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| Manuel, Hudson, Helm, Robertson, Danko |
Today’s birthday boy is Robbie Robertson (71), guitarist and
chief songwriter for The Band. He’s done lots of other things since The Band first disbanded in 1976, but that’s what he’s on here for. And today’s
song is one of the great staples of late Sixties music, a progenitor of much “roots
rock,” a mainstay wherever folk-based tunes are prized. Folk tinged with
gospel, bluegrass, rockabilly. The Band had their fingers in every pie—organist
Garth Hudson could even get classical—and Robertson’s songwriting took wing
from the legendary time spent with Bob Dylan hanging out in a couple houses in
the vicinity of Woodstock, NY. The songs Dylan cooked up then, with his buddies
from The Band, have gone on to be prized as a window into what rock critic
Greil Marcus calls “Old Weird America,” but even if you aren’t so concerned
with the predecessors of what Dylan and The Band came up with, you should see
how essential that music is for much of what goes by the name of “indie.”
This song is The Band at their best, on their landmark first LP,
Music from Big Pink—the interplay of the
musicians and the way their voices work together, especially in the singing and
drumming of Levon Helm and Richard Manuel’s harmonizing and piano playing, sets
the standard for what musical camaraderie should sound like.
In writing “The Weight,” Robertson was truly inspired. It’s
a strange little tale, an odd slice of Americana that gets just right the
fortuitous, the random, the seemingly fated, the cryptic, the occasional, and
the colorful. A guy hits town—a town called Nazareth—and has a series of
encounters. When he’s had enough, he tells us he’s leaving. You might think of
Dylan’s own “Just Like Tom Thumb Blues” where a guy, “lost in the rain in
Juarez,” gets increasingly strung out, then says, in closing, “I’m going back
to New York City.” Here, the “going back” is to Miss Fanny, and the big reveal
is that she “sent me here with her regards for everyone” in the first place.
And that parting line, at the end of the last verse, gives new weight (heh) and
meaning to the chorus: “Take a load off, Fanny / Take a load for free / Take a
load off Fanny / And you put the load right on me.”
Now, how you write and say that changes—and the chorus gets
sung different ways—but I take it as, initially, saying to Fanny: take a load
off (relax), take it easy; then switches to say, “Take a load off, Fanny, and
you put the load right on me”—which says that he’s carrying her load for her.
When we learn that she sent him with her regards, that purpose comes to seem
the “load.” The Weight, then, is the
task, the obligation, the burden of having to go and visit in her stead. But
the line at the end also acts as a “hail and farewell”—I’m going, but y’all got
my regards.
If that’s not enough—the arrival and the departure in the
same song—to fix your attention, mull it over as an aspect of the tune itself
which is bright and optimistic. It feels like it wouldn’t ever speak ill of
anyone, and doesn’t quite. But as verse after verse piles up—five in all—we feel
how the strain increases so that the “load” of Fanny becomes, in part,
retaining some of that warmth and regard without turning bitter. And there’s a
nice stress—particularly Rick Danko’s backing vocal—on “Miss Fanny, you know
she’s the only one” who sent regards
to this god-forsaken town. It’s the situation of the traveler who, in a new
place, will talk dirt about the people he encountered in the last place. That’s
not to say that this place is going to be visited with fire and brimstone, or
that its inhabitants should don sackcloth and ashes, but it is in keeping with
the question in the Gospel of John: “Can anything good come from (or out of) Nazareth?”
The answer to that question in the Bible is: yes. Jesus “comes
from” or “comes out” of Nazareth. He may have been born there; in any case he
seems to have been raised there, where, it seems his mother Mary was also
raised. Indeed, the names of one of the gospellers—Luke—as well as Moses (Miss
Moses) appear in “The Weight,” almost as cameos for the rich tradition behind
Nazareth and Jesus. The question becomes then: are the people depicted in
Nazareth Christian in their behavior? Nazareth is the place darkly thought of in
the phrase, applied to Jesus: “A prophet is not without honor except in his own
home”—indicating that JC’s hometown refused to believe he was all that. With
that in mind we can see why our traveler’s reception in Nazareth leaves so
much to be desired.
First, he arrives, “feeling about half past dead” (a great
phrase) and only wants to find a bed (or “a place to lay my head”—which flirts
with a tomb); he addresses some passer-by with his request and gets a simple “'No,'
was all he said.” The guy can’t offer a place nor direct him to a place. It’s a
flat rebuff. Not exactly neighborly.
Next, he sees someone he recognizes—Carmen—and invites her
to go “down town” (a phrase that here seems to mean, let’s “go to town” and
have some fun, but which can also mean, “let’s go to the police station,” in
which case (possibly either case) Carmen can be taken to be a prostitute,
particularly as she’s accompanied by “the devil.” Carmen demurs saying she’s
got to go, “but my friend can stick around.” A way of saying that the only
invitation our traveler meets with is temptation, or to hang out with the
devil. Niiiiiice. (“Carmen” as in the novel and the opera derived from it
refers to a Gypsy or Romani woman of ill-repute and perhaps occult
associations.)
The next verse gives us “Go down, Miss Moses, there ain’t
nothin’ you can say”—an allusion to “Go Down, Moses,” a spiritual that links
the Exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt with the eventual freeing of blacks from
slavery in the U.S.—and “It’s just old Luke, and Luke’s waiting on the
Judgement Day.” The lines can be inferred to suggest that our hero is feeling
like he’s needing an Exodus from this cursed place and, like Luke, he wouldn’t
be averse to seeing God wreak some vengeance there. But—before we go about
ending the world and this whole cursed farce—“what about young Anna Lee?” Don’t
go yet, Luke implores, asking a favor, “stay and keep Anna Lee company.” At
this point we might say that we’ve found the saving grace of Nazareth, Anna
Lee. Leastways, it seems that one thing that might be worth sticking around for—and
someone who shouldn’t meet the damnation assumed in the Judgment—is Anna Lee.
(Robertson has said he picked up some of the details of the song on a visit to
Levon Helm’s hometown in Arkansas, and claims some of the characters—like Anna
Lee—are from Helm’s past.)
Then we get “Crazy Chester” in the verse memorably sung,
with his best shaky tremble, by Rick Danko. Chester follows the speaker and “caught
me in the fog.” He says he can offer him a solution (“fix your rack”) in
exchange for taking care of “Jack, my dog.” Somewhat incongruously, it seems,
the speaker says “Wait a minute, Chester, you know I’m a peaceful man.” Chester
says “That’s OK, boy, will you feed him when you can?” This verse is perhaps
the most cryptic as there is no clear reason for the speaker to respond with the “peaceful
man” line, generally used when someone has been insulted or when an implication
that one will take violent offense is present. Taking the dog could be a figure
for something unpleasant—animal behavior, violence, greed, lust—so that taking on the
burden of the dog may be a further figure for temptation. Indeed, it’s not too
hard to see that lust is the main temptation that has beset the speaker in
Nazareth—with Carmen and the devil, with Anna Lee (perhaps keeping her “company”
isn’t as wholesome as it may have seemed), and now with the dog that must be
fed. It’s even possible to see this taking of the dog as having a homosexual
implication, a come on that a stranger to town might meet with, in certain
quarters.
So now a picture begins to emerge of Nazareth as rather “godless”—a
veritable Sodom and Gomorrah perhaps. But what about the speaker—is he
blameless? To me, the issue has always been one of “let he who is without sin
cast the first stone.” Sure, you can condemn Nazareth—you out-of-towner, you—but
it’s all in your own eye. The devil, the Judgment Day, the dog—in each case a
favor is asked or implied and refused (only in the Anna Lee verse is no definite
answer given), all which might suggest that our speaker is refusing favors
because of the initial rebuff he met with. But what if that rebuff was due to
the fact that our hero is a bit unwholesome himself?
Time to get back to Miss Fanny—who, for some reason, if only
because of the singalong uplift of that great chorus, we assume to be a decent
person—letting us know that she asked him to go there with her regards. Even
that might be a way of saying that this was their last chance to show their
true natures, the folks of Nazareth. But it could also be that Miss Fanny
expected him to fit in somewhere. Has he passed or failed “the Nazareth test”?
It all comes down, in the end, to the burden of “the weight.”
Which we might say, in Sartrean fashion, is other people. You come to town, you
join up with some group, you find yourself among a population somewhere on
this earth: do you make nice or do you rebuff; do you accept whatever is
offered; do you do favors; ask favor; share; trade; exchange? Do you trust? Do
you help? Do you blame? Do you leave or stay?
That, my friends, is the weight.
