Put some headphones on, take a listen to Ram, and forget if you can that this is an album by a former Beatle. Ram is highly relevant to these art forms, it simply didn’t show much interest in political culture as understood by the rock press of the time. By insisting that McCartney be “relevant,” they ignored the ways in which he was advancing songwriting and recording along with others. It’s fair to say that many high profile cool rock dudes characterized the album in terms such as suburban, trivial, empty, bland, irrelevant. The songwriting on Ram was a particular focus of scorn in some quarters. “Monkberry Moon Delight” is the outlier here: if you figure out what that song is about, please let me know in the comments. Married sex, broken friendships, lonely old people, casual boasting between friends, teenage romance. They are, with one exception, about small topics on a domestic scale. But each is cared for very well, each has a distinctive and intimate voice. The songs themselves range in quality from slightly banal to truly sublime. Paul was a thoroughly grown-up singer by 1971, and Ram features some of his most fluid, confidently virtuosic vocal performances. This contrasts strikingly with the halting, uptight delivery of “She’s Leaving Home” on Sgt. Paul’s voice is passionate and engaged and fully in character on “The Back Seat of My Car,” keeping up with the film score-level drama without difficulty. “The Back Seat of My Car” is gloriously and goofily grandiose, with one of the biggest sounds I am aware of on record in the period, but it never seems to quite get away from itself. The orchestral arrangements are, like those in The Beatles’ best work, integral to the instrumentation, rather than grafted on. There is no mush, no desperate layered glue to cover flaws – everything is heard, and everything counts in these arrangements. That attention to the guitar tones points to the larger beauty of Ram: the whole thing just sounds amazing, with a warmth and clarity rarely heard outside of jazz and classical recordings at that time. From the massive, aggressive chugging rhythm guitar in “Smile Away,” to the casually brilliant country blues licks of “3 Legs,” to the arching, Abbey Road-esque orchestral guitars of “The Back Seat of My Car,” Ram exploits the range of the electric guitar in a way virtually unmatched by its contemporaries. I have been unable to find definitive information on who played what, but the three guitarists together had a boatload of great ideas, and they are recorded exquisitely. Ram is worth listening to for rock musicians simply because of the tonal range and sheer beauty of its electric guitar parts. “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey,” a huge radio hit, is the most overt example on Ram. That is not to say one is better or worse, simply that McCartney didn’t stop learning, and Ram reflects a high degree of technique and confidence in building song stories out of small fragments. I don’t know that a successful album by Paul McCartney needs defending, so instead, I’ll mostly just appreciate some aspects of the album that continue to delight and engage me after 45 years of listening.Īt the level of form, McCartney extends the episodic, tone-shifting techniques of some late Beatles material with a surer, less purely experimental hand, achieving a sense of authoritatively planned effect rather than found-art collage. I listened to it with headphones as a nine-year-old, and I put the vinyl on in the living room once in a while now. I have always loved Ram – it never occurred to me to find it wanting. Perhaps AllMusic editor Stephen Thomas Erlewine is correct that “in retrospect, it looks like nothing so much as the first indie-pop album, a record that celebrates small pleasures with big melodies.” There has certainly been a reappraisal, with some glimmering that Ram represents not a failure to live up to The Beatles (or to the expectations of Village Voice writers), but rather a beginning of something new. See Related Post: “Waiting In the Wings with Paul and Linda McCartney” Some writers were grudgingly complimentary about McCartney’s sheer mastery of the craft of production, but almost no one could be heard to support the material itself. The album was eviscerated by critics on its release, with Jon Landau and Robert Christgau particularly vicious in their assault on both the album and McCartney’s general reputation relative to John Lennon. In early 1971, with The Beatles involved in some bitter legal disputes with each other and with their own management, Paul McCartney recorded Ram with his wife Linda and three hired guns, guitarists David Spinozza and Hugh McCracken, and drummer Denny Seiwell.
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