FEATURE:
Paul McCartney at Eighty
Two: Heart of the Country: The Brilliance of Paul and Linda McCartney’s 1971 Masterpiece, Ram
___________
IN the second of forty features…
IN THIS PHOTO: Paul and Linda McCartney in 1970/PHOTO CREDIT: Paul McCartney
that will come in the build to Paul McCartney’s eightieth birthday on 18th June, I am concentrating on my favourite non-Beatles/Wings album of his. In future pieces, I am going into depth a lot about his role in The Beatles, in addition to his work with Wings. I am also keen to explore subjects away from music – including his vegetarianism and activism – to give a full tribute and salute to the world’s greatest-living songwriter. Before diving into The Beatles, I will write a bit about the Paul and Linda McCartney gem from 1971. Maybe it comes as little surprise that my favourite non-Beatles/Wings album is Ram. The only album credited to Paul and Linda McCartney, I wanted to single this out. Whilst I am going to do more general features about his solo work, I am going to spotlight my favourite Wings album soon. Today, I wanted to come back to Ram. Celebrating its fiftieth anniversary last year, I am going to draw in a couple of articles and reviews to give you more information about an album that was not shown huge kindness when it first came out. After his 1970 McCartney album was slated by many, Ram found plenty willing to throw salt in the wounds and kick McCartney. Given the tension and stress that still existed after the break-up of The Beatles, I think Ram is one of Paul McCartney’s most difficult albums to listen to.
It was clear that McCartney needed to get out of the U.K. With his family, he flew to New York City in October 1970 to begin work on Ram. While the previous album had featured him playing every instrument, now, McCartney decided to hold auditions for musicians. Maybe McCartney was trying to get away from some tension in Britain, but enough time had passed where he wanted to collaborate with other musicians. One reason why Paul and Linda McCartney’s album is so special to me is because this seemed like the former Beatle starting to regain strength and inspiration, despite continued media glare. McCartney definitely would still have felt the aftershocks of not being in The Beatles. Even though Linda does not contribute a huge amount, I think their bond and her influence on him is very clear. She was a rock to him, and one can hear Paul’s affection for his wife on the album. Even though McCartney has released some tremendous solo albums – which I shall rank at a later date -, I do think Ram is the best ‘non-Beatles/Wings’ effort. I do not think there is a weak moment on the album. Ram contains some of McCartney’s best tracks. Linda’s songwriting is excellent features prominently! Beginning with the charged Too Many People and ending with the finest track, The Back Seat of My Car, this is an album that I can listen to over and over again.!
I can understand that some blamed McCartney for the end of The Beatles. There was this anger directed at him. A lot of the spite and poison that was contained in reviews is shocking! Retrospective assessment has been far kinder. Now, Ram is considered among Paul McCartney’s best albums. Not as raw and stripped-back as McCartney or McCartney II (1980), there is an honesty and earthliness to Ram that makes it such a fantastic listen. It is a nuanced album as well. I have found new respect for songs that, before, I liked but did not listen to a lot. Prior to coming to a retrospective review and offering some final thoughts, last year saw Ringer produce a feature around the legacy of Ram at fifty. I find it interesting learning what the recording sessions were like. Ringer spoke with drummer Denny Seiwell about his experiences of working with Paul, Linda and the other musicians:
“As Paul also said, “I think the songs—some of them, anyway—reflected our lifestyle at the time.” It’s a record that evokes a time, place, and mood, like Exile on Main Street with a Scottish farm subbing in for a French villa and hugs instead of hard drugs. That connection comes through not just in the pastoral stylings of “Heart of the Country” and “3 Legs” or the loved-up domestic bliss of “Ram On,” “Eat at Home,” and “Long Haired Lady,” but also in the sound. Paul asked Linda to contribute to the album and be in the band he was planning to form, despite her lack of training. She received songwriting credits on six of Ram’s 12 songs, and her homespun harmonies made the album a family affair that sounded different from the Beatles. A more practiced vocalist might have sung certain “Long Haired Lady” lines more smoothly and sweetly than Linda did, but a more typical intonation also might have made it less fun to sing along.
Recording with his wife was one way to ensure that his new bandmates wouldn’t all turn on him the way the old ones did. It was also in keeping with McCartney’s lo-fi approach to his first album (as well as Wild Life, his first one with Wings). McCartney could have assembled a supergroup to record Ram, like Lennon’s “Dirty Mac” lineup at the Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus, but as he said in 2001, “I was looking for a new band rather than the Blind Faith thing.” After a decade of Beatlemania and internal tension, secret auditions and no-name sidemen seemed like low-pressure, lasting solutions to the problems that had plagued the Fab Four.
Although Seiwell and the other new recruits weren’t headliners, they had some serious chops, which they needed to master some of the album’s demanding musical moments. “Ram was not that easy of a record to really pull off,” Seiwell says, adding, “A lot of the material on Ram was really complicated. To do a song like ‘Uncle Albert’ in one day, in one pass—we did not do ‘Uncle Albert,’ and then stop the machine, and start it for ‘Admiral Halsey.’ That was one song, and that’s the way it was recorded.” Other passages presented similar challenges, particularly the layered vocals of “Dear Boy” and the creative arrangements of multi-part teen ballad “The Back Seat of My Car,” a song McCartney had demoed during the sessions for Let It Be. (“Oh my God, talk about complicated songs,” Seiwell says about “Back Seat.”) “And there wasn’t a lot of editing, if any,” he continues, adding, “That record was not done to a click track. It was pure. It was really an organic recording.” Most tracks required only three to five attempts to get an album-quality take.
What McCartney found was an effortless-sounding synthesis of his influences and strengths. Ram boasted the Beach Boys–style symphonies and harmonies of “Dear Boy” and “Back Seat”; the Buddy Holly bop of “Eat at Home”; the Lennon-esque absurdity and doggerel of “Monkberry Moon Delight.” Yet it’s less an homage to anyone else than a sampler of McCartney’s musical selves, from the anti-political preaching against preaching in album opener “Too Many People”—a potshot aimed at the outspoken Lennon, who would soon return fire—to the whimsical song suite of “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey,” the winking raunchiness of “Eat at Home,” the rustic scatting of “Heart of the Country,” and the “Eleanor Rigby”–esque, depressed protagonist of non-album single “Another Day,” a hit from the same sessions”.
There are so many shades and different sounds mixed through Ram. I love how eclectic it is. You get cheeky-yet-romantic songs like The Back Seat of My Car alongside more experimental and out-there tracks like Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey. Ram is an album where McCartney is not directly influenced by his former Beatles bandmate, John Lennon. At the time, there was animosity between them. Whilst Ram’s opening track, Too Many People, contains some clever digs at John Lennon and Yoko Ono, later in 1971, Lennon would attack McCartney on Imagine’s vicious track, How Do You Sleep? In some ways, Ram is like a divorce album. Even if McCartney was breaking away from The Beatles, he could not escape the fallout and bitterness from bandmates (George Harrison was heavily involved with Imagine). I love Ram because he wrote with Linda and there is so much great material. Even though they were married, it must have been strange writing with her. It would have been the first serious collaboration since the end of The Beatles. Rather than it being a confused or transition album, it is a masterpiece that, years after its release, gained the respect and reputation that it deserved all along. Pitchfork reviewed Ram back in 2012. They talk about some of the darker notes on the album, in addition to how Ram has this collaborative/group vibe - that, in spite of the fact Paul McCartney was very much at the front and centre:
“Or actually, "Paul and Linda." This was another one of Paul's chief Ram-related offenses: He not only invited his new photographer bride into the recording studio, he included her name on the record's spine. Ram is the only album in recorded history credited to the artist duo "Paul and Linda McCartney," and in the sense that Linda's enthusiastically warbling vocals appear on almost every song, it's entirely accurate. Some read Paul's decision as the ultimate insult to his former partner: I've got a new collaborator now! Her name is Linda, and she never makes me feel stupid. In the album's freewheeling spirit, however, the decision scans more like guilelessness and innocence. The songs don't feel collaborative so much as cooperative: little schoolhouse plays that required every hand on deck to get off the ground. Paul had the most talent, so naturally he was up front, but he wanted everyone behind him, banging pots, hollering, whistling-- whatever it is you did, make sure you're back there doing it with gusto.
It is exactly this homemade charm that has caught on with generations of listeners as the initial furor around the album subsided. What 2012's ears can find on Ram is a rock icon inventing an approach to pop music that would eventually become someone else's indie pop. It had no trendy name here; it was just a disappointing Beatles solo album. But when Ben Stiller's fussy, pedantic "Greenberg" character painstakingly assembles a mix for Greta Gerwig intended to display the breadth and depth of his pop-culture appreciation, he slides Ram's "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey" on there. It's the song we see her singing along to enthusiastically in the following montage.
The joy of paying close attention to Ram is gradually discovering that Paul was humming darker things under his breath than it seemed. "Smile Away", for instance, is a messy, romping slab of Buddy Holly rock. Paul makes a joke about his stinky feet. The chorus goes "Smile away, smile away, smile away, smile away, smile away." But it's not just "smile," a brief, cost-free act that can last a second. It's "Smile Away", keeping a fixed grin as conversation grows unpleasant. In interviews of the period, Paul was asked repeatedly if he felt lost without his collaborating partner, if he was motivated solely by commercial success, how he felt about being "the cute Beatle." The backing vocal chant behind "Smile Away" goes, by turns, "Don't know how to do that" and "Learning how to do that." "Smile away horribly, now," Paul slurs over the song's fadeout. Yes, he's fine. No, he and Linda will not become the next "John and Yoko." But thanks so much for asking. If you tell a dog it's a brainless fleabag with the same tone of voice you use to say "Good boy," it will still wag its tail.
The album is riddled with dark grace notes like this: "Monkberry Moon Delight" has an absolutely unhinged vocal take, Paul gulping and sobbing right next to your inner ear. The imagery is surrealist, but anything but whimsical: "When a rattle of rats had awoken/ The sinews, the nerves, and the veins," he bellows. It could be a latter-day Tom Waits performance. "Too Many People" opens with Paul warbling "piece of cake," but the lyrics themselves wag their finger at societal injustices, former bandmates-- basically everybody. The lyrics to "3 Legs" are full of hobbling animals with missing limbs.
The almost-title song "Ram On", could serve as the album's redeeming spirit: A haunting, indelible little tune drifts past on ukulele as Paul croons, "Ram on, give your heart to somebody/ Soon, right away." The title is a play on his old stage name "Paul Ramon," which makes the song a private little prayer; a mirror image, perhaps, to John Lennon's "Hold On". The song is reprised, late in the record, functioning like a calming breeze. "I want a horse, I want a sheep/ Want to get me a good night's sleep," Paul jauntily sings on "Heart of the Country", a city boy's vision of the country if ever there was one, and another clue to the record's mindstate. For Paul, the country isn't just a place where crops grow; it's "a place where holy people grow." Now that American cities everywhere are having their Great Pastoral Moment, full of artisans churning goat's-milk yogurt and canning their own jams, Ram feels like particularly ripe fruit”.
As I say, I am going to discuss various Paul McCartney albums and spend a lot of time on his work with The Beatles (as you would expect!). The only album credited to both him and Linda McCartney is my favourite of his away from Wings (who Linda was a member of) and The Beatles. Over fifty years after its release, critical tone has shifted. I can only imagine what it would have been like for Paul McCartney reading reviews of Ram back in 1971! Ahead of McCartney’s eightieth birthday in June, I wanted to show some love for…
A simply brilliant album.