8/30/2023 0 Comments Was feeling about half past deadSome members of the group have said that they contributed to it but were not credited thus causing tension in The Band. There are three different vocalists on the song with Helm taking lead on the first three verses, Danko takes the fourth and Richard Manuel who harmonises. Robertson and then proceeds to list the band members – Jaime Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, Gareth Hudson & Levon Helm. There is also a dispute over the writing credit. In turn, the opening line was another inspiration to the Scottish rock band, Nazareth, led by Dan McCafferty, who took their name from that line. Two big cap guns, he wore, plus a toupee!” Ronnie would always check with Crazy Chester to make sure there wasn’t any trouble around town and Chester would reassure him that everything was peaceable and not to worry because he was on the case. He was like Hopalong Cassidy, and he was a friend of the Hawks, the backing band of Ronnie Hawkins. ‘Crazy Chester’ was a guy we all knew from Fayetteville who came into town on Saturdays wearing a full set of cap guns on his hips and kinda walked around town to help keep the peace if you follow me. ‘Young Anna Lee’ was Anna Lee Williams from Turkey Scratch. Fanny died in April 1989 at the age of 101 and the book store eventually closed in 2007.Īs for the rest of the song’s characters, well they are all based on real people as Levon Helm explained in his autobiography This Wheel’s on Fire: Levon Helm and The Story of The Band: “‘Luke’ was Jimmy Ray Paulman. Robertson spent hours there and gained much inspiration for this song. She was still running it in the late sixties when Roberson visited to study Bergman’s and Bunuel’s film scripts of which she had plenty. Frances ‘Fanny’ Steloff was the lady who founded and ran the Gotham Book Mart shop in New York in 1920. So, what about the lead character, Fanny? Well she is real. There’s another film influence in the second verse we hear, ‘When I saw Carmen and the Devil walkin’ side by side’, “that was borrowed from Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 film The Seventh Seal and the famous chess game against the Grim Reaper.” 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.” It was those burdens that are ‘the weight’. As I mentioned earlier, Robertson was a fan of Bunuel whose 1959 film Nazarín was also the inspiration as it “unlocked many thoughts in my head, I just knew I wanted characters to unload their burdens on the song’s main character in each verse. One evening when he was working on the song, he looked inside his guitar and saw that it was made in Nazareth in Pennsylvania, where Martin Guitars have had their production line since 1933, not the one in Israel which is what the Bible refers to. It has a number of Biblical references, e.g., the opening line reveals, ‘I pulled into Nazareth, was feeling ’bout half past dead’ which, as Robertson explained to Seth Rogovoy, was inspired by his 1951 Martin D-28 acoustic guitar. The Weight is one of many songs where the title is not mentioned and thus leaves an air of mystery as to exactly what the weight is. That abode influenced the title of the Band’s debut album Music from Big Pink, the album that included three Dylan-penned songs and this week’s suggestion. They briefly returned to club work until in 1967 when Dylan then invited them back to join him for his appearance in Woodstock and they agreed and temporarily rented a pink house which they affectionately named Big Pink. During that tour, Dylan was injured in a motorbike accident and the tour was halted and the band had no work. That tour was billed as Bob Dylan and the Band. Helm, out of loyalty to the rest of the members, told Dylan that he hired all or nothing and so Dylan agreed to hire all of them. Robertson and Helm had a meeting with Dylan and he was impressed and wanted to hire the two of them but. In 1965, Bob Dylan was looking for a backing band for his first ‘electric’ tour and it was the blues singer John Hammond Jr who recommended The Band. The group’s lead singer and drummer Levon Helm decided the name The Band worked well and so it stuck. In 1964 some members left and began backing various singers especially around the Woodstock area. The nucleus of the band began in 1957 when they were called The Hawks. Who were these people? Well, the group’s guitarist and occasional vocalist, Robbie Robertson said it was based on some films he’d recently watched by the Spanish film maker Luis Buñuel, so there might be a clue. This week’s choice is by Bob Dylan’s former backing group and is full of characters like Luke, Jack, Anna Lee, Miss Moses, Carmen, Chester and, needless to say, Fanny.
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