79. Unbelievable

Among my favorite songs ever is the Syd Barrett composition Matilda Mother, from Pink Floyd’s first album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.

Soft-voiced Rick Wright sings the fairy tale verses, about “a king who ruled the land,” a “[silver-eyed] scarlet eagle,” and a “thousand misty riders.” Rick Wright and Syd Barrett, singing together, deliver the child’s lament when storytime is over: “Oh, oh, mother / Tell me more.” Rough-voiced Syd takes over for the incrimination in what I guess I'd call a bridge: “Why’d you have to leave me there? / Hanging in my infant air, waiting?” to which comes the mother’s rejoinder, still in Syd Barrett’s voice, “You only have to read the lines / They’re scribbly black and everything shines.”

Halfway through the song comes a musical interlude which carries the fairy tale stories into the realm of sound, then the band starts building up to some kind of shift, and suddenly we're back in the chords and melody of the verse. But where the first two verses were given to Rick Wright to sing, the third is all Syd Barrett, as if he were now taking possession of the memories that, for the purposes of the song, he had leant Rick. The narrator looks back on that old time, urgently, seriously, attentively: “For all the time spent in that room / The doll’s house, darkness, old perfume / And fairy stories held me high on / Clouds of sunlight floating by.”

It’s an incomplete sentence, drifting away into those passing clouds, the narrator departing along with them. For all the time spent in that room—what? We expect some kind of contrast to follow. But no contrast does, only stories and clouds, and more stories, “oh mother, tell me more.” The last thing we hear in Matilda Mother is a sing-song melody, like a boat of leaves floating down the stream. Off the song goes, around the bend, somewhere out of sight, deeper into the forest...

The Matilda Mother atmosphere is what I hear recreated throughout Under the Red Sky, with the caveat that Bob tempers the intense innocence of Syd’s song with humor (sometimes) and dread (often). The near-psychedelia wrought by the Under the Red Sky band might even be called distant kin to Matilda Mother, if one is being fanciful and squints just right, only that the “tempos are postpunk like it oughta be, springs and shuffles grooving ever forward,” to borrow Robert Christgau’s words.

If you look at things in terms of sheer rock and roll kick, Unbelievable is the best song on the album. It starts with a massive riff from a vast-sounding overdriven electric guitar, accompanied by a few emphatic notes from the piano. When the band gets going, the guitar switches to the gnarly riff that undergirds the verses. The drums gallop like they’ve been saddled up, with snare-heavy breaks that mark the briefest of separations between the B and A sections of each verse. The organ gives the song a progressive rock flavor, hearkening back to something like the “See there! A son is born” section of Jethro Tull’s Thick as a Brick. Also courtesy of the organ come the three descending notes that, answering each of Bob’s phrases in the refrain, form the refrain’s melodic hook. At a couple of moments, harmonica notes mixed to sound like thunderclouds float above the commotion below.

Lyrically, Unbelievable is one of the many Dylan songs in which individual lines or sections connect with me, but were someone to ask me, “So what is this song is about?” I would have to answer, “Uhh…”

The narrator seems to be somebody who saw the present state of the world coming and had always been dismayed by the contents of his visions. Now that those old visions are coming true, he feels disappointed that no one in his generation rose up to stop the onset of the flood… but this interpretation is a rough estimate, at best.

I love this sinister image and great mouthful: “You must be living in the shadow of some kind of evil star.” The second half of the second verse could, perhaps, be a reflection on Bob’s own rise from folksinger poverty to a regrettable stardom, maybe an echo too of Thomas Pynchon’s vision of the ’60s as wrecked by those who had dreamed it up: “They said it was the land of milk and honey / Now they say it’s the land of money,” and with disgruntled irony, “Who ever thought they could make that stick?” Then shifting the focus self-deprecatingly to himself, “It’s unbelievable you could get this rich this quick!”

Awesome, too, is the nursery-rhyme rhythm and unpredictability of the series of violent and aggressive injunctions in the third verse, preceding the awed whisper, “It’s unbelievable the day would finally come,” which is not angry or frightened, sounding in fact rather glad, which, if it is, contradicts my own earlier appraisal of the narrator’s attitude. If the prophet is interpreting the chaotic state of things as the opening act of the apocalypse his faith has long warned is coming, then perhaps the gladness makes sense; if that’s the case, see also Something’s Burning, Baby.

I love the frustration found in “There’s always someone who understands / It don’t matter no more what you got to say.” The lines sound to me like a lashing out at the cheapening of culture, of talk, of friendship and connection, and a longing for a link between two people forged in a greater fire than “oh sure, I hear you man, I understand.” (We’re ten years on from “I told her about Jesus, told her about the rain / She told me about division, told me about the pain / That had risen from the ashes and abided in her memory.”) How could you understand, Unbelievable’s narrator seethes, of course you don’t understand. It’s a humane gesture, a claim flung out against the inanity at large out there (see T.V. Talkin’ Song) that there are true and deep and profound depths to experience, and that these are not reducible, not to be shrugged away.

As I was thinking about the song over the last few days I struck on a solution to a problem that had long puzzled me. I’m bad at logic, or for that matter any manner of abstract thinking, and I never had a clue what Dylan was up to in the lines “All the silver, all the gold / All the sweethearts you can hold / That don’t come back with stories untold / Are hanging on a tree.” What confused me is not the way that the final image feels like a stab from a friend’s dagger; that’s one of the song’s best moments, death suddenly blooming. But “[sweethearts] that don’t come back with stories untold” ? What does that mean? Do the sweethearts not come back, and since they don’t come back at all they certainly don’t come back carrying… untold stories, of all things… or is it that the sweethearts do come back, bearing stories to tell or stories they already told to others on the way? Either case seems hopelessly confusing. Clinton Heylin called it “plain clumsy.”

Playing the song over in my head one evening, though, I suddenly thought, what if there’s a comma missing in the official lyrics? That would seem to solve the problem: “All the silver, all the gold / All the sweethearts you can hold / That don’t come back, with stories untold / Are hanging on a tree.” As in, they don’t come back, and because they don’t come back, their stories remain untold. If that’s what Dylan had in mind, it piles on the poignancy at exactly the right moment, just before the conclusive announcement of their (obscurely Christian-tinged) death by hanging.