Ram, Paul McCartney‘s second solo album, was released to mediocre reviews in mid 1971. Equal parts pretentious and inconsequentially pretty, was the general tone. And certainly, especially compared to John Lennon‘s Utopianism-as-therapy on Imagine and George Harrison‘s masterpiece of frustrated ambition All Things Must Pass, Ram presents as a touch slight.
Maybe it’s just compared to what we now know was to come from Macca, or maybe the current world situation has built in me a high tolerance for the pretty and the inconsequential, but I kind of love it. All the worst impulses he had without the other Beatles to dirty proceedings up are present, but expressed as perfectly and as winningly as he ever managed.
The melodies are delicate, not saccharine, but intricate and lively; see the storm of harmonies billowing out of Dear Boy.
And while it’s a more “professional” effort than the homemade aesthetic of McCartney, which precedes it, Ram keeps the edges just raw enough, those edges that McCartney that would spend most of the rest of his career buffing until you could see your grimacing reflection in it.
But here, say, the stomping, banging-on-the-counter beat, combining with meandering Ukulele of Ram On the effect is cumulatively haunting.
And his collaborations with Linda were never better than the playful, sexy Long Haired Lady (“Well I’ve been meaning to talk to you about it, for some time … “)
Elsewhere, there’s a dull pang of bitterness that permeates a lot of the record. The other Beatles read all kinds of coded messages in the lyrics, and they were probably right.
Personally, the whole Too Many People/How Do You Sleep? axis bums me out; a near decade of magic, a rarely matched creative and charismatic chemistry, all reduced to stroppy millionaires trading letters stuffed with petty recriminations and perceived slights in public. I know in many ways it simply couldn’t have been otherwise. But I don’t have to like it, neither as artistic fuel, nor for whatever else it communicates about people and love and memory.
On the other hand, I’ll say this: that tone at least keeps McCartney’s tendency to the fanciful, the meaninglessly wacky, the maddeningly twee more or less under control. And where that fails – say Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey which somehow managed to be his first solo number 1, which may have taught him some bad lessons – there’s a melodic flourish (in this case the “hands across the water” refrain) to keep you interested.
McCartney, for better and for worse, is a craftsman, and while he’d write many more good songs (and handful of truly great songs); sonically and thematically, it never quite came together like this — he never sounded quite so good — again.
Dancing to Architecture 