Hands across the water
On 17 April 1970, just three weeks before the release of the absurdly-billed “new phase Beatles album” Let It Be, Paul McCartney put out McCartney. It was an unapologetically bric-à-brac affair, having grown out of odds and ends McCartney had been playing with on his Studer J37 four-track recording machine at his London home on Cavendish Avenue. Some tracks were new compositions, others — like ‘Teddy Boy’ and ‘Junk’ — tuneful leftovers from his Beatles days. Sales of McCartney were strong, but the record was largely panned by critics as an insubstantial, self-indulgent mess. Only the majestic ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’ was deemed worthy of a leading ex-Beatle.
Stung by the criticism, McCartney quickly turned his thoughts to a more polished follow-up, one that would reveal McCartney to have been no more than a tantalising promissory note for its creator’s post-Beatles career. Accordingly, in early October 1970 he and Linda set sail for New York. As he would recall years later:
"We were on holiday in France and thinking about making another album. I’d written a few new songs and we thought that for a change we’d go to New York to record. It’s a good place, with a lot of great musicians and would give us a different slant. We’d tried the amateur bit with McCartney, going back to square one; now we wanted to get a bit more professional. So we took the ocean liner [SS] France and sailed from Southampton over to New York."
Once in Manhattan, he booked Columbia Studios at 524 West 57th Street and set about recruiting musicians.
Songs for no one
There are three cardinal facts to bear in mind about the Paul McCartney who arrived in New York that early October. One, he was on fire creatively. Two, he was deeply in love with his new wife, Linda. Three, John Lennon was living rent-free in his head.
All three facts were of course intimately related. The disintegration of The Beatles had left McCartney in a ghastly no-man’s-land. One of the most poignant things in Peter Jackson’s Get Back documentary, with its footage shot in January 1969, is the recurring sight of McCartney at the piano working on new tunes. The melodies are positively oozing out of him. Only… the all-important Beatles cause in whose very service his melodic gift has hitherto been exercised is dying before his eyes. The other guys — well, John and George anyway — have all but tuned out. The better Paul gets, the more he seems to be resented.
All these melodies, all these song ideas, but what — and who — are they for? Some, it is true, will end up on Let It Be, others will find a home on Abbey Road, but with that swansong album in the can and its makers no longer a viable unit, McCartney will find himself in a horrible void.
And boy, did he feel it after the break-up happened for real. Where John could go and cut ‘Instant Karma!’ and feel artistically liberated from the ‘shackles’ of Beatledom, and George could access the same feeling by splurging, in his All Things Must Pass album, on all those compositions that had been passed over for Beatles consideration, Paul felt the loss of his Liverpool bandmates acutely. That the band’s breakup was so acrimonious, with him on the receiving end of most of the opprobrium, exacerbated the situation immensely.
If John’s sentiments could be summed up on ‘God’ as “I don’t believe in Beatles, I just believe in me, Yoko and me”, then Paul’s might be captured in the much more complicated formula: “I still believe in Beatles, and I believe in me, Linda and me”. Linda was not the person who, Yoko-like, made living away from The Beatles better than living with them; no, she was the person who made living without The Beatles bearable.
Paul McCartney in Autumn 1970 was thus a man bereaved — in grief for the sudden new homelessness of his songwriting gift; in grief for the friendship with the one man he considered his songwriting equal and whom he would years later call “the best collaborator in the world;” and in grief for the unique, unpredictable chemical reactions that had occurred whenever all four Beatles got together and made music.
And so it was that McCartney made a key decision for his second solo album: he would convene a band. McCartney had been his DIY vehicle for keeping himself busy (and sane) as the Beatles world was collapsing around him; this second album would proceed from the insight that The Beatles were gone but the need for a band vibe was not.
Wanna be in my band?
McCartney made a telling call with respect to personnel: he would avoid the supergroup route, going instead with lesser-known session musicians. No doubt the still fresh memory of big-name bandmates responding churlishly to his ideas and to his work-ethic chivvying informed this move.
And so he and Linda began auditioning people off-site.
22-year-old guitarist David Spinozza was quickly recruited. So too was New York session and jazz drummer Danny Seiwell.
Seiwell received a message from his guitarist friend Barry Kornfeld that there was a paying gig going on a demo recording. No mention of one Paul McCartney, Esq.
Seiwell recounts what happened next:
“They gave me the address, and I said, ‘Jeez, is there a studio there?’ It didn’t sound right. I went to the address, and it was a brownstone, way over on the West side...And it didn’t look like it had electricity. Like they were going to renovate the building or something. I walk up the steps to the lobby there, and there’s a guy. I said, ‘Is there a studio here?’ And he pointed to the basement. And here it is, this dingy, dirt-floor basement, a ratty set of drums sitting in the middle of it, and Paul and Linda sitting on a folding chair over in the corner. That was it. It was very bizarre.”
McCartney had him run through some rock’n’roll patterns, and Seiwell gave good Ringo. McCartney told him he’d let him know. When the call came that Seiwell was in, he was given to understand that it was just for a week’s work, after which McCartney would be bringing in two other drummers one after the other: Donald McDonald and Herb Lavelle. So happy was McCartney with Seiwell’s playing, however, and so well did they hit it off personally, that the talents of those two gentlemen were not called upon in the end.
(By a delightful synchronicity, Seiwell managed to turn up for the first session proper with the actual drumkit Ringo had used at Shea Stadium: a friend had tipped him off that it was being auctioned by the Museum of Famous People, and Seiwell picked it up for $300. Upon seeing it, McCartney did a double take.)
Young David Spinozza didn’t fare so well. After a good start, he made the fatal mistake of clocking off early one afternoon in order to make another musical appointment. McCartney was not best pleased, and immediately set about finding a replacement. New Jersey man Hugh McCracken was brought in as his replacement, and he proved a keeper. Spinozza’s guitar contribution to the album-in-progress would be in evidence on only two released tracks, ‘3 Legs’ and ‘Eat at Home’, though he can also be heard on ‘Another Day’, the hit single that preceded the release of Ram.
Columbia Studios
With the core band in place, recording began in earnest. McCartney’s initial system was straightforward enough, with basic tracks being laid down on a one song per day basis. Typically, he would show the guys a new song in the morning, get them to jam it into life for a while, and then go for takes. Think a Get Back session, only non-dysfunctional, and you get the picture.
‘Another Day’, whose basic idea went back at least as far as January ‘69, was the first song tackled (after, apparently, a warm-up jam of the demented ‘Monkberry Moon Delight’). This happened on 12 October. According to Seiwell, it was recorded “with Paul on acoustic and Dave [Spinozza] on electric guitar… We started out at about ten in the morning, and [by] lunch we had the right take”. Its verse melody sounds like a wistful rewrite of Lennon’s ‘Help’ (which may help explain why Lennon so detested it), while its theme of loneliness hit the same zone of humdrum pathos as McCartney’s own ‘Eleanor Rigby’ and ‘For No One’. All told, a promising enough start to proceedings. It would soon give McCartney his first #1 single as a solo artist.
Between 12 October and the McCartneys’ return home to Britain for Christmas, a hefty amount of preliminary work was done at Columbia Studios.
The following Ram tracks were worked on:
- ‘3 Legs’ (begun 16 October)
- ‘Eat At Home’ (begun 16 October)
- ‘The Back Seat of my Car’ (begun 20 October)
- ‘Long Haired Lady’ (begun 29 October)
- ‘Monkberry Moon Delight’ (begun 3 November)
- ‘Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey’ (begun 5 November)
- ‘Too Many People’ (begun 10 November)
- ‘Smile Away’ (begun 16 November)
- ‘Heart of the Country’ (16-17 November)
But this impressive haul represents only a fraction of what had been created in studio. In his superb 2013 book Paul McCartney: Recording Sessions (1969-2013), Luca Perasi offers an exhaustive catalogue of the wide range of song ideas explored, tracks laid down, and genres tried out in these sessions. Some involved already written musical sketches (McCartney had come to New York with some twenty-nine demos), others grew out of in-studio jams.
For the listener already familiar with Ram, it can be quite a shock to expose one’s ears (with the help of one’s friendly neighbourhood YouTube) to some of the tracks that didn’t make the final cut. This sophomore album could have gone any number of ways. The finished product owed as much to what was left out as to what made the cut.
Clearly, McCartney went into the project without a firm concept of what kind of an album he wanted to make. He was up for Americana, blues, rockabilly, English whimsy, heavy rock and light balladry.
Just as clearly, however, two themes were already very much at the forefront of his mind: his love for and gratitude to Linda, and his pain over the estrangement from John and the loss of his band. The overall impression from the publicly available Columbia recordings (canonical and non-canonical) is of a man who is both galvanised musically and in an intensely exposed state emotionally. The keynotes are distress, disorientation, and determination to make the best of this bizarre new independence that has been thrust upon him. For a sense of the atmospheric pressure under which McCartney was working, take a back-to-back listen to, say, the following jumble of tracks: ‘Monkberry Moon Delight’, ‘Rode All Night’, ‘A Love for You’, ‘Oh Woman, Oh Why?’, ‘Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey’, ‘Too Many People’ and ‘Smile Away’. Pain, confusion, drollery, chaos and creation — all are in the mix. They could very well have yielded McCartney’s own White Album.
What with ultimate track selection, studio layering and production polish, however, the album the listening public finally got to hear months later showcased a significantly more stable, packaged and presentable Paul McCartney.
But — and herein lies the strange power of Ram — enough of the musical and personal restlessness (and aggression) that informed those Autumn/Winter 1970 sessions stuck to the final product. For all that McCartney tries to convey (quite sincerely) the joy of his new-found rustic freedom with Linda and family in Scotland, the album gives off a weirdly post-traumatic energy that undercuts even these happy protestations. McCartney serves up plenty of bitter, plenty of sweet, and the lack of convincing mediation between the two modes exerts a fascination all of its own. At the heart of the record is an ethos of embattled defiance — in the face of critics, of events, of John, and of McCartney’s own self-doubt. Not for nothing does it open with the words “Piss off”.
Album completion and release
In January 1971, the McCartneys returned to New York, where they switched operations to Phil Ramone’s A&R Recording Studios. Here tracking of new songs (including ‘Ram On’ and ‘Dear Boy’) was undertaken, and further overdub work (orchestral and otherwise) on tracks cut at Columbia performed. George Martin was quietly enlisted to score three songs: ‘Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey’, ‘Long Haired Lady’ and ‘The Back Seat of my Car’. His contribution would not be made public for three decades.
The A&R sessions went on into February. In March, the McCartneys flew to Santa Monica and booked into Sound Recorders Studios in Los Angeles, where final work on the album continued until April. These Los Angeles sessions also saw abundant new material recorded that went well beyond Ram requirements. (According to Danny Seiwell, one song worked on here was the Lennon-apostrophising ‘Dear Friend’, perhaps the most haunting thing McCartney has ever done.)
Ram was released on 17 May 1971, thirteen months after McCartney. It too sold well, but its (chief) creator’s hopes that it would be better received critically than its predecessor were quickly disappointed. Jon Landau in Rolling Stone was especially scathing:
“[I]f it was Paul who used to polish up Lennon’s bluntness and forced him to adapt a little style, it is by now apparent that Lennon held the reins in on McCartney’s cutsie-pie, florid attempts at pure rock muzak. He was there to keep McCartney from going off the deep end that leads to an album as emotionally vacuous as Ram. Now left to their own devices, each has done what always came most naturally. Lennon has created a music of almost monomaniacal intensity and blunt style, while McCartney creates music with a fully developed veneer, little intensity, and no energy.”
Ouch.
The lyrical digs at John Lennon that listeners and critics (and of course Lennon himself) detected across the album — starting with the opening ‘diss track’ (‘Too Many People’) — quickly became the story of the album, meaning that it got reduced in significance to merely the latest public volley in the sorry John-Paul feud. The inclusion on the back cover of a photo of two beetles screwing one another didn’t exactly help.
Listen without prejudice
Thesis: the strong prominence given to Linda’s voice across the album affected its reception markedly, that reception being framed — whether consciously or subconsciously — by grief over The Beatles’ recent demise.
For many listeners, Linda’s voice was about as welcome on a McCartney record as the female voices on the Spector-hijacked ‘The Long and Winding Road’ had been to McCartney himself. (What was it he had recently told the Evening Standard? “I would never have female voices on a Beatles record”.) Without Linda’s voice across Ram, in a way that went well beyond anything on McCartney, one could have luxuriated in the illusion that one was listening to Beatle Paul on a quasi-Beatles record. With her voice, that illusion was broken, and the dire fact that Paul was no longer a Beatle sunk in.
There had of course been plenty of Paul songs on Beatles records that did not contain the musicianship or voices of other Beatles. But they had still been enjoyed without complication as Beatles songs. They had the aura. Hearing Linda’s voice on this new stuff, by contrast, changed the experience of hearing his voice. It’s all there in the opening lines of Verse 1 of ‘Too Many People’. “Too many people going underground”, sings Paul. All is well. Then: “Too many reaching for a piece of cake”. Linda comes in on “piece of cake”. All that is Beatlecool melts into air.
In terms of the 1971 listener’s own psychodrama, this phenomenon renders song quality or even vocal performance by Paul functionally irrelevant. One need only imagine, say, ‘Dear Boy’ or ‘Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey’ or ‘3 Legs’ or ‘Smile Away’ with John and George on vocal support to get the point; conversely, one might imagine ‘Back in the U.S.S.R.’ or ‘Two of Us’ or ‘It’s Getting Better’ or ‘Hello Goodbye’ with a multitracked Linda gamely chipping in. Different experience altogether. Ram actually offered McCartney in full bloom as vocalist, musician, tunesmith and wordsmith, only now his astonishing talent was dramatically recontextualised — at least for Beatles fans in disbelief at the fact that the dream was over — by the heavy vocal presence of his new creative partner. Many listeners coming to the album after years of exposure to Beatles music found this presence naff, intrusive and alienating.
It would take several years for Ram to be listened to on its own merits, and for Linda to be accepted as Linda rather than as the ersatz Beatle no one asked for. The prodigious commercial success in the 70s of Wings, a band with Linda at its heart, helped acclimatise people’s ears to her voice as an acquired-taste accompaniment to post-Beatles Paul’s and as an integral element on hit song after hit song. And growing familiarity with Ram as an established item in McCartney’s back catalogue allowed the shock of the new to wear off. As such, one can see McCartney’s foregrounding of Linda on Ram as his bravest call of all: it marked his determination to break with his past, confirm sonically that the dream was indeed over (at least for the foreseeable), and not compete directly with his Beatle self.
Ram’s critical reputation stands high today. Time has not been kind to Landau’s verdict. Ram is widely acclaimed as an indie gem avant la lettre, and home to some of McCartney’s most inventive music and production. The extraordinary panoply of vocal personae showcased by McCartney — there is even a song (‘Monkberry Moon Delight’) that invents Tom Waits — has drawn much admiring comment, as has the intricate tapestry of vocal harmony parts he wove on several tracks.
Perhaps the best way to approach Ram has always been to hear it without prejudice, which is to say not as a post-Beatles record but as the work of a young solo artist hopelessly in love with melody; in love with lyrical abandon; in love with musicianship; in love with the joys of stitching together song ideas in medley style; in love with the wondrous lateral possibilities granted by the modern recording studio; and, yes, in love with his wife and new creative partner.
The album does, it is true, show ominous signs in spots of a lack of quality-control focus, as though McCartney has banished from the room any contrarian voice. A certain tendency towards over-repetition of single ideas, and unawareness of the law of diminishing returns, can cause one to wince here and there. Some songs come across as inspired but only three-quarters written — a flaw not wholly masked by within-track medleying or by bells and whistles on the production side. Yet there is much — very much — to love and admire. It’s certainly quite a trip on headphones. That John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr do not feature does of course tell, but this circumstance should hardly be held against either the album or the young man. Or, for that matter, the wife.
About the author
Daragh Downes is a writer, critic and musician. He has written music features and reviews for The Irish Times and has discussed musical, literary and cultural matters on Irish national radio. For many years he lectured on literature, aesthetic theory and cultural history at Trinity College, Dublin.