The Weight

There is a truism that art makes the strange familiar and makes the familiar strange. The Band’s biggest hit is intimately familiar to every classic rock listener, but it is quite a strange song. The lyrics seem like they are talking about ordinary people in ordinary situations, but they don’t add up to any specific identifiable reality. The devil makes an appearance. There are two different characters named Annie and Fanny. The narrator is on the run, but we don’t know from what. There are three different singers, all of whom sound like backwoodsy Muppets. In photos, the musicians look like Civil War re-enactors, or Bushwick hipsters, or rednecks, or academics, or all of the above. In the days before the internet, everything about them was mysterious, from the band name on down.

“The Weight” appeared on an album called Music From Big Pink because it came out of jam sessions that the Band held with Bob Dylan in the basement of Big Pink, a house deep in the forest outside Woodstock, New York. The house is, you guessed it, big and pink. You can rent it! We took my father-in-law to see it, and even though it’s way out in the boonies, we were not the only fans making a pilgrimage there that day. 

My first band in college did a cover of “The Weight”, as has seemingly every other band that has ever existed. Aside from The Band themselves, nobody has done it better than the Staple Singers.

The version that the Staples performed with The Band for The Last Waltz is one of the most magnificent performances ever captured on film. As this guy says in his reaction video, “Ay, if this don’t move your soul, you might be soulless.”

Aretha Franklin’s recording is great too, and includes a scorching slide guitar intro by Duane Allman.

The Chambers Brothers’ version is beautifully funky and smooth.

I also like this version by High Mountain Hoedown, though I have no idea who they are, there is no information about them online.

“The Weight” originates in the era when The Band were working as Bob Dylan’s touring band under the name The Hawks. Here they are in action in 1966.

While Dylan was recovering from his 1967 motorcycle accident, he and the Hawks held extensive jam sessions around Woodstock, at his house and in the basement of Big Pink. They spent months rehearsing and recording folk, country and early rock songs. In A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs, Andrew Hickey tells the story.

[Dylan] and [Robbie] Robertson had had something between friendly discussion and outright arguments about Dylan’s style of songwriting while on tour the year before. Robertson — who, at this time, remember, had a body of songs that mostly consisted of things like “Uh Uh Uh” — thought that Dylan’s songs were too long, and the lyrics were approaching word salad. Why, he wanted to know, did Dylan not write songs that expressed things simply, in words that anyone could understand, rather than this oblique, arty stuff?

Dylan saw the validity of this critique. He started introducing the Band to his older folk repertoire, which was new to them. As Robertson explained:

None of the guys in The Band were about folk music. We were not from that side of the tracks. Folk music was from coffee houses, where people sipped cappuccinos. Where we played as The Hawks, nobody was sipping cappuccino, I’ll tell ya. We were playing hardcore bars.

As Dylan taught folk songs to the Hawks, they adapted them to their playing style. Andrew Hickey again:

While the Hawks were all Canadian, they’d been trained by Ronnie Hawkins and Levon Helm in how to play rock and roll, and that meant that they had picked up the way music was played in the Deep South. Not only that, but they’d played sessions in Nashville with [Roger] Hawkins, and Robertson had played with A-team musicians on the Blonde on Blonde sessions.

The result was that they picked up an instrumental style that sounded like the music that came from what the writer Charles L Hughes refers to as the country-soul triangle of Muscle Shoals, Memphis, and Nashville — a style that comes, ultimately, from white country musicians backing Black soul musicians, and which we’ve seen coming up time and again from Arthur Alexander to Aretha Franklin to Otis Redding. The Hawks’ music doesn’t sound anything like the more uptempo music from those musicians, all slashed guitar chords and stabbing horns, but it sounds very, *very* much like the ballads coming out of Memphis and Muscle Shoals, which were dominated by gospel piano, organ pads, and delicate picked guitar, records like Percy Sledge’s “When a Man Loves a Woman” or James Carr’s “Dark End of the Street”… When sung by white singers, rather than Black ones, and coupled with the folk-style lyrics that Dylan was introducing to the Hawks, that style became known as Americana.

Dylan and the Hawks also wrote some Americana-flavored originals, which formed the eventual basis for the material on Music From Big Pink.

“The Weight” seems simple, but things get weird in the chorus! It begins with Robbie Robertson’s wistful guitar intro. Here’s a good tutorial. This leads into the main groove, a two bar loop that you could learn in ten seconds.

||: A  C#m | D  A :||

This is a standard rock and pop chord progression that my NYU colleagues call the Puff schema because it appears in the first line of “Puff the Magic Dragon.” While the chords are simple, there’s some intrigue in the move from A to C#m. Both of these chords share the notes C-sharp and E, but the A chord contains A, while the C#m chord contains G-sharp. This is a strange bit of voice leading, because G-sharp is the leading tone in the key of A, a tense and dissonant note that would normally make you expect a resolution back to the tonic. However, C#m functions more like a tonic chord than a dominant; you could even think of it as a rootless voicing of Amaj7. So the chord is both settled and unsettled, at rest and pulling away.

Levon Helm’s lead vocal is all within the A major pentatonic scale, and it involves some mild melodic-harmonic divorce. For one thing, Levon never sings the note D, even over the D chord. Also, on the line “Hey mister can you tell me”, he accents F-sharp over the A and C#m chords, and that is not a chord tone from either chord.

The chorus begins with the same chord sequence as the verse, but with a faster harmonic rhythm.

| A  C#m  D | A  C#m  D | A  C#m  D |
| Dadd9 | (3/4) Dadd9 |
| A  A/G#  A/F#  A/E | Dadd9 |

There is even stronger melodic-harmonic divorce in this section, because Levon keeps singing C-sharp over the D chords, like on the word “free” in the line “Take a load for free”.

After the second time they sing “Take a load off, Annie”, the most magical part of the song occurs: the band hits a D(add9) chord, that is, a D chord with E on top, and they let it ring. On the second beat of the measure, Levon Helm sings “annnnd” on the note A, the fifth of the D chord. One beat later, Rick Danko joins with “annnnd” on D, the root. Finally, on the last beat of the measure, Richard Manuel comes in with “annnnd” on E. That is not the expected note! You expect him to sing F-sharp to fill out the D major triad. Instead, it’s a D(add9) chord, and there is significant tension between Rick’s D and Richard’s E.

Next, there’s a bar of 3/4 time in which Levon sings “put the load right on me”, and Rick and Richard repeat the line a beat later. They are still singing on D and E respectively. On the word “me”, Levon jumps from A up to C-sharp, which rubs extraordinarily hard against the D and E. When people cover the song, they don’t do that! It’s a dissonant cluster you’d expect to hear in a Thelonious Monk song, not country-rock made by hippies.

Finally, there’s a bar of A with a bassline that walks down the A major scale, and a concluding bar of D(add9) with Richard Manuel’s wordless falsetto vocalizing on top. The song ends on that chord, too, a highly inconclusive conclusion.

So what are the lyrics about? Mavis Staples recalls asking the guys in The Band that question, and their response was, “We don’t know.” Robbie Robertson got the opening line from the sticker on the inside of his guitar, a Martin made in Nazareth, Pennsylvania. The name reminded him of Nazarín, a Luis Buñuel film, and he said that he wanted to convey that film’s satirical atmosphere. Levon Helm explained that some characters in the song were people that he and the Hawks knew in Arkansas, including Young Anna Lee and Crazy Chester. Others were names that they chose for old-timey vibe: Carmen, Miss Moses, Fanny.

A few nights ago, the family and I went to see Mavis Staples, who is 86 years young and is still a dynamite stage presence. Her cracked and craggy voice only enhances her sound, and her repertoire is surprisingly fresh and current. The show was all about multiracial Americana. Mavis’ opening act was Allison Russell, a Black singer-songwriter who plays banjo and clarinet. Her all-Black band used only acoustic instruments and did an appealing fusion of country, gospel and soul. Mavis herself had a mostly white band consisting of just guitar, bass, drums and two backup singers. Her guitarist is the excellent Rick Holmstrom, who plays country-flavored fingerstyle on a Fender Telecaster, using no effects at all except for amp tremolo. There was a surprise appearance by Norah Jones, the queen of multiracial Americana herself. She and Mavis sang “You Are Not Alone”, written for Mavis by Jeff Tweedy.

Mavis didn’t do “The Weight” at the show, but she still performs it regularly. Here’s a recording she did with Levon Helm in 2011, shortly before his death.

What genre is this song? It’s tighter and more polished than hippie folk-rock, but it’s looser than current country. It’s less groovy than funk, but it’s funkier than rock. It’s not as rural as country, but it’s not as urban as pop. Americana seems like an outgrowth of the 1960s folkies, but it points back to an earlier time, before jazz, blues, country and R&B diverged in the first place. If you listen to music from the rural South in the early 20th century, it’s impossible to sort any of it into genres. Here’s a blues song by Lottie Kimbrough and Winston Holmes that features yodeling. Here’s a Jimmie Rodgers song with trumpet by Louis Armstrong. Here’s a Bob Wills rag with solos on lap steel and alto sax. Greil Marcus coined the term “old weird America” in his book Invisible Republic about the Basement Tapes, and I know some people resist that term, but I don’t know of a better one.

I don’t believe that genres are meaningful musicological descriptors. Genres really describe audiences. The Band makes rock because they have a rock audience. Mavis Staples makes Americana because she has an Americana audience. Bob Dylan was a folkie because he had a folk audience, and they got very angry when he revealed himself to be more of a rock fan than a folkie at heart. Is any of this “authentic”? Mavis Staples can’t be anything but authentic; she bestows authenticity on everything she touches. Levon Helm acquired a certain gravitas when he was older, but what about when he and the other beardos in The Band were young? Does it even matter? If “The Weight” isn’t about anything in particular, then it can be about whatever we want. It would be simpler if it had a specific meaning and origin, but it’s from The Band’s imagination of America, and ultimately, imagination is where it lives on.