wheel's On Fire was the Julie Driscoll / Brian Auger British #5 hit version, which I saw performed live twice in quick succession. Julie Driscoll (now Julie Tippetts) had been touring Britain for four years with Steampacket, a band that featured three vocalists, Driscoll, Rod Stewart and Long John Baldry, with Brian Auger on organ. I'm told Reg Dwight (aka Elton John) was on piano, and I guess I saw Steampacket four or five times. I didn't notice, but this was before the glasses and costumes. When the male vocalists left for fame and solo fortune, the remnant became Brian Auger and The Trinity, and they were one of the earliest fortunate recipients of the basement acetate. The Driscoll version gave the song a spacey, ethereal treatment.
Phil Johnson
If youy listen to her work with Auger now, it still sounds hip, and Julie's voice is quite outstanding. Even then the normal soul vocabulary of generic slurs and slides is made utterly distinctive by rough, throaty sandpaper-textured burrs that are as close to Celtic folk-music as they are to Memphis.
When I first saw that Big Pink cover and looked at the back, the inclusion of two favourites, this and The Weight pushed me to buy it. Because my first contact was with the Driscoll version, I totally fail to comprehend the carping by Marcus and Hoskyns. None of the other versions match the sweep of the Band's take on song nor especially do they match Danko's voice. Even so, the Julie Driscoll vocal also stands the test of time, and Brian Auger's backing is second-only to The Band. On The Band version, Rick's voice sounds as if it's at the end of a long session with many takes which adds to the atmospherics.
Paul Williams
"This Wheel's On Fire" - the album version adds some 1975 overdubs (drums, piano) to the original recording, but either way it sounds great - is a beautiful and chilling piece of double talk, or dream talk, working off the recurring phrase "If your memory serves you well" and punctuated by the fabulously dramatic "wheel's on fire" chorus (which works even though there's no obvious connection between the words of the verses and the words of the chorus). The song is really circular, chorus breathlessly tumbling into each verse and each verse opening and closing with the same words, rolling forward in an ever increasing tension, releasing again and again and yet still building, still unresolved. What does it mean? It's like a dream. It does and doesn't have to do with certain things that happened; does and doesn't refer to events that may still happen, or are happening now. What does it mean? Maybe nothing. Some songs don't have meanings; they overflow with feelings instead.
Robert Shelton
The title comes from the biblical prophet Ezekiel's vision, recounted in a black spiritual "Ezekiel Saw the Wheel." The image of man's life as a wheel of fortune appears in Chaucer and other medieval literature. Shakespeare described King Lear in decline as "bound upon a wheel of fire". Dylan's shadowy narrator is a returning traveller who develops a vague personal tale into a grim portent of the future - fire and explosion as the mysterious wheel rolls forward. A motorcycle wheel causing a personal explosion? In "Writings and Drawings" Dylan's jaunty sketches convert this wheel into a plaything. "Wheel" contains some of Dylan's most opaque writing, yet the song builds firmly in a series of tension-and-release peaks. Sometimes the words' sonoroties become more important than their literal sense.
Greil Marcus
As the men and women before the preacher crane their heads to place his words, he traces a rolling deliberate rhythm, with his voice, with his hands, stepping into his famous sermon on the Book of Revelation, a soliloquay the crowd knows as "This Wheel's On Fire." It's a story the preacher has told for years, but his listeners are rapt and still because neither he nor they have ever gotten to the bottom of it.
Greil Marcus also describes the songs narrator as a "squinting mystic", which I like. Re-read the last line of each of the comments above. They all return to the same point, you get the feeling, but you can't interpret what the lyrics are about. Andy Gill has a good attempt:
Andy Gill
Given suitably enigmatic melody by Rick Danko, Dylan's lyric draws again on Shakespeare's King Lear … itself inspired by the biblical visions of Ezekiel, possibly the Old Testament's nuttiest prophet - to offer what seems like a mea culpa for past transgressions, a moment of self revelation in which the singer realizes that in order to get to this, it was necessary for him to go through that. The road down which the flaming wheel rolls is of course the road of excess, which Rimbaud claimed, leads to the palace of wisdom. … The mood of the song is far more portentous, capturing a soul suspended on the cusp of torment and deliverance, unable to arrest its headlong drive towards destruction, yet aware of the tasks which have to be completed. It is virtually impossible not to see the locked wheel of Dylan's Triumph 500 in the title, the very wheel upon which his own accelerating pursuit of disaster was borne so swiftly, and then arrested so abruptly. The verses brim with unfinished business, anchored by the certainty that "we shall meet again."
Something else that becomes apparent is that all Dylan commentators read each other. "We shall meet again" / "This wheel shall explode" interests me. In American English, shall has a particularly strong sense of certainty attached to it, and is a favoured Dylan word. I was once told straightfaced by an American editor that "shall" does not exist in American English. I advised her to read the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution while I played I Shall Be Released, We Shall Overcome and This Wheel's On Fire. I can't offer any sensible interpretation either. I always saw it as a companion piece to We Can Talk, full of memorable lines which create an idea, but which don't bear analysis. I've often been guilty of finding the biblical and Shakesperean links myself, but I don't get the connection with "being bound upon wheels of fire". I see a fiery vision, but the headlong rush of urgency brings the motorcycle to mind first, and more especially sudden success - hot, untouchable, unstoppable, hurtling forward, possibly doomed (but possibly exploding into success):
Please notify my next of kin, this wheel shall explode
Notify my next of kin is a phrase from a last will and testament, or a police report - the next of kin have been notified . Shall shows inevitability. Open up the original Music From Big Pink cover, and that same legal phrase "Next of kin" is the label overprinted on the family photo.
Rick Danko
Those first royalty checks we got almost killed some of us. 'This Wheel's On Fire' was never really a hit, but it had been recorded by a few people, and all of a sudden I got a couple of hundred thousand dollars out of left field. This was half the writer's royalty from one song. We were all shocked at these windfalls we never dreamed existed. Dealin' with this wasn't in the fucking manual, man! If you've never made a million dollars overnight, like we did. You have no concept of what it can do. We saw it ruin people, kill them! Suddenly we had all the money we needed and people were falling over themselves to make us happy, which meant giving us all the dope we could stand. People wanted to turn us on for free, do favors, and some of us were happy to be taken care of like that. There wasn't anything real dramatic about it, because it was a fact of life, and probably still is. I'm here to tell you that it's a crying shame to see what success can do to some people. I'm sure it wasn't the best thing that could have happened to The Band.
Poignant, no?
They say everything can be replaced
They say every distance is not near
So I remember every face
Of every man who put me here
(Chorus:)
I see my light come shinin'
From the west unto the east
Any day now, any day now
I shall be released
They say ev'ry man needs protection
They say that ev'ry man must fall
Yet I swear I see my reflection
Somewhere so high above this wall
(Chorus)
Now yonder standing there in this lonely crowd
A man who swears he's not to blame
All day long I hear him shouting so loud
Just crying out that he was framed
If your memory serves you well
We're going to meet again and wait
So I'm going to unpack all my things
And sit before it gets too late
No man alive will come to you
With another tale to tell
And you know that we shall meet again
If your memory serves you well
CHORUS:
This wheel's on fire, rolling down the road
Best notify my next of kin
This wheel shall explode!
If your memory serves you well, I was going to confiscate your lace
And wrap it up in a sailor's knot and hide it in your case
If I knew for sure that it was yours, and it was oh so hard to tell
And you know that we shall meet again if your memory serves you well
(CHORUS)
If your memory serves you well, you'll remember that you're the one
Who called on them to call on me to get you your favours done
And after every plan had failed and there was nothing more to tell
And you know that we shall meet again if your memory serves you well
(CHORUS)
From Peter Viney's reflections:
During the 1965 / 1966 Dylan tours there was a double shock for the folkies. While they were still getting used to the electric sound of The Hawks, they were hit with someone actually joining Dylan on backing vocal in One Too Many Mornings when Rick Danko sang "… Behind!" When Dylan and The Hawks retired to the basement, it was at Big Pink, the house that Danko rented. When you listen through either the official set, or the five volume The Genuine Basement tapes, Danko's bass is omnipresent, loping its way loudly and proudly through every song. Danko is the voice who comes in behind Dylan most often, and like Dylan he had the encyclopaedic knowledge of folk and country music. It was fitting that like Richard Manuel he received the call to collaborate with Dylan. Danko also co-wrote Bessie Smith with Robbie Robertson.
Rick Danko
We would come together every day and work and Dylan would come over. He gave me the typewritten lyrics to 'This Wheel's On Fire'. At that time I was teaching myself to play the piano. … Some music I had written on the piano the day before just seemed to fit with Dylan's lyrics. I worked on the phrasing and the melody. Then Dylan and I wrote the chorus together.
Three basement songs made it to Big Pink, Tears of Rage, This Wheel's On Fire, and I Shall Be Released and in all cases they were radically improved; vocals, arrangements and backing all show a major leap from the basement versions. Half of Music From Big Pink was done in New York City over just two sessions - Tears of Rage, Chest Fever, We Can Talk, This Wheel's On Fire and The Weight. They were recorded on a four track machine (as was Sergeant Pepper). The Band laid down the instrumental live on tracks 1 and 2, put horns on track three and vocals and tambourine on the fourth track. Producer John Simon has mentioned the wonderful acoustics of A & R studio where it was recorded.
Levon Helm
Garth got some distinctive sounds on that track by running a telegraph key through a Roxochord toy organ. Garth just hit that key when he wanted on that song. I thought we'd cut a pretty good take on it, but when we got back to New York from California, there were problems.
John Simon
The snare drum wasn't loud enough on our four track recording, so Levon had to go back into the studio and overdub the snare, an awful chore. When it was over, Levon growls at me, 'Don't lemmee ever have to do that again."
Greil Marcus has commented that This Wheel's On Fire and I Shall Be Released seem not to fit the mood and style of the album. He even says that they sound like fillers on an album that needs nothing of the sort. Hoskyns repeats the same criticisms. I entirely disagree. Perhaps Marcus had got fixed onto the basement interpretations with Dylan before he heard Big Pink. (The acetate was known, though the bootlegs weren't). I think that both Marcus and Hoskyns are showing (or repeating in Hoskyns case) the normal prejudices of Dylan snobs. Only an elite few can have heard the Dylan version first. For most of the world, the Julie Driscoll, Band and Byrds versions were familiar before they found someone to sell them a bootleg of the basement tapes.
My first meeting with This Wheel's On Fire was the Julie Driscoll / Brian Auger British #5 hit version, which I saw performed live twice in quick succession. Julie Driscoll (now Julie Tippetts) had been touring Britain for four years with Steampacket, a band that featured three vocalists, Driscoll, Rod Stewart and Long John Baldry, with Brian Auger on organ. I'm told Reg Dwight (aka Elton John) was on piano, and I guess I saw Steampacket four or five times. I didn't notice, but this was before the glasses and costumes. When the male vocalists left for fame and solo fortune, the remnant became Brian Auger and The Trinity, and they were one of the earliest fortunate recipients of the basement acetate. The Driscoll version gave the song a spacey, ethereal treatment.
Phil Johnson
If youy listen to her work with Auger now, it still sounds hip, and Julie's voice is quite outstanding. Even then the normal soul vocabulary of generic slurs and slides is made utterly distinctive by rough, throaty sandpaper-textured burrs that are as close to Celtic folk-music as they are to Memphis.
When I first saw that Big Pink cover and looked at the back, the inclusion of two favourites, this and The Weight pushed me to buy it. Because my first contact was with the Driscoll version, I totally fail to comprehend the carping by Marcus and Hoskyns. None of the other versions match the sweep of the Band's take on song nor especially do they match Danko's voice. Even so, the Julie Driscoll vocal also stands the test of time, and Brian Auger's backing is second-only to The Band. On The Band version, Rick's voice sounds as if it's at the end of a long session with many takes which adds to the atmospherics.
Paul Williams
"This Wheel's On Fire" - the album version adds some 1975 overdubs (drums, piano) to the original recording, but either way it sounds great - is a beautiful and chilling piece of double talk, or dream talk, working off the recurring phrase "If your memory serves you well" and punctuated by the fabulously dramatic "wheel's on fire" chorus (which works even though there's no obvious connection between the words of the verses and the words of the chorus). The song is really circular, chorus breathlessly tumbling into each verse and each verse opening and closing with the same words, rolling forward in an ever increasing tension, releasing again and again and yet still building, still unresolved. What does it mean? It's like a dream. It does and doesn't have to do with certain things that happened; does and doesn't refer to events that may still happen, or are happening now. What does it mean? Maybe nothing. Some songs don't have meanings; they overflow with feelings instead.
Robert Shelton
The title comes from the biblical prophet Ezekiel's vision, recounted in a black spiritual "Ezekiel Saw the Wheel." The image of man's life as a wheel of fortune appears in Chaucer and other medieval literature. Shakespeare described King Lear in decline as "bound upon a wheel of fire". Dylan's shadowy narrator is a returning traveller who develops a vague personal tale into a grim portent of the future - fire and explosion as the mysterious wheel rolls forward. A motorcycle wheel causing a personal explosion? In "Writings and Drawings" Dylan's jaunty sketches convert this wheel into a plaything. "Wheel" contains some of Dylan's most opaque writing, yet the song builds firmly in a series of tension-and-release peaks. Sometimes the words' sonoroties become more important than their literal sense.
Greil Marcus
As the men and women before the preacher crane their heads to place his words, he traces a rolling deliberate rhythm, with his voice, with his hands, stepping into his famous sermon on the Book of Revelation, a soliloquay the crowd knows as "This Wheel's On Fire." It's a story the preacher has told for years, but his listeners are rapt and still because neither he nor they have ever gotten to the bottom of it.
Greil Marcus also describes the songs narrator as a "squinting mystic", which I like. Re-read the last line of each of the comments above. They all return to the same point, you get the feeling, but you can't interpret what the lyrics are about. Andy Gill has a good attempt:
Andy Gill
Given suitably enigmatic melody by Rick Danko, Dylan's lyric draws again on Shakespeare's King Lear … itself inspired by the biblical visions of Ezekiel, possibly the Old Testament's nuttiest prophet - to offer what seems like a mea culpa for past transgressions, a moment of self revelation in which the singer realizes that in order to get to this, it was necessary for him to go through that. The road down which the flaming wheel rolls is of course the road of excess, which Rimbaud claimed, leads to the palace of wisdom. … The mood of the song is far more portentous, capturing a soul suspended on the cusp of torment and deliverance, unable to arrest its headlong drive towards destruction, yet aware of the tasks which have to be completed. It is virtually impossible not to see the locked wheel of Dylan's Triumph 500 in the title, the very wheel upon which his own accelerating pursuit of disaster was borne so swiftly, and then arrested so abruptly. The verses brim with unfinished business, anchored by the certainty that "we shall meet again."
Something else that becomes apparent is that all Dylan commentators read each other. "We shall meet again" / "This wheel shall explode" interests me. In American English, shall has a particularly strong sense of certainty attached to it, and is a favoured Dylan word. I was once told straightfaced by an American editor that "shall" does not exist in American English. I advised her to read the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution while I played I Shall Be Released, We Shall Overcome and This Wheel's On Fire. I can't offer any sensible interpretation either. I always saw it as a companion piece to We Can Talk, full of memorable lines which create an idea, but which don't bear analysis. I've often been guilty of finding the biblical and Shakesperean links myself, but I don't get the connection with "being bound upon wheels of fire". I see a fiery vision, but the headlong rush of urgency brings the motorcycle to mind first, and more especially sudden success - hot, untouchable, unstoppable, hurtling forward, possibly doomed (but possibly exploding into success):
Please notify my next of kin, this wheel shall explode
Notify my next of kin is a phrase from a last will and testament, or a police report - the next of kin have been notified . Shall shows inevitability. Open up the original Music From Big Pink cover, and that same legal phrase "Next of kin" is the label overprinted on the family photo.
Rick Danko
Those first royalty checks we got almost killed some of us. 'This Wheel's On Fire' was never really a hit, but it had been recorded by a few people, and all of a sudden I got a couple of hundred thousand dollars out of left field. This was half the writer's royalty from one song. We were all shocked at these windfalls we never dreamed existed. Dealin' with this wasn't in the fucking manual, man! If you've never made a million dollars overnight, like we did. You have no concept of what it can do. We saw it ruin people, kill them! Suddenly we had all the money we needed and people were falling over themselves to make us happy, which meant giving us all the dope we could stand. People wanted to turn us on for free, do favors, and some of us were happy to be taken care of like that. There wasn't anything real dramatic about it, because it was a fact of life, and probably still is. I'm here to tell you that it's a crying shame to see what success can do to some people. I'm sure it wasn't the best thing that could have happened to The Band.
Poignant, no?
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