the burden of lending a hand

It’s the summer of 1968. A press release goes out from the office of Albert B. Grossman Management at 75 East 55th Street in New York. Attached is a biography of a group with no name. Across the top, in lowercase, is the heading “the band.” Below it are five names: Robbie Robertson, lead guitar; Richard Manuel, piano; Levon Helm, drums; Rick Danko, bass; Garth Hudson, organ. Each is also listed on vocals.

“The band’s lack of a name may be puzzling to some,” it reads. The biography says that they have been together “for almost nine years,” came up behind “the Arkansas-born Canadian rock hero, Rompin’ Ronnie Hawkins,” and were “once known as The Hawks and then touted as the group who’s backed up Bob Dylan.”

It sets the scene in a basement. Near Woodstock, “far from the urban centers where musical movements are assumed to be made,” sits a house called Big Pink. There, it says, a five-piece band has made music “like a fresh breeze blowing through the blasting decibels, shattering feedback and frenetic rhythms that have characterized pop fare since the psychedelic bandwagon took off.”

It leaves out how they got there. It leaves out the bars in Hamilton and Toronto, where four Canadians and a drummer from Arkansas learned their craft behind Hawkins. It leaves out the road. It leaves out the phone call to a club in Somers Point, New Jersey, in the summer of 1965, and the nights that followed, when crowds were split over Dylan going electric.

Now they have an album of their own, and they still won’t take a name. In the same biography, Robertson explains why. “Our friends and neighbors just call us the band and that’s the way we think of ourselves,” he says. “And then, we just don’t think a name means anything.”

Capitol Records, their label, prints no band name on the single. Billboard calls them an “unnamed quintet.” Rolling Stone puts two words on its cover: THE BAND.

Closing side one of their debut album is a song Robertson wrote as a backup. The song is “The Weight.”

As a single, it stalls at No. 63 on the Billboard Hot 100, beaten by a cover from Los Angeles pop singer Jackie DeShannon. It won’t matter. Within six months, Aretha Franklin, the Queen of Soul, will take it to No. 3 on the R&B chart. Within a year, the group that would not take a name will play it for half a million people at the Woodstock festival.

It’s a song about one question: how much can you carry before you cannot carry anymore?

For Robbie Robertson, the load began in 1960, at 16, when he joined a rockabilly singer from Arkansas.

The code of the road

Robertson grew up in Toronto, but his first music came from somewhere else. His mother, Dolly, was born and raised at Six Nations of the Grand River, near Brantford, Ontario. On visits there, Robertson said in the 2019 documentary Once Were Brothers, “every day when the sun started to go down, the instruments would come out. And I could sit in the middle of this and hear the fingers on the strings and the hands rubbing on the skins of the drum.” His relatives there taught him a couple of chords on the guitar. “This is where I belong,” he remembered thinking. “This is calling me.”

Back in Toronto, he was raised on country music and the big bands. “I’ve been playing guitar for so long, I can’t remember when I started,” he said, “but I guess I got into rock just like everybody else.” He left high school to play around the city, and by 15 he had his own group.

He wanted to get noticed by Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks. “They were the best thing that’d come around, them and Carl Perkins,” he said, “and my ambition was to impress them somehow.” His way in was songwriting. Before he joined, he wrote two songs that Hawkins recorded, “Hey Boba Lu” and “Someone Like You.”

Hawkins was born in 1935 in Huntsville, Arkansas, and grew up in Fayetteville. Through high school and as a physical education major at the University of Arkansas, he formed his first bands, playing Fayetteville clubs such as the Tee Table, the Bubble Club, and the Shamrock Club.

After a stint in the army, Hawkins moved to Helena and put together a touring band with a young drummer from nearby Marvell, Levon Helm. In 1958, at the suggestion of Conway Twitty, the group went north to Canada. They found steadier work and a better reception than back home and became a draw in Hamilton and Toronto. Canada became their base, but they kept working the circuit in the American South.

Over the next few years, Hawkins replaced the rest of his Arkansas players with young Canadians. Of the four Canadians who would become The Band, Robertson came first, at 16 by his own account, and joining meant going south. “When I was 16 years old and I went to West Helena, Arkansas, it nearly blew the top of my head off,” he said. “Everything was different. The way people walked, all the road signs, the advertisements. I just got off the bus in this place, the twilight zone, and it hit me so hard that I just never shook it off. I could afford to be amazed by it, but nobody there was ever amazed by it because they grew up in it and didn’t think twice about it.”

Rick Danko, recruited as a rhythm guitarist, was told to learn bass. Richard Manuel, a pianist, came from a Stratford group called the Revols. Garth Hudson, a classically trained organist from London, Ontario, was the last to join. “He could play rings around all of us put together,” Robertson said. Hudson’s job was “to play organ and horn… and to teach us music.” The five performed as Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks until 1964, when they left Hawkins to go out on their own.

Robertson wanted more than the next gig. “I want to be something original. I don’t want to be a bar band,” he said. “I’m having dreams about finding a sanctuary, finding a place that we can go and we can hone these skills, and we’re just not on the road driving to the next gig.”

As Levon and the Hawks, they worked the bar circuit and backed blues singer John Hammond Jr. “We’ve played everywhere from Molasses, Texas, to Timmins, Canada, which is a mining town about 100 miles from the tree line,” Robertson said.

Through Hammond, Robertson met Bob Dylan. To Robertson, Dylan was a folk singer with a guitar and a harmonica, and folk belonged to another world. “Folk music, from what we knew, was happening over by a university somewhere, and people were sipping cappuccinos listening to folk music,” he said. “Where we’re playing on the other side of the tracks, there ain’t nobody sipping cappuccinos over there.” Hammond invited Dylan to one of his own sessions with the group. “Dylan flipped out,” Hammond said. “I mean, he thought these guys were phenomenal.”

Robertson had no idea what Dylan wanted. “What we didn’t know is that Bob’s already doing a rock and roll thing,” he said. “He wanted to hire an amazing band that he could take on tour with him.”

In the summer of 1965, they were playing a club in Somers Point, New Jersey, when the phone rang. “I didn’t know a whole lot about Bob,” Helm said in the film. “We were more into R&B and blues music.” In 1968, he put it more bluntly. “We had never heard of Bob Dylan,” he told Rolling Stone. “But he had heard of us. He said, ‘You wanna play Hollywood Bowl?’ So we asked him who else was gonna be on the show. ‘Just us,’ he said.”

Dylan first used Robertson and Helm for his shows at Forest Hills and the Hollywood Bowl. In September 1965, he came to Toronto and rehearsed with the full group after their set at Friar’s Tavern. They toured with him that fall, though Helm left in late November, worn down by audiences booing Dylan’s electric sound. He missed the 1966 world tour, where Dylan and the group faced nightly heckling from folk purists who saw the change as a betrayal. “We hook up with him and have no idea that he’s the only one that thinks this is a good idea,” Robertson said. “The rest of the world hates this idea. We play with him and they boo us every night.”

After Dylan’s motorcycle accident in July 1966, the group followed him to the Woodstock area. In early 1967, Danko, Manuel, and Hudson moved into a pink house in West Saugerties that rented for $125 a month. They called it Big Pink. It was the sanctuary Robertson had dreamed of. Between roughly June and October 1967, they recorded with Dylan in its basement, the sessions that became The Basement Tapes. Helm returned in October, near the end.

The band from Big Pink

Around Woodstock, they were simply the musicians up at Big Pink. When locals asked whether “the band” was in town, everyone knew who they meant. “That’s how the town actually gave us our name,” Helm wrote. Robertson heard it the same way. “We kept hearing the band, the band, the band,” he said. “And it felt unpretentious, unjivey, uncute, just strictly the band.”

Even the paperwork could not keep up. In February 1968, Capitol’s tape files for the group’s first sessions listed the artist as the Crackers, a name the group had considered for a while. So did the tape boxes from Gold Star Recording Studios in Hollywood, where they recorded part of the album. By June, the Los Angeles Times was introducing them as Dylan’s backing group, “currently known as the Band.” By July, Ralph Gleason, the San Francisco Chronicle‘s music critic and a co-founder of Rolling Stone, had dropped the “currently.” “‘The Band’ is the group that played with Bob Dylan for over a year,” he wrote.

In August, Capitol made it official. The artists were the five men, “not the Band, nor the Crackers, nor the Hawks,” the music trade magazine Record World reported. Elsewhere in the same issue, Record World called them the Band anyway, and spelled their single “The Wait.” The trades could not even agree on the spelling. Billboard printed Robertson’s legal first name, Jaime. A week later, Capitol’s own trade ad printed it as Jamie.

The decision came from the group, not the label. The same biography that opened with “the band’s lack of a name” carried one more line from Robertson. “It’s gotten out of hand, the name thing,” he said. “We don’t want to get into a fixed bag like that.” On August 24, Rolling Stone ran his explanation as a headline: “Friends and Neighbors Just Call Us the Band.”

The British sleeve put it more simply. The group had decided names were overdone, the liner notes said, and settling on the names their parents had picked for them “seemed a reasonable way out.” The same notes borrowed Robertson’s road map, with an upgrade. The group had played “everywhere from Molasses, Texas to Stockholm, Sydney to London.” Timmins was gone. In its place were three stops from the 1966 tour with Dylan.

The question settled itself. By May 1969, the biography in the program for their Fillmore East shows had dropped the explanation. “They call themselves The Band,” it said. Reviewing those shows, The New York Times called them simply “The Band, which was first known as Bob Dylan’s back-up group.”

Woodstock knew what to call them before Billboard did.

The road to Nazareth

On July 1, 1968, Capitol released Music from Big Pink. It held 11 songs. Dylan wrote one, “I Shall Be Released,” and co-wrote two more, “Tears of Rage” with Manuel and “This Wheel’s on Fire” with Danko. Manuel wrote “In a Station,” “We Can Talk,” and “Lonesome Suzie.” The group added an old country ballad, “Long Black Veil.” Robertson wrote four: “To Kingdom Come,” “Caledonia Mission,” “Chest Fever,” and “The Weight.” Dylan painted the album cover.

“The Weight” closed side one. It started with a guitar. “When I wrote ‘The Weight,’ I had my guitar, it’s a 1951 Martin guitar, and I have it on my knee, and I’m looking at it, and I’m trying to think of what to write about, and I look in the sound hole on it, and it says Nazareth,” Robertson said. “I thought, all right, and I’d use this.” Nazareth, Pennsylvania, is home to C. F. Martin & Company. Robertson put the town in the song’s first line.

The idea came from New York. “Prior to moving to Woodstock, I lived at the Chelsea Hotel in New York. Poet Gregory Corso, who was staying there, urged me to check out the Gotham Book Mart on West 47th St.,” Robertson said.

“The bookshop was a dusty, funky place owned by Fanny Steloff that sold used and new books. After looking around, I found that the store also stocked movie scripts. I loved film, and had long wondered how plot elements in a film fit together. These scripts were like blueprints. The script that punched me between the eyes was Ingmar Bergman’s screenplay for his 1957 movie The Seventh Seal. Luis Buñuel’s scripts for Nazarín and Viridiana, which examine the impossibility of sainthood, also captivated me.”

Buñuel, the Spanish filmmaker, gave him the theme. In Nazarín, a priest tries to live exactly as Christ taught, and every good deed brings him more trouble. In Viridiana, a young nun opens her uncle’s estate to beggars, and her charity ends in ruin. “In these scripts and in these movies, there’s a theme in there that it almost implies the impossibility of sainthood. Of trying to do good. You think there’s not that many saints, you know, there must be something difficult about that,” Robertson said. “And the theme in his [Buñuel’s] films, here these people doing good things and really being tormented for trying to do a good thing.”

The characters came from somewhere else. “When I was 16 years old, I went from Canada down to the Mississippi Delta to join Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks,” he said. “I’m going to the Holy Land. And it made such an impression on me, because I’m 16 years old, that all of the names of places and characters, and just the rhythm of the whole landscape and of the Mississippi River, all of it washes over me, and all of these things get stored somewhere back in my dream compartment. Now it’s time for me in 1967 to really write songs, and so I unlock this door up into my attic, and it comes out, and it becomes a song like ‘The Weight.'”

“As for the words, I just knew I wanted characters to unload their burdens on the song’s main character in each verse. The guy in my song starts by asking the first person he sees in Nazareth about a place to stay the night, a biblical concept,” Robertson said.

“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,'” Robertson said.

A backup song

“The Weight” was there from the start. Before The Band had a record deal, Albert Grossman, who managed both Dylan and the group, paid for a session at A&R Studios on Seventh Avenue in New York. The studio had four tracks, and the group played live onto two of them. “The Weight” was on the first reel. Grossman played it for Dylan’s friend Bobby Neuwirth, then sold the tapes to Capitol.

Capitol logged a four-track copy of that early reel on February 3, 1968. “Weight” was master 59204. That winter, Capitol sent the group to Los Angeles to finish the album with producer John Simon. By April 1968, they were back at A&R mixing it.

“When I wrote ‘The Weight,’ it was a backup song in case something else didn’t work on the record,” Robertson told interviewer Matt Schichter in 2011. Only when they recorded it, he said, did they recognize what they had. Helm remembered it the same way. They recorded it perhaps four times, he wrote, and were not sure it would make the album.

Robertson also had a singer in mind. Helm had just come back after nearly two years away from music. “I wanted to write a song that Levon could sing better than anyone in the world,” Robertson told The Wall Street Journal in 2016.

On the record, the song belongs to three voices. Helm sang most of the verses, Danko took the fourth, and Manuel joined them on the chorus. The album did not say who was singing. Reviewing it for Sing Out!, the magazine’s editor, Happy Traum, heard Helm’s Arkansas voice leading “The Weight,” then noticed the lead jumping to another singer without warning. The switch, he wrote, “helps maintain the singer’s anonymity.”

A band with no name had a song with no fixed voice.

Beaten to the draw

A single was supposed to come with the album. In June, Record World called Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released” probably “the most outstanding” song, and reported that it would make up a single that “allegedly will be issued simultaneously with the album.” That did not happen. The album arrived alone. The critics noticed anyway. On July 2, 1968, the Chicago Tribune‘s Robb Baker reviewed Music from Big Pink and singled out “The Weight” among its “particularly good cuts.”

On July 7, Gleason wrote of “Capitol’s delightfully perverse tradition of refusing to inform anyone of what is going on,” and called it the most “un-promotional minded” of the major record companies. He later wrote that Capitol had issued the album “with no fanfare whatsoever, not even a press release until after the LP was out several weeks.” With radio and retailers, saying less was the strategy. Grossman’s biography sold the group as a fresh breeze against the noise of psychedelic pop. Capitol would soon say the same thing in two words.

By the time Capitol issued a single on August 8, with “The Weight” on top and Dylan’s song on the other side, Jackie DeShannon, on Imperial Records, already had her version out, almost identical to the original. The Band, the Chicago Daily News‘ Joe Cappo later wrote, had been “beaten to the draw with their own gun.”

Two days later, Rolling Stone ran Al Kooper’s review of the album. Kooper, who had played organ on Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” picked “The Weight” as its most commercial track, with “a most contagious chorus that addicts you into singing along.” He closed with a challenge to every other band in the business. “This album was recorded in approximately two weeks,” he wrote. “There are people who will work their lives away in vain and not touch it.”

The music industry’s two big weekly trade magazines saw the race coming. On August 17, Billboard noted the song was already “making noise via the Jackie DeShannon version,” and Cash Box warned of a “tricky cover situation” but backed The Band, betting the album’s underground following could carry the original to the front.

On August 24, both labels made their move in the same issue of Billboard. Capitol bought a full-page ad headlined “The Un-Hype!” Below it sat five names. No band name. No mention of Dylan.

Imperial Records put cash on the table. John Antoon, its national promotion manager, borrowed his tactics from a previous employer, Allstate Insurance. He launched a bounty program for his 20 field promotion men, aimed at singles that “need an effort to break them.” Get the single onto a station and you earned $50. Get it into that station’s Top 10 and you earned $100. Get it into the Top 10 of “the major national” charts and you collected $200, plus a gold ring, a silver cup, and membership in the new Imperial 100 Club. The first record in the program was DeShannon’s “The Weight.”

That week, her version entered the Hot 100 at No. 100, the last spot on the chart. Four days later, Cash Box finished its weekly survey of the country’s key radio stations. Ninety per cent of them had added DeShannon’s record. Twenty-eight per cent had added the original. When The Band’s single entered the Hot 100 at No. 84 on August 31, DeShannon had already jumped to No. 68. Capitol’s ad had listed five names. Billboard‘s chart called them The Band.

Just as the record reached the chart, the group lost its chance to sell it in person. Bill Graham, who ran the Fillmore halls in San Francisco and New York, had been planning concerts with Dylan and the group, including free shows in major cities. On September 2, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that the plans would have to wait. Rick Danko had been hurt in a car accident.

Both versions peaked on the Billboard chart dated September 28: DeShannon at No. 55, The Band at No. 63. The bounty beat the un-hype. Neither came close to the Top 10. Nobody collected the $200. By November, Cash Box filed the whole affair under a familiar heading: the “Band/DeShannon hit split.”

The same fight had already broken out in Britain, and there Capitol stopped holding back. In the first week of September 1968, three record labels advertised three versions of “The Weight” in the same issue of the New Musical Express. Island Records bought the front cover for the British band Spooky Tooth, billing its version as the label’s “choice for No. 1.” Liberty, DeShannon’s British label, admitted “there are others,” then called hers “the AMERICAN HIT!” Capitol answered with an ad calling The Band’s single “the original hit version” and telling readers to “accept no substitute.” Under the five names, the ad printed what Woodstock already knew: “better known as THE BAND.”

There, the original won. A month after Capitol’s ad, Record Mirror said the same thing in a headline: “…they ARE the band.” The group was “not keen on being called The Band,” the paper wrote. “But we ARE calling them The Band and we’re buying enough of their records to give them victory in the three-cornered fight over ‘The Weight.'” By late October, the single had climbed to No. 21 on the British chart.

Billboard‘s soul writer Ed Ochs saw a different future for the record. In his October 12, 1968, “Soul Sauce” column, he called The Band “heir to Cream” and tipped “The Weight” to cross over to the R&B chart. In the same column, he was keeping tabs on Aretha Franklin.

Kooper did more than praise the song. He and guitarist Mike Bloomfield, another veteran of the “Like a Rolling Stone” sessions, recorded an instrumental version live at the Fillmore West in San Francisco and asked Columbia to release it as a single. In late October, the label told the story in a full-page trade ad. Columbia said it had laughed at the idea until the pair explained that they considered The Band’s original “one of the most fantastic recordings of the year” and then played the tape. Capitol had sold the original with an un-hype. Columbia closed with “We have a hit!”

Before the year was out, Jackie DeShannon, Spooky Tooth, the Staple Singers, and Kooper and Bloomfield had all recorded it.

Four months after his October column, Ochs reported that Aretha Franklin had sold out two shows at Newark’s Symphony Hall. Her new single was “The Weight.” In the same issue, Billboard‘s reviewers predicted her version, produced by Jerry Wexler and Tom Dowd for Atlantic, would reach the top 20, and called it a sales blockbuster “this time around.”

Her version debuted at No. 52, higher than either earlier version had entered. In its second week, it passed both of their peaks. By the end of March, it reached No. 19 on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 3 on its R&B chart.

Billboard had predicted the top 60 for The Band, which missed by three spots. It predicted the top 20 for Franklin. She made it by one.

Ochs was right that “The Weight” would reach the R&B chart. The singer who took it there had been in his column all along.

By the end of 1969, Capitol admitted it had misjudged the record. “Like other record companies, we were just getting involved in the underground music scene when ‘Big Pink’ came out,” Rocco Catena, the label’s merchandising vice-president, told the Los Angeles Times in December 1969. “We made exaggerated claims in the ads, we used words like ‘dig’ and ‘blow your mind.’ We were using the old-fashioned mass merchandising techniques and they didn’t work.” Music from Big Pink, the album the critics had praised, had sold about 125,000 copies.

It won’t matter

In late 1968, Gleason heard where it was going. With the album still on the charts, he wrote that other singers were already recording these songs, “and there will be more.” He went further. “The songs are going to be American classics,” he wrote, “and it will not matter if there is no second album nor if the Band ever appears in person again.”

They played their first concert under their own name on April 17, 1969, at Winterland in San Francisco. Robertson had a fever of 103. Bill Graham wanted to cancel and bring everyone back on Sunday. Albert Grossman “declined,” Gleason wrote. “Wives were having babies. Reservations and plans had been made. It couldn’t be done and it wasn’t.” So a hypnotist in a blue suit stood onstage, waving his hands at Robertson, while the band got through seven songs in 35 minutes. The next morning, the San Francisco Examiner called it too little, too late.

The crowd thought otherwise. Four days later, Gleason reported in the Chronicle that apart from two new numbers, the audience knew everything by heart. “They sang along with Robertson’s classic, ‘The Weight,'” he wrote, “as I have not heard them do for any other group.”

Seven months after it stalled at No. 63, Gleason was already calling it a classic.

The band was still finding its footing on stage. Three weeks after Winterland, Billboard‘s Ed Ochs reviewed The Band at the Fillmore East. He found them nervous and stiff, with Garth Hudson looming behind the organ “in self-imposed exile.” Even his opening line called them Dylan’s former band. But when they reached “The Weight,” their voices came together, he wrote, “like hallelujahs in a hillbilly church.”

By summer, it was the song they ended on. On July 14, 1969, The Band played the Mississippi River Festival in Edwardsville, Illinois, before about 4,500 people. They closed with “The Weight,” which the St. Louis Post-Dispatch called “its most popular number.” When they came back for an encore, Dylan came with them. The crowd rushed the aisles. The paper’s reviewer thought it unfortunate that Dylan had overshadowed “the most interesting rock group in America.”

That July, Easy Rider opened in American theatres. The Band could have scored it. “Somebody from the picture called up our manager and asked if we would like to do the score for a movie about a couple of guys who ride across the country, meet some people, end up with a couple of prostitutes and then get killed,” Robertson told Rolling Stone a year later. “Our manager said we weren’t interested.” The film used “The Weight” anyway, to “cushion a crucial scene,” Helm wrote, and it “gave our whole neofrontiersmen image a big boost.”

There was a catch. When the soundtrack album came out, the song was on it. The Band was not. “Albert wouldn’t even license the song to go on Easy Rider‘s sound-track album,” Helm wrote. Other accounts put the refusal on Capitol, the one label that would not license its track to Dunhill for the album. Whoever made the call, the version on the record was a close copy by Smith, a band on Dunhill’s own roster.

Once again, a cover carried “The Weight” where the original could not.

A month later, they walked onstage at Woodstock. “At the Woodstock festival in August 1969, we performed on Sunday, the last day, at 10 p.m. I’d never seen anything like it. There were a half-million people out there in the dark rootin’ and tootin’. They wanted excitement. Our set was more subdued,” Robertson said. “When we played ‘The Weight’ toward the end, you could feel a beautiful somber mood come over the place. It felt like we caused the audience to feel nostalgic for a period they never actually experienced.”

When the film and the album carried Woodstock to millions the following year, The Band was not on either. The filmmakers had asked them to give back half their fee for a share of the profits, and they refused. Atlantic asked whether they wanted to be on the album. “We didn’t like the setup, and the album seemed pretty shoddy,” Robertson told Rolling Stone. “Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young had to go back into the studio to dub over their voices to make it sound better. So we said no.” Danko had his own reason. He told Melody Maker it was not “the sort of film I’d want to look at myself in 20 years from now.”

Two of the defining moments of 1969 reached millions on record, and neither record carried The Band’s “The Weight.”

It did not slow the song down. By October 1969, the group with no name was on the cover of Cash Box. The magazine looked back on Music from Big Pink as “an underground smash.” Inside, its reviewer caught The Band at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. After a year of covers, the verdict on “The Weight” was in. Levon Helm sang it, the reviewer wrote, “reminding us again that theirs is still the definitive rendering.”

Fourteen months earlier, the same magazine had warned of a “tricky cover situation.” The original had outlasted every cover.

The group kept going. A second album, The Band, was already climbing the charts that fall. More albums followed, along with a festival at Watkins Glen, New York, in the summer of 1973 that drew a crowd larger than Woodstock’s, and a 1974 tour back behind Dylan.

By the middle of the decade, the group had moved to Malibu, and it was pulling apart. “It came to a place,” Robertson said, “and then I said, why don’t we bring this episode to a conclusion, a beautiful musical conclusion.”

On November 25, 1976, The Band played its farewell concert at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco, the building where it had played its first. Martin Scorsese, the director of Taxi Driver, was there with his cameras, filming it for a documentary. Near the end of their own set, just before Dylan walked out, they played “The Weight.” Helm remembered it as “our song,” with “the whole house and the six horn players all singing along.”

The film used a different performance. Scorsese later shot The Band with the gospel family group the Staple Singers on an MGM soundstage in Culver City, Mavis Staples singing verses, and that was the version on screen when The Last Waltz opened in 1978.

Rolling Stone ranked “The Weight” No. 58 on its 2021 list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame named it one of the 500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll. When The Band was inducted into the Hall in 1994, Robertson went back to the beginning. “We should thank Ronnie Hawkins for being so instrumental and us coming together and for teaching us ‘the code of the road,'” he said.

Whose song

The more the song was recorded, the more one question mattered. From the start, only one name went on the credit.

Robertson remembered playing the finished album for Dylan. When “The Weight” came on, Dylan stopped him. “He’s like, wait a minute, who wrote that? And I said, I wrote that. He said, you wrote that? And I could just see the pride in his eyes,” Robertson said.

In the fall of 1968, Sing Out! printed “The Weight” with a note from Dylan: “My good friend Jaime Robbie Robertson composed this fine song.” When Billboard reviewed the single, it listed one writer: Robertson.

A songwriting credit decides who is paid each time a song is sold, played on the radio, or recorded by someone else.

Helm saw it as shared work. “We had two or three tunes, or pieces of tunes,” he wrote in his memoir, “and ‘The Weight’ was one I would work on.” He never stopped saying so. Asked in 2007 whether the rift with Robertson would ever heal, Helm said, “I doubt it. Not as long as he wants to claim everything that the band ever made.”

Danko described the process differently. Robertson wrote the lyrics, he told Melody Maker in 1971. “He’ll bring one over and if we like it we say ‘sure.’ So we smooth it out and get it going and then just pull everybody together and do it.” Robertson, in the same magazine, said he wrote with Helm’s voice in mind, trying to write songs Helm “can get off on the lyrics of.”

Helm disputed the credit. He did not dispute the meaning. “I’ve sung that song enough times,” he wrote of Robertson’s explanation, “to agree with him.”

Critics heard something else. Robertson pointed to film scripts, but the first reviewers heard Dylan. In August 1968, Richard Goldstein of The New York Times found Dylan’s “sense of the elusive epigram” in the song’s Miss Moses line, and wrote that Robertson had grasped Dylan’s approach so completely that their songs read “as equal clauses in the same sentence.”

A year later, Billboard‘s Ed Ochs offered readers a different map. To him, the song was the group’s own pilgrimage, and the destination was Woodstock. “The Weight,” he wrote, celebrated “their crusade to Dylan’s place.” Even the meaning of the song ran through the man they had backed.

What he carried

For decades, the end of The Band was laid at Robertson’s feet. He was the one who stopped touring, the story went, and the one who held the songwriting credits.

In 2011, Canadian broadcaster George Stroumboulopoulos asked Robertson whether that was fair. “This was five men making a decision,” Robertson said. “It wasn’t my decision.” After The Last Waltz, he said, the plan was for everyone to step back, work on their own projects, and come back refocused. “Nobody came back.”

Asked about the rift with Helm, he said, “I don’t carry that around with me. I have nothing but great admiration and love for Garth and Levon, and I miss Rick and Richard terribly. They were my brothers.”

In 1971, Robertson told Melody Maker what he was after when he wrote. “Just timelessness is what I’m trying for most of the time,” he said.

Lyrically: The Weight

“I’ve lost track of how many cover versions of the song there are,” Robertson said. “The funny thing is nobody knows what the song is about. So why other artists would bother to record it has always mystified me.”

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.

A tired traveller pulls into Nazareth. The song doesn’t say why he has come. Not yet. He asks a stranger where he might find a bed. The man grins, shakes his hand, and says no. A handshake usually seals a deal. Here it comes with a refusal. That contradiction sets the pattern for the whole song: every encounter looks simple, and every one has a cost. The stranger isn’t cruel. He just sends the traveller back onto the road.

Nazareth is more than the word inside Robertson’s guitar. Looking for a bed in an unfamiliar town is, as Robertson put it, “a biblical concept.” Mary and Joseph, a couple from Nazareth, found no room at the inn in Bethlehem.

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.

The chorus turns the song around. To take a load off is to sit down and rest, the very thing the traveller was just refused. Now he offers that rest to someone else and takes her load onto himself.

“The chorus I came up with was, ‘Take a load off Fanny’—not Annie, as many people think. I’m not sure I had the Gotham’s owner in mind when I used ‘Fanny.’ But her name was certainly buried back there in my imagination. ‘Fanny’ just felt rhythmic,” Robertson said. “‘Take a load off and put it right on me’ also was pure Buñuel. Once you lend a hand and assume someone else’s burden, you’re involved.”

That is the traveller’s trap. He tells Fanny the load is free, and for her it is. He is the one who pays. Nothing in this song is free. Even the music adds to it. Before the load lands, the song stacks up three “and”s, each one another weight.

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.”

Turned away, the traveller picks up his bag. He came looking for a bed. Now he is looking for a place to hide. Then he sees a woman named Carmen walking with the Devil. He asks her to come downtown with him. She says she has to go, but her friend can stay. Carmen leaves. The Devil stays. It is the first load anyone hands him, and he never agreed to take it.

The image came from Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal “and the chess game with Death,” Robertson said. In the 1957 film, a knight home from the Crusades meets Death on a beach and challenges him to chess to buy more time. Death follows him for the rest of the film. In the song, the Devil does the same to the traveller.

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?’

The verse opens by echoing “Go Down Moses,” a religious folk song first sung by enslaved African Americans. In it, Moses tells Pharaoh, “Let my people go.”

Roebuck “Pops” Staples, a gospel singer from Mississippi, led the Staple Singers, the family group he formed with his children, including Mavis. They had recorded “The Weight” themselves in 1968. Years later, as they got ready to film it with The Band for The Last Waltz, Pops asked Robertson what the song was actually about. “Pops, you know as well as I do,” Robertson told him. Pops laughed and answered his own question: “Go down Moses.” To him, the song was a spiritual.

Then the verse turns to old Luke, who is waiting on Judgement Day, the day Christians believe God will judge every soul. The traveller asks about young Anna Lee, a name Robertson borrowed from Anna Lee Amsden, a lifelong friend of Helm’s. Luke asks a favour in return: stay and keep her company. Whatever Luke is waiting for, the traveller is the one asked to look after Anna Lee. This time the load is a person.

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.”

Then Crazy Chester follows him and catches him in the fog. Chester offers a deal: he will fix the traveller’s rack if the traveller takes his dog, Jack. Rack can mean a bed. The traveller came to Nazareth asking for one, and now he is finally offered it. The price is a dog to look after. For the first time, he pushes back and reminds Chester that he is a peaceful man. Chester waves it off and asks him to feed the dog when he can.

Robertson had seen Chester before. “Crazy Chester was based on someone I saw in Fayetteville, Ark., when I was 16. There was this guy in a wheelchair who was kind of nuts. He’d roll into the town square, and when girls went by, he’d call out, ‘Hoocha, baby, hoocha.’ It was like a tic,” Robertson said. “Chester was stuck in my head.”

This is the one verse Helm does not sing. Robertson handed it to Danko in the studio, because it seemed “like a refreshing change to have a new character voice enter the narration.” The verse already held a piece of Danko. Robertson had first named the dog Hamlet, after Danko’s dog at Big Pink. “I changed it to ‘Jack’ because Hamlet didn’t sing right,” he said. So Danko sang about a dog first named for his own.

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.

Now he wants out. His bag, the one he picked up after the first refusal, is sinking low, as if it held everything he was handed along the way. He’ll catch a cannonball, old slang for a fast express train, and ride it out of town.

At last, the song says why he came. Fanny sent him, with her regards for everyone. It is the predicament Robertson described, a man who came only to say hello for somebody. It all began with Fanny. Hers was the first load he offered to take, and now he is heading back to her. The journey is circular.

He came to Nazareth only to pass along a greeting. He leaves carrying everyone’s burden. The song never says its own title. It doesn’t have to.