"The Weight" (The Band)

"The Weight" is one of those songs that sounds like it always existed.  It's so ubiquitous that it's hard to believe that it was written by a rock band* in the late 1960s instead of hardscrabble coal miners, field hands, or railroad workers in the late 1860s.  And the plethora of Biblical references (Nazareth, Moses, Luke, the Devil, and Judgment Day) definitely help lend it an air of timelessness.

The lyrics are built around what's called a "journey motif" in the world of literature.  (Thank you, Joan Ideker and your senior AP English class.)  The everyman narrator is sent to Nazareth by Ms. Fanny with a seemingly simple task: convey her regards to the people there.  But along the way, things get complicated: he can't find lodging, discovers Ms. Fanny's friend Carmen engaged in some sort of immoral activity, and gets saddled with taking care of Crazy Chester's dog, among other things.  In the end, his enthusiasm for carrying out Ms. Fanny's task has faded, and he decides it's time to leave Nazareth and head home.

The lyrics taken as a whole paint a surreal tableau of the American experience, where people still hop trains and carry their earthly belongings in a bindle on a stick, and where the physical and metaphysical worlds blur into one.

The music itself also captures a sound that is steeped in Americana without fitting into any particular genre or period.  The late Levon Helm's vocal (and the late Rick Danko's, too, for that matter) is as indebted to Ray Charles as it is Woody Guthrie.  Helm's drumming also resides in a charmed space somewhere between "When Johnny Comes Marching Home" and Fats Domino's "Blueberry Hill."  And then there's Garth Hudson's quarter-note pulse on the acoustic piano, which is as pure Southern Gospel as you can get.

It's easily one of the best songs of the 1960s.

(*Despite guitarist/songwriter Robbie Robertson still claiming sole credit for the song, I'm inclined to believe Helm's assertion in a year 2000 interview with journalist Larry Getlen: although Robertson came up with the core of the song, the entire band contributed to the composition—particularly Hudson.)