“The Weight,” the center of gravity on Music from Big Pink, could be the whole story: the tale of a man who arrives in a town called Nazareth to perform a task he doesn’t understand among people who act as if he doesn’t exist. Levon Helm was once described as the only drummer who could make you cry; as the song begins, as it moves on, so slowly, with an ominousness as musically light as it is morally inescapable, he does. He takes the narrative in the verses; in the choruses he, Manuel, and Danko trade back and forth on the word “and” in a way that makes it feel like the most threatening, bottomless word in the English language. “The lyrics are fascinating, even though I have no idea what this song is about,” the Band’s producer, John Simon, said when he heard it. “It was all I could think of at the time,” Robertson says back to him, but in his book he says more: “As a songwriter, ‘The Weight’ was something I had been working up to for years. I just heard”—heard, not wrote—“what I was looking for.”
He and the Band heard and played what a great many people were looking for: in 1968, with the United States tearing itself apart in war, assassination, riot, hate, and fear, they played out a sense of America as a real but also mythical place, a story that, while absorbing all the versions that had come before, remained unfinished. It’s what Harold Bloom heard: “It is inconsequential to me who wrote the songs,” he wrote in 2002, speaking of “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” “Rag Mama Rag,” “Up on Cripple Creek,” “It Makes No Difference,” and “a dozen or so others.” “What matters is that the songs at their best seem always to have been there, until refined by the Band.” He spoke of a “quasi-mysticism” that was “endemic in their music”:
There is, as I have argued elsewhere, a post-Protestant gnosis in North America, which could be called “The American Religion.” The Band’s performances, at their most intense, can seem to emanate directly from that gnosis, as the Dylan of 1965–1975 seemed to also. If our freedom is our solitude, it is also our wavering sense that what is best and oldest in us is no part of the creation. A spirituality that unsponsored has its sorrows, some of which The Band caught and rendered permanently.