buhdge

Paul and Linda McCartney | Ram (Parlophone, 1971) Received rock wisdom will tell you that the two greatest Beatles solo albums are the bleak Plastic Ono Band, with is primal howling and stark piano, and the expansive and rather drawn-out All Things Must Pass (a single album’s worth of good material masquerading as a triple).

Yet as a band, the Beatles were primarily a pop act, specializing in carefully crafted entertainment product with one eye firmly on the record-buying public (an eye which lazily wandered during the 1970s as far as Lennon and Harrison were concerned, with disastrous consequences—listen to Extra Texture or Mind Games and tell me these are the works of a Beatle!). For my money, the two best-crafted and most entertaining post-Beatle pop albums are the joyous 1987 George Harrison comeback Cloud 9, and McCartney’s often-overlooked gem Ram.

In fact, McCartney’s back catalogue is full of overlooked gems.  Trapped in the pub-rock hell of Wings, McCartney gave us one or two nice singles, glorified b-side ‘C Moon’ probably being the best, and one highly-regarded album, but once freed to become plain old Paul McCartney again, that is when he really got the chance to stretch his legs. His output from the ’80s to the present is an often-beguiling mix of experimental oddities, rock anthems and melodic pop you feel you’ve known your entire life.  Of course, there’s a lot of rubbish too (almost the entire Pipes Of Peace and Off the Ground albums, for example), but that’s par for the course.

The one McCartney album which is top quality pop-rock from start to finish is 1971’s Ram.  His second solo record until 1980’s McCartney II, Ram is a brash, gaudy masterwork sandwiched between the half-finished-sounding McCartney and the offensively tedious Wings debut Wild Life.

Although Ram is ostensibly a rural album, there’s nothing pastoral about it.  It’s all hearty suntan and sheep manure, a cartoonish romp in wellingtons through the great British countryside; an album whose tacky yellow sleeve comprising splotchy felt pen doodles and taped-on glitter somehow enhances rather than detracts from the music within.  I don’t mean to make it sound like a crass or ugly record; it’s just unashamedly entertaining.

Ram’s primary characteristic is relentlessness.  This is a record that sits still for no one; it’s so relentless in fact that listening to it is a bit like being personally bullied in a dream by McCartney for forty minutes, except in a good way.  Many of the songs twist and turn in all sorts of unexpected, infectious musical directions, and like many of the best albums, by the end you feel like you’ve just been taken on a journey.

Side one opens with Paul sweetly singing “Piss off, yeah!”, and after a misleading instrumental meander suddenly becomes as breathless and persistent as it means to go on with the light-fingered melodic rocker ‘Too Many People,’ a merry diatribe against modern life intercut with admonitions aimed at an anonymous wrongdoer who “took your lucky break and broke it in two”—presumably Lennon, but the lyric is so unspecific that it could be anyone.  This is followed by the vaguely nightmarish ‘3 Legs’ whose mysterious lyrics make no sense mathematically (“most flies they got three legs but mine got one”) but certainly unsettle, albeit in the familiarly glib Paul McCartney way.  Again, this song points a fairly directionless finger of criticism at someone that might be Lennon (“When I thought that I could call you my friend…”).

Next up is the first outing for ‘Ram On,’ a floaty ukulele doodle name-checking McCartney’s showbiz alter ego from the early days of the Beatles, Paul Ramon, but offering no insight other than “Ram on, give your heart to somebody soon, right away.”  It’s possibly the least interesting track on the album, but They Might Be Giants were impressed enough to cover it.  Much better is “Dear Boy,” a tightly-structured piano-driven piece of power pop in keeping with the Beatle sound and which wouldn’t have seemed out of place on the White Album or Abbey Road (and which is, in fact, considerably better than either “Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da” or “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer”).   The song’s descending lines, gorgeous counter-harmony and Leslie-filtered vocals actually give it quite a modern feel, a bit of a Ben Folds vibe perhaps; lyrically, the song is a dig at Linda’s ex-husband, although the reliably paranoid Lennon naturally took it as an attack against himself.

Things take a distinct turn for the weird in “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey,” the world’s catchiest and most nonsensical suite, essentially a novelty song but so imbued with Macca’s deft ear for melody that it successfully reached number 1 in the singles charts in the US, his first chart-topper outside of the Beatles.  Features include a collection of Paul’s own patented comedy voices, a bad impersonation of a telephone, and some humorous backing vocals from a vaguely bored-sounding Linda.  Finally, side one plays out with the silly and infectious “Smile Away”: “I was walking down the street the other day and who did I meet?/I met a friend of mine and he did say, ‘Man, I can smell your feet a mile away’.”  “Here There And Everywhere” this ain’t.  The one-note guitar battalions and valve buzz are suitably climatic, though.

At this stage, most artists would be flagging, but Paul opens side two with another salvo of joyful melodic hooks, the chirpy “Heart of the Country,” another White Album-flavoured number complete with walking bass, finger picking and scat singing, and a hit single in anyone’s book.

Always a craftsman and rarely an out-and-out artist in the purest sense of the word, McCartney could never write convincing nonsense verse the way his partner could with “I Am the Walrus,” for example.  The one exception to this is the genuinely threatening “Monkberry Moon Delight,” musically a garish glam-rock number but containing some of Paul’s best lyrics hidden beneath the shouted delivery: “When a rattle of rats had awoken the sinews, the nerves and the veins/my piano was boldly outspoken/in attempts to repeat its refrain,” or, “Sore was I from the crack of an enemy’s hose/and the horrible sound of tomato ketchup, soup and puree.”  Make of it what you will.

By the time you reach “Eat At Home,” you’ll know exactly what I mean when I describe the album as relentless.  It just doesn’t let up.  You’re almost left exhausted by the sheer amount of melodic hooks, and “Eat At Home” is yet another rock song with a naggingly catchy tune, this one written in the chug-a-lug Buddy Holly oeuvre.  And if that weren’t enough, “Long Haired Lady” is catchier still, and another suite to boot, packed full of effortless musical invention, each new fragment more nagging than the last.  Vaguely erotic in content, Paul croons sweetly while Linda’s overtly comic Miss Piggyish backing vocals ask “Is this the only thing you want me for?”.  The whole thing plays out, “Hey Jude”-style, with a repeated sing-along chorus that seems to come out of nowhere but fits perfectly.

After a reprise of “Ram On,” the album closes with a real curio.  Much more earnest than the rest of the material on the record, the largely straight-faced rock ballad “The Back Seat of My Car” is actually a Beatles-era reject submitted in 1969 for the Let It Be project, yet is more polished and archetypal than much of the music on either that album or Abbey Road.  Another song which morphs through several different phases, it finally settles on a stirringly anthemic final chorus: “We believe that we can’t be wrong,” sings Paul, a seemingly meaningless rock lyric that was taken as yet another jibe by the heroin-addled Lennon.

And after that it all turned rather sour.  John took the pokes—real or imagined—in bad grace and released the outright nasty “How Do You Sleep?” on his Imagine album (the irony of this juxtaposition doubtless lost on him), to which Paul replied with the wounded “Dear Friend” on Wings’ Wild Life.

All that’s ancient history now, though, and Ram can be enjoyed on its own terms: very early ’70s, yet oddly fresh and timeless, it’s a record which will leave you gasping for breath by the end.

Go to: Adam S. Leslie