The Band
Robbie Robertson discovered the opening word of "The Weight" by looking into the sound hole of his 1951 Martin guitar, which bore the name of its Pennsylvania factory town. "Nazareth" became the first word of the song. The concept came from film scripts by Ingmar Bergman and Luis Buñuel that Robertson had found at a New York bookshop: stories about people doing good things and being tormented for it. The song peaked at number 63 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1968. Eric Clapton heard it and quit Cream, calling it "the musical equivalent of a breath of fresh air." Crazy Chester, the character in the second verse, was based on a real man Robertson had seen in Fayetteville, Arkansas at age sixteen.
In our deep dive into The Weight, we trace the song from a guitar's sound hole to the Bergman and Buñuel scripts that gave it its moral weight, and what it reveals about a band doing something quietly different from everything else on the radio.
