Still in Rotation: Ram (Paul McCartney)

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Still in Rotation: Ram (Paul McCartney)

Still in Rotation is a feature that lets talented writers tell Midlife Mixtape readers about an album they discovered years ago that’s still in heavy rotation, and why it has such staying power.

Paul Myers is one of my favorite music Tweeps, and not just because of the geographic close calls we share – he’s from Toronto, I’m from across the lake in Rochester, he lives in Berkeley, I live a few miles south in Oakland. Songwriter, musician, author, journo: I’m honored to have Paul here today talking about Ram.

Still in Rotation: Ram (1971)

To fully appreciate the impact Ram had on me as a young boy in suburban Toronto, you have to first realize that I grew up in a happy, unbroken home and at that point no one I knew, even my grandparents, had died. Therefore, the only painful family breakup I’d ever experienced had been when Paul McCartney leaked news of the Beatles split to a stunned planet of Beatles fans.

Mommy and daddy had things to work out, but they want you to know it isn’t your fault and they both love you very, very much.

After we’d pored over their lovely swansong, Abbey Road (in many respects more perfect than Sgt. Pepper), and the tense post-mortem that was Let It Be, came the “solo albums”.

Having been naïvely invested in the myth of the Fab Four as one big happy, innocuous family, the idea of John & Yoko, the radical activists, was as jarring as your older brother going off to college or becoming a draft dodger, so his first few albums didn’t click with me, at the time anyway. I bought into the prevailing notion that without Paul’s steadying influence, John might never make Beatle quality records again. As for Paul, apart from “Maybe I’m Amazed”, which would clearly have been welcome on any late era Beatles album, the McCartney album had felt homemade and missed the deft production touch of Sir George Martin, which my dumb young ears needed. Again, I was a kid. This was how I saw it then.

At the close of 1970, George Harrison, the under utilized underdog of the group, had surpassed his Fab rivals with his tour de force All Things Must Pass, my Christmas album that year. It amply made up for the lack of new Beatles under the tree. Then, the following year, both Lennon and McCartney, as if challenged by the quiet one, each pulled up their socks and finally crafted solo albums that felt Beatle-worthy. For Lennon, it was the Phil Spector produced colossus Imagine, a triumph of echoey Lennonism redolent with strings and a full spectrum of poetic emotions laid bare. If he sounded like he had something to prove, remember that the context of the album’s October 1971 release was only five months after Paul & Linda McCartney’s own solo masterpiece, Ram.

From the opening descending acoustic guitar riff of “Too Many People”, Ram felt like Paul’s personal Revolver; the album where he began to define the rules once more. Beatle Paul was back, but he wasn’t going backwards. This time, he and his old lady shared equal billing, and their conjugal vocal blend seemed to make a defiant statement to the haters: “Linda is my partner now, piss off if you can’t handle it”, or words to that effect. Looking back now, I am certain that this was the point all along. Also, free of outside collaborators, Paul could fill his kitchen table with the best melodies of any of the rock songwriters of his generation. So what if his lyrical focus seemed less urgent or relevant than Lennon’s? Still, McCartney put enough confessional subtext into his word salad that you felt the point even if it made no linear sense.

The one time playboy of St. John’s Wood was now happily domesticated and songs like “Eat At Home”, “Heart Of The Country”, “Long Haired Lady”, and the big finale “Back Seat Of My Car” were his paeans to the new normal. The angrier songs on Ram, such as “Too Many People” dealt in a round about way with McCartney’s disaffection for his former partner. Apparently, Lennon took personal offence to the line, “Too many people preaching practices” as a possible attack on Mr. and Mrs. Lennon’s limousine liberalism.

And it’s read McCartney’s feelings of abandonment into couplets like:

That was your first mistake

You took your lucky break and broke it in two

Now what can be done for you?

You broke it in two.

The two were shooting songs back and forth at each other, and months later, Lennon would gut punch McCartney (with guitar from Harrison) on “How Do You Sleep?” from Imagine. At the time, I remember that I just didn’t like mommy and daddy fighting, even in the veiled forum of song jabs.

Nowadays they’d have settled it like gentlemen, with a Twitter war.

A former partner also informs “Dear Boy”, but this time it’s Linda’s ex, who apparently never knew that “she was just the cutest thing around”. That’s pretty much it for the toxicity on Ram, however, and the overall vibe is one of matrimonial bliss.

The album’s biggest single, “Uncle Albert / Admiral Halsey” is where McCartney established his penchant for pasting together song fragments into a Frankenstein “suite” that more often than not works, as it had on Abbey Road’s second side, and as he would later do time and again, most successfully with “Band On The Run” two years later. I still have no idea what this lovely, rollicking, episodic fantasia is going on about, but I do know two things; it still holds up and you could never have a chart hit this crazy in modern times. But Macca got a pass, the Beatles pass, because like his three fellows, he was, and always would be, a Beatle and therefore untouchable.

Musical moments like “Uncle Albert”, along with Ram’s full colour, hand-drawn gatefold packaging, assured us kids of the Beatles family that we would survive the divorce.

Ram and Imagine joined All Things Must Pass as the best examples of the solo Beatles rising to their legacy. In fact, in coming years, the boys would all pitch in for Ringo Starr’s own high watermark, Ringo. These four albums also pronounced that The Beatles were dead. Long live the Beatles.

Our family had indeed broken up, but now we had four dads instead of one.

♪♪♪Berkeley based, Toronto born, writer and musician Paul Myers is the author of the critically acclaimed music biographies A Wizard A True Star: Todd Rundgren In The Studio, It Ain’t Easy: Long John Baldry and the Birth of the British Blues and Barenaked Ladies: Public Stunts Private Stories and numerous periodicals, including FastCoCreate, Paste, Crawdaddy, and Mix Magazine. Paul was nominated for a Gemini Award (Canadian Emmy) for writing the BBC 4 documentary Long John Baldry: In The Shadow Of The Blues, and is one half of the San Francisco songwriting team, The Paul & John.