![]() ![]() “Smile Away” is sung with that exaggerated voice he used for the rock & roll medley in Let It Be: it is unpleasant. On “Three Legs” they do strange and pointless things to the sound of the voice to liven it up it doesn’t work. ![]() The album’s genre music-blues and old rock-is unbearably inept. For myself, I hear two good things on this record: “Eat At Home,” a pleasant, if minor, evocation of the music of Buddy Holly (with some very nice updating), and “Sitting in the Back Seat of My Car,” the album’s production number. Lennon has the better of it for the moment, but he may falter yet: “Power to the People” was as awful in its own way as anything on Ram, and only a fool would write off a man of McCartney’s past accomplishments on the basis of two albums (I’m not much of a fan of the last one either).Īll of which makes it no less easy to deal with this very bad album from this very talented artist. Thus the dissolution of the Beatles reveals that their compromises had always been psychological first, and musical second, and that without each other they both drift naturally to their own emotional-musical extreme. And it is so lacking in the taste that was one of the hallmarks of the Beatles that it strongly suggests Paul is not happy in his role as a solo artist, no matter how much he protests to the contrary. On the one hand there were the rockers: “She’s A Woman,” “I’m Down,” “If You Won’t See Me,” “Get Back,” and “Lady Madonna” on the other, the ballads and the schmaltz, including (in descending order), “Hey Jude,” “She’s Leaving Home,” “Yesterday,” “And I Love Her,” “Taste of Honey” and “Till There Was You.” Ram fulfills all the promise of “Till There Was You” and loses touch with the entire remainder of McCartney’s own past. McCartney’s work in the Beatles was always schizoid. Ram is so incredibly inconsequential and so monumentally irrelevant you can’t even do that with it: it is difficult to concentrate on, let alone dislike or even hate. For some, including myself, Self-Portrait had been secure in that position, but at least Self-Portrait was an album that you could hate, a record you could feel something over, even if it were nothing but regret. All three of these are songs filled with good humor, and their foundation in old-time rock & roll makes it easy to overlook how inventive these productions are, but on the more obviously tuneful and gentle numbers - the ones that are more quintessentially McCartney-esque - it's plain to see how imaginative and gorgeous the arrangements are, especially on the sad, soaring finale, "Back Seat of My Car," but even on its humble opposite, the sweet "Heart of the Country." These songs may not be self-styled major statements, but they are endearing and enduring, as is Ram itself, which seems like a more unique, exquisite pleasure with each passing year.Ram represents the nadir in the decomposition of Sixties rock thus far. But McCartney never was quite the sap of his reputation, and even here, on possibly his most precious record, there's some ripping rock & roll in the mock-apocalyptic goof "Monkberry Moon Delight," the joyfully noisy "Smile Away," where his feet can be smelled a mile away, and "Eat at Home," a rollicking, winking sex song. It's filled with songs that feel tossed off, filled with songs that are cheerfully, incessantly melodic it turns the monumental symphonic sweep of Abbey Road into a cheeky slice of whimsy on the two-part suite "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey." All this made Ram an object of scorn and derision upon its release (and for years afterward, in fact), but in retrospect it looks like nothing so much as the first indie pop album, a record that celebrates small pleasures with big melodies, a record that's guileless and unembarrassed to be cutesy. Where McCartney was homemade, sounding deliberately ragged in parts, Ram had a fuller production yet retained that ramshackle feel, sounding as if it were recorded in a shack out back, not far from the farm where the cover photo of Paul holding the ram by the horns was taken. ![]() John and George fulfilled those expectations - Lennon with his lacerating, confessional John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, Harrison with his triple-LP All Things Must Pass - but Paul McCartney certainly didn't, turning toward the modest charms of McCartney, and then crediting his wife Linda as a full-fledged collaborator on its 1971 follow-up, Ram. After the breakup, Beatles fans expected major statements from the three chief songwriters in the Fab Four. ![]()
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