“The Weight” appears on the Band’s now legendary 1968 album Music from Big Pink. Wikipedia says that Robbie Robertson wrote the song. However, to borrow a phrase fromGeorge Gershwin‘s Porgy and Bess, it ain’t necessarily so. Or, to borrow a phrase from “Luck Be a Lady”, best known in Frank Sinatra’s version, “there is roomfor doubt”.
Unfortunately, all the members of the Band are dead now, so we can’t ask them about the authorship of “The Weight”, and we probably couldn’t trust any answers they might have given when they were alive. So what we are left with is the evidence of the song itself. What does “The Weight” tell us?
We can feel confident that the members of the Band were fine musicians and congenial companions. Bob Dylan would not have agreed to collaborate with them if they hadn’t been. For a while in the late 1960s, they served as an extension of his talent, as later the E Street Band would serve as an extension of Bruce Springsteen’s. The now legendarycollection The Basement Tapes gives evidence of this. However, serving as the extension of a genius is not the same thing as being a genius.
To establish the authorship of the song “The Weight”, we can ask whether its distinctive styleresembles what Bob Dylan was writing in the late 1960s or what Robbie Robertson was writing at the time. To establish something like a baseline for Robertson as a songwriter, we can consider two of his best-known songs, “Up on Cripple Creek” and “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”.
The first of these is a charming song with clever melodies that the Band exploits beautifully. The second is a rare, moving example of compassion for the Confederate dead. Indeed, the song is so moving that Joan Baez, who had no sympathy for the Confederacy, recorded it.
Thinking about “The Day They Drove Ole Dixie Down” leads to an awkward question: Does a song that laments the demise of the soldiers of the Confederacy, and thus the demise of the American slavery they fought to preserve, pose moral questions for those of us who are alive in the 21st century? Did Robertson and the Band (and Joan Baez) not think through the implications of what they were singing?
Listening to “Up on Cripple Creek” and “The Night they Drove Ole Dixie Down” several times makes us realize these songs have very little imagery. However, the latter uses a train as a metaphor for the Confederacy. Let us consider “The Weight” in the context of Bob Dylan’s songs of the late 1960s.
“The Weight” has an unforgettable first line: “Pulled into Nazareth feelin’ ‘bout half past dead.” Right away, the use of Nazareth distinguishes this song from Robertson’s, which does not use Biblical references. Moreover, this line has a similar theme and mood as the extraordinary first line of Bob Dylan’s “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues”: “When you’re lost in the rain in Juarez, and it’s Easter time too.”
Then, too, there is the matter of the rhyme in “The Weight”. The first stanza uses the triple rhyme dead/ head/ said. Note that Dylan’s “Visions of Johanna” also begins with a triple rhyme: quiet/ deny it/ defy it.”His “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” also begins with a triple rhyme: times/ rhymes/c himes. It is fiendishly difficult to sustain triple rhyme schemes throughout a song, as Bob Dylan does. To find precedents for such accomplished feats of songwriting, one has to go back to the golden age of the Great American Songbook, when great songwriters like Irving Berlin and Cole Porter also used complicated rhyme schemes.
The rhymes in “The Weight” conform to Bob Dylan’s daring, innovative songwriting practice of the late 1960s. No other songwriters of the time were doing anything like that. (To be sure, Dylan’s influence made itself felt later in the 1970s, as when Kris Kristofferson used triple rhymes in “Sunday Morning Coming Down”.)
By contrast, Robbertson’s rhymes are more conventional. “Up on Cripple Creek” begins with the rhymes mountain/ go/ river/ Mexico. “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” has a conventional abab rhyme: name/ train/ came/ again.
Then there is “The Weight”‘s theme. A clue is found in the line “You take the weight off Miss Fanny, and you put it right back on me.” That is to say, the weight is shared between and among people; it is imperishable. The weight is not physical; it is the weight of the human experience in general. One way to express this as a theme is to say that the physicality of human experience unites us all. One possible source for such a theme occurs in Act I, Scene 2 of Hamlet, when our hero refers to “this too too solid flesh.”
If the weight is imperishable—if it is part of the universal human experience—then this very fact poses the question of whether it is possible to transcend it. My bookDecoding Dylan shows that transcendence is a key theme throughout Dylan’s work. It appears most clearly in one of his masterpieces, “Visions of Johanna”.
In short, “The Weight” conforms to Bob Dylan’s use of intricate triple rhymes and themes of mystical unity in the late ’60s.
So if “The Weight” has all the hallmarks of Dylan’s songwriting practice in the late 1960s, and none of Robertson’s, it is reasonable to conclude that Dylan, not Robertson, wrote it. However, we cannot leave the matter there. We’re talking about Bob Dylan, so nothing is simple or obvious.
I suspect the song’s creation happened something like this: Dylan wrote the lyrics, sketched the chords, and then gave these drafts to Robbertson to give the song a final polish. Probably Robertson worked out the wonderful pseudo-barbershop harmonies with his colleagues right there in the basement. (Notably, the Band does not use these charming harmonies in any of its other songs.) Robertson had more than enough musicianship to do that.
All his life, Bob Dylan has been a shape-shifter, a verbal chameleon who cannot be pinned down or held to the same criteria as other musicians. It is enough to read through Jonathon Cott’s Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews (2017) to notice how he could make word salads to avoid seemingly obvious questions about himself and his work. Dylan is now an Institution. We should assume he would never tell us that one day in the late 1960s, he said to the band’s Robbie Robertson, “Hey Robbie, I have a song for you.”
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