1971@50: PAUL AND LINDA MCCARTNEY - RAM

About a year after releasing the most surprisingly bitsy ex-Beatle album Paul McCartney brought this more studio slick effort to the public, roping Linda in for the byline. Where McCartney had him in the garden shed, pasting musical  polaroids in with glimpses of grandeur, Ram lines everything up like a real record as if to say it was him behind the woolly beard, after all. 

I didn't own a copy of this record in the '70s. In fact my solo Beatle collection was pretty slight. It wasn't hard to find a copy I just had a wincing response to seeing it that mentally sounded like Nah! See also, Red Rose Speedway and Wings Wildlife. The only ones I had of Paul's were Band on the Run and Venus and Mars. Some great tracks in there but ... My first copy was a hi-res download from an online retailer. I'd walk around with it in my ears and see if I liked it.

Too Many People: By which Paul remembers the value of starting strong. Acoustic guitars and both clean and dirty electrics, rangy vocal with cool water harmonies and falsetto lines and melody as appealing as a perfect lamington with a cup of perfect tea. This is the Paul of Abbey Road rather than the hermit of Kreen Akrore. There's even a note of protest in the words (which would be taken by his old co-writer somewhat personally but that's for when I get to Imagine) which adds a little heft but, really, the message here is that he is back and ready to roll. And roll he does. 

3 Legs: Except he shouldn't do it this way. McCartney blues is not what I want to hear, especially when the pointless lyrics don't earn the musical hue. A call and response acoustic stomp that at best I can tolerate in passing. This is the first sign that he's getting indulged rather than encouraged.

Ram On: Noodley piano, some studio patter and a ukulele comes in with a real vocal in a minor key. This builds to a gentle band arrangement. Goes nowhere but is very easy on the ears.

Dear Boy: If the previous track had a nod or two to late '60s Beach Boys this is an outright wink to the kind of texture and rhythmic play of a Surf's Up or Heroes and Villains. A strident Rhodes vamp and a busy melody soon joined by a choir of beautifully arranged harmonies. Aimed at Linda's first husband rather than Lennon, this one, too, was taken personally by the latter. The frenetic pace and purpose of the song is breaks for breath as a rattling lead guitar solo sounds before a rich choral fade. Utterly marvellous.

Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey: This is as Beatlesque as the album gets with recollections of the Abbey Road medley. A plaintive vocal starts with the rest of the band. We're so sorry, Uncle Albert. For what? Well, this is Paul putting the words on last so you're going to have to stop caring. A phone voice verse in a posh accent still makes me smile: "we're so sorry, Uncle Albert, but we haven't done a bloody thing all day...." The melancholy turns jaunty without a real break. A silly flugel horn tune is overtaken by a screaming chorus and early Fabs style clean guitar progression. A nonsense verse about Admiral Halsey, a falsetto something then back to the flugel horn, the big chorus before a coda and fade. It's hard to call this track a masterpiece despite the obvious love of craft and rich melodic content and mood mapping but the words are meaningless rather than slight and, though this doesn't really get in the way, seem to undercut the music. Oh, did I say fade? I meant crossfade as a few ugly guitar squawks lead us to ...

Smile Away: If blues isn't Paul's thing he's out to hammer that home with a big clumsy balls out rocker which brings back the Beach Boys salute with Bula BVs and what sounds like lyrics made up during a jam version that through insistence (or lack of resistance) made it on the album. Could be worse is the best I'm giving it. But, honestly, considering the scale of Uncle Albert which should have put it at the end of the old side one, why put this on the end?

Heart of the Country: A good strong acoustic strut where the jazz influences fit well. This makes me wonder if he adapted the White Album sliver Can You Take Me Back was nagging as this melodically and rhythmically. Lovely.

Monkberry Moon Delight: And then there's this. A strong strident minor key thumper with stupid words and a vocal pushed into what sounds like self parody. Those two elements ruin this number. Listen to this and the later 1985 when he got the combination right and compare. I have to pretend it's a guest vocalist. I think he's trying for a kind of Cab Calloway in the voice. It's completely at odds with the smoother BVs. Goes on.

Eat at Home: A domestic life plea which might also be a thinly veiled sexual invitation is set in a pleasant soft rock pool. The Buddy Holly style symmetrical melody is delivered in a pleasing mid range vocal. While not ground breaking, it's a smiler.

Long Haired Lady: In which Linda gets a few solo lines demanding relationship commitment. The scale starts big here with a massed acoustic guitars and brass arrangement adding breadth. What sounds initially like a plea for respect in a relationship soon turns into a quirky but sincere sounding love song that stretches into a Hey Jude coda with fanfare trumpets, a stronger restatement of the Linda lines before a final verse and then more Hey Jude fade. Easy listening but intentionally so.

Ram On: A messy but fun reprise of the side one fun mess.

Back Seat of My Car: Broody guitars support Paul's melancholy vocal about a plan of personal freedom with his love. This is a clear invocation of what he loved about the Beach Boys at their most polished. Brian Wilson's rapid changes, chanting BVs, silky lead vocals lead up to a far more McCartney-style minor key chorus of "we believe that we can't be wrong". A sudden jaunty break smooths out again and leads back to the chorus and a big finish. This is the most like the decade to come (not just for McCartney) that the album reaches and it is appropriately at the end of the sequence as though gazing out over the waves or into the sky towards whatever the new times hold.

This record feels like McCartney really did get out of bed and concentrate on getting a record done. He and Linda even went to America to do it and due to that and a number of other value changes and shifts produced a record that didn't sound like a broken rock star in a shed but a composer's expression. While I can never love some of these tracks the whole thing makes sense and carries the feel of music made for a public. 

Personally, I think that if I had bought a copy of this as a teenager I would have listened to all of it once before skipping on every further outing (which I did, admittedly, on most albums at the time) but the relief of having a record that sounded like it cared what I thought of it would have remained. I would graduate to preferring records made without that care but it was warmth that would have taken me then.

There's a vague meme some folk are circulating that this is the prototype indie pop album and it needs to stop. That only goes in one direction and one only. If someone comes up with a means to fashion the exact textures of an old thing nowadays they are copying the past and only copying the past. Paul was not telling the future. Any attempt by people who don't understand or care about the difference between influence and mechanical reproduction is doomed to exposure or, worse, snivelling sychophancy. So, if you are in your twenties or maybe late teens and you come across a listen to Ram, you are hearing the past, whatever you think of it. Instead, consider how that past has been plundered by people who got there a little ahead of you and made records that sounded like they were done in 1971 and are treated as reverently as if they'd come from then. Consider indulging that rather than exalting it. Thank you, thank you, ladies and gentlemen.

Plastic Ono Band Revisited: Too versions?

I've already done the autobiographical thingy about this album and if you want to read that it's here. In short, I've never warmed to it. Then this came out, a box set with hours o' material to listen to if you really love the thing. Well, I don't but I have been increasingly fascinated by it as a whole statement and these expanded releases at their best can really set things in context. So, does this?

First, what's in the box? Six CDs of the remastered album, outtakes, demos, studio takes in various states of completion, all the rags that eventually were placed and trimmed before the record was given to the world. A hardcover book with masses of photos and interview material to give context to the songwriting, recording and the place of the album in its moment of history. And a second sleeve with two Blu-Rays that have everything on the CDs plus the studio jams that became a lot of the companion Yoko Ono: Plastic Ono Band.

There's a distinct difference here between this packaging of the later Beatles albums that have come out in fiftieth anniversary boxes and it's a significant one. On the Abbey Road box we get a number of discs that feature the other shots taken of the iconic zebra crossing photo and it's easy to see the point as the alternative photos are on the covers of discs with alternative versions, out takes, and whatever else that, like the particular photo didn't make it on to the album. 

The Plastic Ono Band box contains a number of iterations of the original cover without a pixel's difference. Every sleeve has the same photo. There's also a point to this. Lennon's purpose was minimalism: low production of a small band and the least arrangement necessary to keep the mystique at a minimum and the communication front and centre. It also reflects the sequencing of the music which is the tracklist in album order regardless of its state of completion or recording date. Starting with the new master we get the entire set as demos, developing tracks, raw studio mixes and so on. Oh, also, the three singles from the time get the treatment, too: Give Peace a Chance, Cold Turkey and Instant Karma. A lot of material but formed into digestible courses.

I pretty much shelled out for the two hi-res discs. The finished album is presented in stereo, 5.1 (96 and 192 khz 24 bit!) and the more expansive Dolby Atmos (lesser bit rate but a world of great newness). The rest of the material on the two Blu-Rays is entirely in stereo but at those celestially high sample rates. 

From Mother to My Mummy's Dead, the original album in Atmos is swoonable. When you get a movie in this audio format you usually get a lot of directional presence (helicopters landing, bullets richocheting etc) but here the object based sound design is used to create a larger ambient stage. The voice is in the centre with other instruments in the typically trio setup and the room reverb filling out the rest of the channels. It's a kind of stereo deluxe. The early days of remixing classic rock in surround featured a lot of gimmick thinking with guitars circling around the way they never do but here we just get to be in the room with the music. If anything the overall sound is beefier than before which will bother a lot of purists but it is a higher resolution presentation than it ever was and it's not pretending to be anything else. Thoughtfully executed, it is a marvel.

And then it's all the other versions. All of them are worth at least one listen but many hipsters happening on this set will nod sagely at reverb free vocals on Instant Karma or a plainer mix than Phil Spector administered. There is a lot to enjoy in the evolution and elements sequences and the demos and raw performances bring a lot of moment to the experience. I usually find going through these preparatory or forensic versions interesting the first time and most of these fall into that box. None is better than the released version but many hold charm as musical diary entries. Of all of them my favourite is an early take on Mother with guitar and amp tremolo which is delivered with a quieter and more poignant vocal. At the other end of the album sequence there were exactly two takes of My Mummy's Dead. They were done at the same occasion by the same method, Lennon singing along to his guitar into a cassette recorder. They are all but indistinguishable from each other, do not allow more than EQ or compression. Despite this either one or the other will appear at the end of the tracklist whether it's demo, evolution, elements, raw studio, or whatever else. Given the generous real estate of Blu-Ray this can't be called a waste of space but the only reason they are there is because that's how the original album ends and the concept of presenting that and the three singles in order needed to be fulfilled. 

The jam tracks are mostly misnamed, being the kind of idle cover versions you might remember from the Let it Be sessions. Elvis here a number of other early rockers there. Two early drafts of Imagine's I Don't Wanna Be a Soldier are worth a listen as they goe from a kind of flavourless Blood on the Tracks canter to the more effective blues take which led to the album track. Some moments are too fleeting to get the titles they receive in the sequence: I've Got a Feeling is really a few strums of the chord sequence; Get Back is a brief guitar noodle. The longer take of Lost John is worth repeat listening and the banter can be funny but that's what you get when you put jams on (see also the third disc of All Things Must Pass, though that's a lot slicker). 

The most value beyond the original album and singles sequence, though comes at the end when the bedrock jams (actual jams) are laid down for the Yoko companion album. Not all of it was used and then not always recognisably but these really are worth the listen. If you thought that Yoko Ono was only capable of ice pick wailing over tokenistic rock playing get in front of these. There is that wailing but there's a lot more as well and it's articulate and purposed, sounding more disciplined and committed than the designation  of live studio jam would suggest. It is what we get instead of the Yoko Ono Plastic Ono Band album. I can say that I've listened to these tracks (they're only on the Blu-Ray) more than the jams or out takes. 

The book is a handsome hardcover with strong photographic content. There are chapters on Janov's primal scream therapy which informed the shape of the music, lyrics and performance of the record, chapters on individual tracks taken from various interview sources including some more recent recollections of participants. Information on the recording process and a very handy mix map of the surround material. It's more, in other words, than a glorified brochure.

I bought this set and bought into it because, despite the distaste I had for the album, the record haunted me (and I had the money) and whether it was hearing it in such high resolution, in surround, or just as clearly and fully as it is presented here I have changed my mind. Where I thought of it as a musically mediocre showbiz turn in the guise of a cry of pain and triumph it now meets me as an authentic statement made from serious needs and presents as a cohesive punch. I still don't love Well Well Well or I Found Out and still have trouble recalling them as distinct from each other they now sit well in the sequence. What once was a bin of narcissistic whinging now, finally, feels like communication.