I pulled into Nazareth, just feelin' 'bout half past dead

Hello everyone, and welcome to another lovely Tuesday evening here on Looks Like Coffee, Tastes Like Juice. I just arrived back home after rushing to my friend Nicholas' house to stare in utter amazement at the vehicle parked snugly on his driveway. Even for those who have no passion, or interest, in cars, the Ford GT40 is definitely a site to behold. That's all besides the point though, and has nothing to do with the post today, I just thought I'd let you all know that I am currently harboring a crush with Nicholas' driveway. Anyways, today's post is going to be about the band, The Band, and will mainly focus on their song, The Weight. So, enjoy.

"The Band was a Canadian-American rock group, active from 1967 to 1976 and again from 1983 to 1999. It mainly consisted of Canadians Robbie Robertson (guitar, piano); Richard Manuel (piano, harmonica, drums, saxophone, organ); Garth Hudson (organ, piano, clavinet, accordion, synthesizer, saxophone); Rick Danko (bass guitar, violin, trombone), and an American Levon Helm (drums, mandolin, guitar, bass guitar).

The members of the Band first worked together as The Hawks, the backing band of rockabilly singer Ronnie Hawkins from 1959 until 1963; they were also known as Levon and the Hawks. (In about 1966, they released a single on Ware Records under the name the Canadian Squires). Afterwards, Bob Dylan recruited the group for his 1965-1966 world tour. They also joined him on the informal recordings that later became The Basement Tapes.

Dubbed "The Band" by their record company (a name derived from how they were referred to during their tenure with Dylan), the group left Saugerties, New York to begin recording their own material. They recorded two of the most acclaimed albums of the late 1960s; their 1968 debut Music from Big Pink (featuring the single "The Weight") and 1969's The Band. They broke up in 1976, but reformed in 1983 without founding guitarist Robbie Robertson.

Although the Band was always more popular with music journalists and fellow musicians than with the general public, they have remained an admired and influential group. They have been inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In 2004, Rolling Stone ranked them #50 on their list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time.^[1]"

So, there's a little bit about The Band which, I admit, I shamelessly copied and pasted via Wikipedia. Now, I shall continue to use this technique to tell you a bit about the song, The Weight.

"The Weight" takes the folk music motif of a traveler, who arrives in Nazareth in the Lehigh Valley region of Pennsylvania. Once there, he encounters various residents of the town, the song being a story of these encounters.

The residents include a man who cannot direct the traveler to a hotel, Carmen and the Devil walking side by side, "Crazy Chester," who offers a bed in exchange for the traveler taking his dog, and Luke who has gone out to wait for the apocalypse, leaving his young bride neglected.

In Levon Helm's autobiography "This Wheel's on Fire," Helm explains that the people mentioned in the song were based on real people the Band knew. The "Miss Anna Lee" mentioned in the lyric is Helm's longtime friend Anna Lee Amsden^[2][3]."

Here's the previously mentioned song

The Weight - The Band

and a clip from the Martin Scorsese directed The Last Waltz, a DVD documenting The Band's last concert.



Til' Tomorrow