97. King of Kings

I treasure Dylan above all for his singing; secondarily for his songwriting, and for his lead playing on electric guitar and organ. This here number has no vocals, no lyrics, and no electric or organ lead. Yet it’s a marvel. And goes to show that, if you're a musician, it’s good to try doing something different from what you usually do—you never know just where you might end up.

King of Kings closes Not for Beginners, a Ron Wood solo album. Ron thought Dylan would be bringing him something more typical, which is to say, something with words; Dylan wasn’t into it, but his gift to Ron is a great one regardless, as Ron's tone when he talks about the song in interviews proves he also soon realized. The closest thing I can think of in Dylan’s catalogue is the home demo (with Fred Tackett and Jennifer Warnes) of Every Grain of Sand, the one that appears on the original Bootleg Series. But Every Grain of Sand has words and vocals, and those elements claim a lot of attention. Here on King of Kings all we have is the guitar playing: the chord progression, the little melodies that arise out of it, the “chorus” riff, and Ron Wood’s sensitive embellishments in the right channel.

King of Kings reminds me a bit of the great early Bruce Cockburn track called All the Diamonds in the World, a hymnlike little piece that Cockburn wrote as a young man sitting near the waterside in Stockholm. King of Kings likewise makes me think of a bright sky over a seashore. But, though the setting is the same, All the Diamonds is a morning view, with tall-sailed boats upon the water, while in King of Kings it’s sunset and most of the fishermen have gone home. Bruce's song is one of awakening into religious life, of great changes beginning, whereas Bob’s has the sense of a hard-won and enduring peace, and gratitude as deep as the ocean, and awe that’s both breathtaking in how powerful it is and yet familiar.

I was raised on Pink Floyd. As a seven-year-old overwhelmed by just how good music can be, I weighed the songs with lyrics no more heavily than the instrumentals. How could I, when Atom Heart Mother had the title suite; The Dark Side of the Moon had On the Run and Any Colour You Like; Obscured by Clouds had the back-to-back opening punch of the title track and When You’re In, and then Mudmen and Absolutely Curtains later on; A Momentary Lapse of Reason had Signs of Life, Round and Round, and Terminal Frost; The Division Bell had Cluster One and Marooned—and these were all among my favorite Pink Floyd songs? So in compiling this list, I was happy to find that an instrumental by Bob Dylan (of all people) had sneaked into my top 100.

Is King of Kings, I wonder, actually the last of Bob’s expressly devotional songs?—rather than Thief on the Cross, or (maybe, depending on how you hear it) Death Is Not the End, or God Knows—unless you think of This Dream of You as about a certain event in autumn 1978, which is a fair way to interpret that song. But This Dream of You is purposefully ambiguous, whereas the title of this track is pretty clearly a reference to the Christian Gospels. And King of Kings, in tone and mood, does sound to me like the kind of song that a “true believer,” as Dylan indirectly called himself in a 2009 interview about Christmas in the Heart, might write fifteen years after the starry psalms on Saved.

And just as a quick postscript, Ron Wood is one hell of a guitar player, isn’t he? I consider Faces’ valedictory single, You Can Make Me Dance, Sing, or Anything/As Long as You Tell Him (which my dear friend, the poet Steven Rineer, used to hook me on Faces), to be the best single ever made, over even such incandescent pairings as Have Mercy (Mercy, Mercy, Mercy)/Let the Boy Pretend, and Point Me at the Sky/Careful with that Axe, Eugene, and The Ballad of John and Yoko/Old Brown Shoe, and Helen Wheels/Country Dreamer, and Ain't No Hallowed Ground/Half Light Blues. Ron Wood's crazy, unpredictable guitar playing is (of course!) a large part of why I feel that way. 

He's also a good painter! The cover art for Not for Beginners (inspired by the title of the song Dylan gave him?) is Ron's own work.