Almost Hits: The Band - The Weight (1968)

I should have acknowledged the passing of the great Robbie Robertson - the late composer and unofficial leader of The Band earlier - but there have been so many nice tributes written about him already that I believed I had nothing pertinent to add.

However, while looking around for something to say I discovered that the mostly Canadian quintet never placed any of their singles in the top twenty of the Hot 100 during their entire career. Their highest charting record was the double sided hit "Up On Cripple Creek" / "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" that fought its way to #25 in 1969.

I considered writing about one of those two songs, but instead I'm going to discuss the first 45 RPM record the group released under the name of The Band. "The Weight," from their debut LP - Music From Big Pink - was very popular on FM, album oriented, rock radio stations, but it only managed to make it as high as #63 on Billboard's weekly chart of the most popular singles.

The song - primarily composed by Robertson - tells the story of a traveler visiting the town of Nazareth. Robertson named the town in the song after the Pennsylvania borough that is home to the Martin Guitar Company because he happened to be playing one when he wrote it.

The characters in the story are all based on real people. Fanny was the owner of a New York City bookstore that Robertson used to visit. Young Anna Lee is a longtime friend of singer, composer and drummer, Levon Helm. Crazy Chester was an eccentric resident of Fayetteville, Arkansas known to Canadian rocker Ronnie Hawkins whose backing group, The Hawks, eventually became The Band.

Robertson said "The Weight" was inspired by surrealistic filmmaker Luis Buñuel. He once said, "Buñuel did so many films on the impossibility of sainthood. .............................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? .................................Do me a favour when you're there." This is what it's all 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" is considered one of the elite songs of the rock era by five musicians who are often considered to be the progenitors of the Americana sub-genre. The Band was Americana before it was a "thing" and before it had a name.

Although Helm and Robertson were good friends during the days of The Band disputes over songwriting credits arose after they went their separate ways. Helm claimed that Robertson wrote only 60% of the lyrics of "The Weight." He said that Rick Danko and Richard Manuel wrote the rest of the words with a little help from him. He also claimed a lot of the music was written by keyboard player Garth Hudson. 

Here is a live version of "The Weight" featuring The Staple Singers from The Last Waltz, and you can find the lyrics here.

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Almost Hits is an occasional exploration into songs that failed to reach the top 20 on the American Billboard Hot 100. Many have become classics despite what their chart position may indicate.