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.

1970@50: MCCARTNEY - PAUL MCCARTNEY

Starting off with hand percussion and acoustic guitar and a familiar rock tenor going through what sound like an off the cuff ditty to his wife. It ends with a self-conscious giggle. The next song has a more adept folky figure and Paul's Let it Be voice where he's going for something more contemporary. Valentine Day is a shambling rock instrumental that goes longer than it needs.

Every Night is the first thing that sounds like a song. Deft shifting between major and minor. Paul's voice is more natural and his welcome falsetto rides atop a pleasant strumming folky acoustic wash. It's lovely. Hot as Sun is a throwback instrumental with a melody you can easily hear McCartney singing. Bright clean guitars and cooling organ tones. Again, lovely. It is interrupted by the kind of spooky sounds (glasses ringing from fingertips running around their rims) that Pink Floyd were filling whole sides with. Lest this should scare everyone away there's a quick snatch of something jaunty with a vocal that enters and exits in seconds.

Junk is a gentle strummed number with acoustic guitar and glockenspiel with a lovely minor key verse and sustained chord chorus as a junkyard's pieces are listed. The choruses are a brief sad dialogue between the shop and the yard. Really very beautiful. Man We Was Lonely is a bouncy country song with bright harmonies, minor key verses (one instrumental with well played slide guitar) an echoey arpeggio outro and it's end of side one.

Side Two begins  with Oo You, a gleaming guitar riff and and a bright, inflected rock vocal. There's a good energy to the verses and the falsetto choruses really drive while it's kept impressively lean. Momma Miss America is a loose 12 bar with a two chord figure on guitar, piano and a meaty bass line. This breaks down and rises again as a riffy guitar figure which repeats rather than develops. Paul is telling us he can play rock guitar. This ends.

Teddy Boy is another of the few finished songs. A gentle strumming figure under a light vocal tells a tale about a boy who feels betrayed by the loss of his father and the appearance of a step father. He goes off by himself dreaming of protecting his mother. A lovely chorus blends a descending chord pattern with a rising backing vocal that might be either Paul or Linda or both. A sadder instrumental version of Junk follows with a piano playing the vocal melody. The falsetto sections give it a strong sense of cinema score. A small block of beautiful music that feels crafted and ready.

Maybe I'm Amazed begins with broad piano chords that announce something importance. McCartney enters in full rock tenor with a pleading vocal to his lover this breaks into a lovely screaming section which gives way to a richly melodic guitar solo which gives way to the screaming section repeat that folds back down to the opening pointed vocal of the opening verse which bursts into an instrumental section founded on a huge organ chord. The solo repeats, augmented by the chromatic climbs on the piano bass notes. The fade is slow but satisfying. This is the album's centrepiece and is the one real moment that convinces that he had the strength to raise something to the quality of his recently ended Beatle years. A small epic of vulnerability confessed through great power.

Kreen Akore matches meaningless drum tracks with David Gilmour guitar, multi-tracked choirs, more guitar, an organ bass note, more drumming exercises, a runner's breathing comes in. More Floydish organ and guitar wailing. Not bad but better when Pink Floyd did it.

To anyone who heard this at the time, hoping that the hero of Abbey Road was going to give the world a monument to polished invention this album could only have been a letdown. Not only because the point of Abbey Road was that it sounded like the last real group effort by a band that had grown so prodigiously inventive that they could no longer be held under the one name. And as Paul seemed the one more together and outgoing, surely he would keep the competitive flag aloft. But no.

What they got was a holiday songbook with offcuts and off-the-cuffs slapped on to two sides like a holiday cook would do. The best of these suggest McCartney's innate power with melody and structure but the worst, like the opener and most of the attempted rock instrumentals, approach being embarrassing. Who expected more of Ringo than the friend-supported wince of Sentimental Journey but, really, was it too much for the Mr Music of the band to come up with more than these rags and the odd hint of old greatness? Well, you have to think about that.

Of all of them, Paul's sense of the rug-pull would have weighed the worst. John and Yoko went off gallivanting and frightening the horses forging records that worked through their audacity as much as their content. George had a more earnest chat with Phil Spector who had been given the worst job with the Let it Be project but could offer the newly emerging songwriter a big ground-up musical wealth. Even Ringo did ok. But in each case the other three did something Paul seemingly couldn't bring himself to do, work with other people, with friends like Eric Clapton or Klaus Voorman.  They even worked with each other again, this time free of the constraints of the iconic Beatle context. Paul sneered at this chumminess and did everything himself.

No one stopped him releasing unlistenable instrumentals or goofy love notes to his wife. The best two shorter complete songs, Junk and Teddy Boy, were Beatles era songs anyway. The rest sounds competent but uncommitted. Except for Maybe I'm Amazed. Was it perversity? I don't know but if that had been released as a single he could have had the biggest post Beatle hit out of all of them. But no. It feels as though he's taking his ball back home to kick it against the wall rather than let those guys play. This record came with his public announcement about leaving the band and a self-penned "interview" protesting that he was over it all and moving ahead. But if this was moving ahead it had better be done with a rear vision mirror as he seemed audibly to be devolving.

Time has not been kind to this record. The cover art of Linda's photos of him enjoying the bearded lifestyle post-fame is fun but the sounds that came from its grooves were those of exhaustion, a flat end of inspiration. What did he make of albums like the lush and strong All Things Must Pass, the lean and eviscerating Plastic Ono Band, or even Ringo's chart topping and compelling It Don't Come Easy? Whatever he thought his withholding of the best song on this album just feels like pique. Perhaps he just did need the time off. The next album, which pointed clearly to how the ensuing decade would play for him, was the opposite of this. Nothing on that is as strong as the strongest one on this but he would learn that success in his thirties would not need the headlong charge it took in his twenties. Maybe that's it, this is his moment of saying to himself: right, you've got one record to panic and then you have to start working.