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.’