Ram (album)

Recording and structure

Paul McCartney and his family flew to New York City in October 1970 to begin working on the follow-up to McCartney. While McCartney had featured him on every instrument, for Ram Paul decided to hold auditions for musicians, bringing some in under the guise of a session to record a commercial jingle. Auditions were held in an attic on 45th Street for three days, where David Spinozza was tapped for guitar duties, after being asked by Linda, before auditions moved to a basement, where Denny Seiwell was recruited on drums. McCartney later claimed to have found Seiwell "lying on a mattress one day in The Bronx". Midway through the sessions, Spinozza was replaced by Hugh McCracken when Spinozza became unavailable.

The basic tracks for the album were taped at Columbia's Studio B from 12 October to 20 November 1970 before the McCartneys returned to their Scottish farm for the Christmas holidays. Work continued at Studio B and A&R Recording Studios, New York, from the second week of January 1971 through to February. Playing guitar or piano and singing at the same time, Paul chose to overdub his bass later on. Although it was a collaborative project, Linda's vocal duties were mostly limited to singing harmonies and backing Paul, who sang almost all of the lead parts; however, Linda sang co-lead vocals on "Long Haired Lady". The New York Philharmonic was brought in by McCartney to play on "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey", "Long Haired Lady" and "The Back Seat of My Car", as well as the McCartneys' forthcoming, non-album single "Another Day". Paul and Linda's daughter Heather sang backing vocals on "Monkberry Moon Delight".

In July 1971, Northern Songs and Maclen Music sued Paul and Linda McCartney for violating an exclusive rights agreement by collaborating on the song "Another Day", released three months before Ram. Although six of the eleven songs on Ram were also co-written with Linda, both parties agreed the issue of royalties for the album could be decided at a later date. In June 1972, ATV announced that "all differences between them have been amicably settled" and Paul and Linda signed a new seven-year co-publishing contract between ATV and McCartney Music. The sessions also produced songs such as "Dear Friend", released on Wings' debut album, Wild Life (1971), "Little Woman Love", as well as tracks featured on Wings' 1973 album Red Rose Speedway: "Get on the Right Thing", "Little Lamb Dragonfly" and "Big Barn Bed". It has recently surfaced that "I Lie Around", issued as the B-side to Wings' 1973 single "Live and Let Die", was taped during the sessions. Also recorded was the first incarnation of "Seaside Woman".

The album was mixed at Sound Recorders in Los Angeles. By early 1971, the project was completed, along with "Another Day" and its B-side, "Oh Woman, Oh Why". In addition to the songs released on Ram and the first two Wings albums, McCartney recorded the following tracks during these sessions: "Hey Diddle", "A Love for You", "Great Cock and Seagull Race", "Now Hear This Song of Mine", "Rode All Night", "Sunshine Sometimes" and "When the Wind Is Blowing".

Songs

The song "Ram On", from the album's first side, was reprised on the second side, before the album's final track "The Back Seat of My Car". "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey" is in a similar vein to the Abbey Road medley, as the song consisted of several unfinished songs combined into one. Music videos were made for "3 Legs" and "Heart of the Country", from footage that was filmed on 2 January 1971, and edited together 5 months later, by Ray Benson.

Feud

According to Peter Brown, John Lennon believed that a number of songs on Ram contained jibes aimed at him, particularly "Too Many People" and "Dear Boy". Lennon thought the line "Too many people preaching practices" was directly referencing him and Yoko Ono. McCartney later claimed that only two lines in "Too Many People" were directed at Lennon. "In one song, I wrote, 'Too many people preaching practices,' I think is the line. I mean, that was a little dig at John and Yoko. There wasn't anything else on [Ram] that was about them. Oh, there was 'You took your lucky break and broke it in two.'" Brown also described the picture of two beetles copulating on the back cover as symbolic of how Paul McCartney felt the other Beatles were treating him. George Harrison and Ringo Starr were said to consider the track "3 Legs" as an attack on them and Lennon. Paul said that "Dear Boy" was directed at Linda's ex-husband, and not Lennon. As well as conducting a war of words via the British music press, Lennon's response was the scathing "How Do You Sleep?", and it has been considered too that "Crippled Inside", also from his Imagine album, was directed at McCartney. Early editions of Imagine included a postcard of Lennon pulling the ears of a pig in a parody of Ram's cover photograph of McCartney holding a ram by the horns.

Release

"Another Day" / "Oh Woman, Oh Why" was released that February and became a worldwide Top 5 hit. In May, Ram was unveiled, on 17th in the US and on the 21st in the UK. "The Back Seat of My Car" was excerpted as a UK single that August, only reaching number 39, but the US release of the ambitious "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey" proved much more successful, giving McCartney his first number 1 single since leaving The Beatles. The album reached number 1 in the UK and number 2 in the US, where it spent over five months in the Top 10 and went platinum. Despite the phasing-out of monaural albums by the late 1960s, Ram was pressed in mono with unique mixes that differ from the common stereo version. These were only made available to radio stations and are among the most valuable and sought-after of Paul McCartney's solo records. The album has sold over 2 million copies.

Critical reception

Upon its release, Ram was poorly received by music critics. McCartney was particularly hurt by the harsh reviews − especially as he had attempted to address the points raised in criticism of his earlier album, McCartney, by adopting a more professional approach this time around. In his review for Rolling Stone, Jon Landau called Ram "incredibly inconsequential" and "monumentally irrelevant", and criticised its lack of intensity and energy. He added that it exposes McCartney as having "benefited immensely from collaboration" with the Beatles, particularly John Lennon, who "held the reins in on McCartney's cutsie-pie [sic], florid attempts at pure rock muzak" and kept him from "going off the deep end that leads to an album as emotionally vacuous as Ram". Playboy accused McCartney of "substituting facility for any real substance", and compared it to "watching someone juggle five guitars: It's fairly impressive, but you keep wondering why he bothers." Robert Christgau, writing in The Village Voice, called it "a bad record, a classic form/content mismatch", and felt that McCartney succumbed to "conspicuous consumption" by overworking himself and obscenely producing a style of music meant to be soft and whimsical. Writing four years later, Roy Carr and Tony Tyler from NME suggested that "it would be naive to have expected the McCartneys to produce anything other than a mediocre record ... Grisly though this was, McCartney was to sink lower before rescuing his credibility late in 1973."

His fellow ex-Beatles, all of whom were riding high in the critics' favour with their recent releases, were likewise vocal in their negativity. Lennon hated the album, dismissing his former songwriting partner's efforts as "muzak to my ears" in his song "How Do You Sleep?" Starr told the UK's Melody Maker: "I feel sad about Paul's albums ... I don't think there's one [good] tune on the last one, Ram ... he seems to be going strange."

Retrospect

Decades after Ram was released, critics have reviewed the album more favourably. Some commentators consider it to be one of McCartney's finest solo works. The 2012 reissue received an aggregate score of 86 out of 100 from Metacritic, based on twelve reviews – a score that the website defines as indicating "universal acclaim".

Reviewing the 2012 reissue, Mojo said that "today it sounds quintessentially McCartney". AllMusic editor Stephen Thomas Erlewine wrote: "in retrospect it looks like nothing so much as the first indie pop album, a record that celebrates small pleasures with big melodies". Pitchfork Media's Jayson Greene called Ram "a domestic-bliss album, one of the weirdest, earthiest, and most honest ever made". Simon Vozick-Levinson of Rolling Stone dubbed it a "daffy masterpiece" and "a grand psychedelic ramble full of divine melodies and orchestral frippery".

David Quantick of Uncut felt that, although it is not as "legendary" as publicised, the album is "occasionally brilliant and historically fascinating" as "post-Beatles mish-mash". Steven Hyden, writing for The A.V. Club, said that the "lightweight" style that was originally panned by critics is "actually (when heard with sympathetic ears) a big part of what makes it so appealing". However, Q magazine still found Ram to be "frustratingly uneven". In a retrospective review, Robert Christgau panned McCartney's songs as pretentious "crotchets ... so lightweight they float away even as Paulie layers them down with caprices".

Re-releases

In 1977, McCartney supervised the release of an instrumental interpretation of Ram (recorded in June 1971 and arranged by Richard Hewson) with the release of Thrillington under the pseudonym of Percy "Thrills" Thrillington. Thrillington was later released as part of the 2012 remaster of Ram. The album, along with McCartney's Wings over America and Tug of War albums, was issued in the US on compact disc on 18 January 1988. In 1993, the album was remastered and reissued on CD as part of The Paul McCartney Collection series with "Another Day" and "Oh Woman, Oh Why" as bonus tracks. That same year Digital Compact Classics released an audiophile edition prepared by Steve Hoffman.

On 21 May 2012 (in the UK) and 22 May (in the US), the album was reissued by McCartney's current label, Hear Music as part of the Paul McCartney Archive Collection. This reissue included the mono mix, which had never been issued previously on compact disc, except by bootleggers. The mono version was also released commercially in 2012, albeit as a limited edition LP. The 2012 reissue was accompanied by the Record Store Day exclusive edition of "Another Day" single.

Tributes

In 2009, two tribute albums featuring all of the songs from the album were put together:

In 2012, Danish rock singer/songwriter Tim Christensen, American singer/songwriters Mike Viola and Tracy Bonham, and Christensen's solo band The Damn Crystals did a one-off tribute show, performing Ram in full length along with other post-Beatles songs, at Vega in Copenhagen, in celebration of McCartney's 70th birthday. Vega's large concert hall, with a capacity of 1500, was sold out. The concert was met with very positive reviews. In 2013 the concert was released as the DVD/CD and DVD/2-LP album Pure McCartney. In 2013, the collective held further performances playing McCartney songs.

Track listing

2012 remaster

Ram was reissued in several packages:

Personnel