http://theband.hiof.no/articles/the_weight_viney.html
Quote:
Take a load off Fanny
This chorus is so incredibly well-known, yet readers of the earlier version have e-mailed me regularly saying ‘I thought it was Annie … because later there’s ‘What about Miss Anna Lee’. I had my Annie / Fanny doubts at first too. I’ve heard a few interpretations - a Canadian musician swore to me in 1971 that ‘Take a load off Fanny’ was all about catching and disseminating the clap (= a load), and that there was a double take - ‘off’ could also be ‘of’ (presumably using the English frontal sense of the word ‘fanny’ rather than the American posterior one) - Take a load off Fanny/of Fanny, and you put the load right on me. The clap is Miss Fanny’s regards to everyone. Of course, being Canadian, he claimed to have been told this directly by a member of The Band. Twenty years later, another Canadian asured me that this was perfectly true, again tracing the explanation directly to an un-named Band member. I can easily believe that a Band member told someone this, but it doesn’t mean it’s true, as none of them ever betrayed a lack of a sense of humour. I’m interested that this particular story is so widespread, and yet so ignored by Robertson when he’s talking about the lyrics. While we’re worrying about intepretations of a load, move over to The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary :
Load:
A burden of affliction, sin, responsibility etc; a thing which weighs down, opresses or impedes a person.
Load:
A material object or force which acts or is conceived as a weight, cog etc.
Load:
= DOSE slang, 20th century (dose= an infection with venereal disease)
So maybe a dose of clap is part of the weight, or more likely, a symbol of the weight. This was expanded by another internet post :
‘Rosalind’:
I always thought that "Fannie" might have come from the song that Levon always looked forward to singing during The Hawks wild years. He mentioned on the Conan O'Brien Show back in 1993 that his very favorite song to sing every night way back then was "Short Fat Fannie" It was also the song that he used to tease Cathy Evelyn (Smith) with. She mentioned that in her book "Chasing The Dragon" She said she would turn red and run away cause every time he sang it, he would look over at her and grin. Since "The Weight" was swamped with real-life folks and memories...13
Cathy Smith was an early close associate of The Hawks as well as a later associate of The Band going right up to The Last Waltz, and is mentioned in Levon Helm’s autobiography as the girl who helped them out of a drug bust:
Rick Danko:
So Levon spoke to this chick he was dating. Her name was Kathy and she was the most beautiful girl in Toronto… 16 years old when he met her, and she was a gorgeous, gorgeous lady. She looked beautiful and no one could resist her. Anyway, Levon explained the situation to her, and she kindly gave this cop who was trying to crucify us a blow job. Then she told him she was 14 years old. He was the chief witness against us, but this was some weird shit for him, and he disappeared, we never saw him again. In the end everyone else got off, and I received a year’s suspended sentence on probation.14
Rosalind’s comment got this reply:
Bill Munson:
I never found Cathy Smith’s Chasing The Dragon, but some pertinent bits of it are quoted in The Seahorse Motel chapter in Rock & Roll Toronto. The event, which was the sort of thing British Premiership footballers have gained recent notoriety for, involved three Band (or rather Hawks) members and resulted in the birth of “The Band baby” quoted elsewhere. According to the book, Richard (who it appears was not in fact responsible) stood up and offered to take the ‘load’- or consequences. In the light of Ros’s quote about “Short Fat Fannie” it does ring bells with the themes Robbie has stated that The Weight is about – sharing a load, guilt and ‘the impossibility of’ redemption and would make some sense of the chorus.15
I’ve never managed to find Cathy Smith’s book either, but for the prurient, here is the relevant passage as quoted in Rock and Roll Toronto.
Cathy Smith, from Rock and Roll Toronto:
“One night a few months after I met them, they rented a few rooms in the Seahorse Motel down on the lakeshore. We partied on into the night, and at one point I ended up in bed with Rick Danko, In the middle of making love, Rick found out I wasn’t on the pill and things (as it were) ground to a halt. He got out of bed and wandered on down the hall, leaving me lying there hurt and confused, then Levon walked into the room, climbed into bed with me.” Six weeks later, Smith discovered she was pregnant. Levon was the father, she insists, although she also says that she ‘didn’t belong particularly to Levon’. Richard Manuel offered to marry her, but she turned him down.16
In all the correspondence I got since writing The Weight article years and years ago, Rosalind is the first to point out the Cathy Smith connection, and it covers the shared load theme without necessarily dismissing the clap reference either. Going back too her involvement in the drug bust, a weight is also slang for a kilo (or is it a pound) of dope. Again, the idea of a shared responsibility emerges – they were all busted for an offence that was eventually pinned on just one of them.
SaDavid:
And what's all this "take a load off Fanny" riff? The whole thing becomes only a little less cryptic when we learn, in the very last lines, that the pilgrim is traveling under instructions, has, in fact, been sent by the mysterious Miss Fanny. The "weight" of the title is the load of her obligations the pilgrim has been sent to discharge. The irony, of course, is that he leaves with a heavier load than the one he brought with him - "my bag is sinkin' low."17
A more inocuous meaning came from B Molson:
B.Molson:
Robbie Robertson had a knack for incorporating common sayings into his songs. I assume it means is a shorter way of saying, "lets take a load off my feet and put it on my fanny"
But if it’s a common saying, it’s managed to escape me. A further reading from far left field:
Joab Jackson:
As you might know, The word "fanny" is also slang for "butt" or, to be blunt,"a**hole." So, "Take a load off, Fanny" can be read as a very euphemistic way of saying "thanks a lot, a**hole." In each of the verses, the narrator is thwarted by some other character. Someone refuses him lodging. A friend leaves him with the devil, he must take care of a child and a dog. In each case, the narrator is dumped on by someone else. In effect, in each verse, some one else has taken a load off themselves and put it on the narrator. The final verse (and here is where I am stretching the most) is about, and I will be blunt here as well, a fart. It is the perfect response to dealing with a "Fanny": "Miss Fanny ... sent me here with regards to everyone."
I don’t get that one at all, but then again a lot of correspondents don’t get my pictures. The Hawks had been to England. They knew fanny meant the other end, or what Dawn French calls ‘the front bottom’.
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