Released: 1968
In amongst the chaos, the turbulence, the drugs, the noise and the sheer sense of displacement that 1968 had on people – King, Kennedy, the tigers, the bears, oh my – along came a band – the Band – who unravelled it all.
Formerly electrifiers of Bob Dylan, Canucks Rick Danko, Levon Helm, Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel and Robbie Robertson had already made what would become some of the most bootlegged demos of all time (Helm worked later on the overdubs for the official version of The Basement Tapes in ’75, pedants) before the release of their debut album Music From Big Pink in 1968.
The Weight, with it’s biblical allusions, yee-haw three part harmonies and rustic simplicity, couldn’t have been further away from the modern world, but Robbie Robertson’s smoky voice gave it another quality altogether, one where something as gauche as time had simply ceased to exist. In amongst all of modernity’s dizzying chaos, here was a song on which you could hang your stovepipe hat on.
The Voice Of Unreason 
Good to hear this again.
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