This Is The Thread Where We Praise And Canonize Paul McCartney's "Ram"

HERE WE GO!

Go ahead and buy "Ram". It can't be that expensive, and you'll probably like it. It has the most extensive Beach Boys homage of his solo work, and some good examples of that sort of linear song structure at which he excels (where it's just a progression of bits rather than verse-chorus-verse). Yes, there's some goofy and even embarassing bits on it, but anyone buying a Macca record knows to expect that. It's a totally unpretentious and, at times, charming album.

Nice haiku, Begs2Differ!

"Fluff, sure, but darn catchy fluff!" - Roger Catlin, Musichound Rock: The Essential Album Guide, 1996.

"Brimming with melodies and intriguing ideas!" - William Ruhlmann, The All-Music Guide to Rock, 1995.

"Most of the songs are so lightweight they float away even as Paulie layers them down with caprices!" - Robert Christgau, Christgau's Record Guide, 1981.

"There are some nice moments...It's like watching someone juggle five guitars!" - Playboy, 9-71.

"wailing sentimentality!" - Billboard, 1971.

"I don't see how someone can play it and take in all that stuff and say 'I don't like it!" - Paul McCartney

?!

Jody say it ain't so! It's a decent record. I don't LOVE it or anything, but it's ok. I got a vinyl copy for free. "Too Many People" is a great song.

'Heart of the Country' is a nice jazzy thing that if it had been on the White Album and had some input from the other beatles would have been 10x better.

Paul's 'wigging out' moments like around 3'20 of 'Too Many People' are fucking deadly.

Haha. Yuppers.

I think I said this on another thread once, but I can only listen to Paul in moderation. I like many of his songs on the White Album, but if you listen to them all in a row, you'd be dead by Blackbird > Rocky Racoon.

Too Many People
3 Legs
Ram On
Dear Boy
Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey
Smile Away
Heart of the Country
Monkberry Moon Delight
Eat at Home
Long Haired Lady
Ram On (Reprise)
The Back Seat of My Car

*SNICKER*

I tried listening once. It wasn't very good.

Me no understand.

"Get Back" = Great
"Eat at Home" = Stinks?

Me no understand.

"Lady Madonna" = Classic
"Monkberry Moon Delight" = "The nadir in the decomposition of the sixties?"

Me no understand.

Has 'Monkberry Moon Delight' ever been sampled in a hip-hop track? 'Cause it damn well should be.

this record is great, my favorite Macca solo work

Absolutely.

Surely a great album, although he has done several better ones after he broke up Wings again.

Lately I've been wanting to add Big Barn Bed (from Red Rose Speedway) to Ram...it's got the weird catchy pot-smoking Ram vibe so much. I wonder if it was recorded at the same time?

Ah, it was. I thought I remembered a snippet of it on Ram.

i really like "ram".

the album with the bonus song "oh woman oh why" is the one to get, simply cos that song's a really funky stones-y dirge.

Perhaps some will find this interesting, perhaps not...

...but I'm rerecording "Ram" all by myself, track by track. Have a listen!

The Ram Project

Can't listen right now, but nice idea. I haven't ever heard Ram, i should probably track down the original before checking out your version anyway. Oh, and i've read that book, Tim, it's really good.

I've always said I'd like it played as my funeral song

What! Awesome!

I think my Band on the Run ploy worked. I got all excited a moment ago just looking at the tracklist

my plan has always been to follow Paul into the '80s and '90s as the years pass and i grow to be the same age he was when he made those albums. i don't want to feel the pressure of listening to all of his material from that era and deciding if i like it right now. there's no rush

Xp Yes. And as the slouching defeat of the pipes and drums outro brings people to horrible tears, I will sit bolt upright in my coffin during the surprise fake-out, wink at the congregation, shriek an ungodly shriek, then lay back down forever

In all seriousness, Let Em In was playing during the assessment for my blood donation today and that was a difficult-to-concentrate-on moment

late to this party but will add that Paul seems a big let me roll it fan himself, his 9th most performed song according to setlist fm (and he did indeed play it when i saw him)

Another thing about Ram that I really love is that it feels like its own world. I don't know if I have those same feelings about any other Paul project other than Pepper.

― Blood On The Knobs, Wednesday, 18 June 2025 15:07 (six days ago) bookmarkflaglink

I have the big deluxe "Ram" box, and it's non-disc extras like notebooks, sketches, flick-books and whatever else, are totally charming and lovely. As you say, it's its own world.

Yeah for sure

"Hope of Deliverance" is a gold-plated classic to me.

In all seriousness, Let Em In was playing during the assessment for my blood donation today and that was a difficult-to-concentrate-on moment

currently obsessed with the instrumental outtake (?) "sunshine sometime", what a warm peaceful blanket of a tune

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHii_TnJzB8

wow that's a delight

thinking of paul stoned at home grooving to this

kind of proto-mac demarco

very very very nice

Funny that Let Me Roll It has significantly more plays on Spotify than Mrs Vandebilt, which I assume is the more famous song

Mrs Vandebilt is a famous song? where and how?

^this

I didn't say it was a famous song?

One thing "Let Me Roll It" has going for it is that it was in dialogue with Lennon's "How Do You Sleep?"

Also he's doing a Lennon impersonation and it's a far better song than Mrs Vandebilt.

"Mrs Vandebilt" is a model of production and playing. The bass tracka lone.

I didn't realize it was spelled without an "r" until today.

Oh!

Ey-oh!

I love Mrs Vandebilt for a lot of reasons, not least of which is the switcheroo from “what’s the use of worrying” (reassuring!) to “what’s the use of A-NY-THIIIIING” (dark and hilarious!)

The Oh! Eh-oh! bit alone feels semi-iconic

Hate it. Reminds me of one of the Bee Gees' worst 60s singles, "I-O-I-O".

... or whatever it was called.

fwiw as someone with v lite knowledge of macca solo I have heard of "Let Me Roll It" but not "Mrs Vanderbilt".

I've been on a massive Paul + Beatles + Family kick for a month or two now. Falling deeper in love with many old favorites -- the White Album, Let It Be (Naked), Abbey Road, McCartney, Approximately Infinite Universe [I thought I couldn't love these albums more, yet I was soooo wrong]... but Ram is still my single favorite thing that a Beatle has been involved in. That beautiful, rainy, homespun vibe, my god...! The sadness and sweetness and defiance!

hell yeah! love that.

Paul doesn't seem to hold anything back in the new two-part Vanity Fair interview - just more relaxed, less guarded and much more blunt.

Forgot, they make it clear this interview was done in 2015, for the Jann Wenner bio, but only a small portion was used for it.

I thought Man On the Run would be a bit of a snooze but it’s superb. Very artist-approved but candid in places and fascinating in its assemblage of stuff I’ve never seen. Nary a talking head in sight.

I did not realize that "Coming Up" inspired John to return to the studio to make Double Fantasy.

Also good to hear Sean Ono Lennon's defense of Paul's infamous "yeah, it's a drag innit...cheers" reaction to John's murder.

It was pretty good, mostly because it allowed dissenting voices (Henry McCullough, Denny Seiwell) but also granted Linda her importance.

Yeah good fun. And it spent a good long while on Ram, which was nice. Man I love Ram

I really love the first McCartney record, it's so offhand and low stakes in a charming way, feels like an ex-Beatle version of a four-track cassette album

No mention of "Give Ireland Back to the Irish" in the doc, which would've been a good counterexample to the idea that Paul's music was never politcal

#1 in Spain!

'Man On the Run' left me a little melancholy. I never thought about him being only 27 when the Beatles split. wanting to get that feeling again of a band starting out and growing together along with thoughts of needing to 'grow up' was strange place to see someone so experienced and accomplished. Shows how important those early years with John were. Yeah, very lucky he had someone like Linda.

Every time I learn a little about Linda the more I like her -- apparently she and Yoko got on swimmingly.

yes, she felt more like the star of the documentary than paul. and the idea of she and yoko getting on well makes me very happy indeed

What Rob Sheffield wrote about Bowie and Iman in his book applied to Paul and Linda: by the time he met her he'd had every kind of deviant sex, so when he married her it was the comfort of knowing this was IT.

Is it much different to WingSpan? I liked that.

My fave solo McCartney along with "Chaos...". Just solid throughout. I like playing it after "Smiley Smile".
I knew Hugh McCracken through an old studio job I had and often chatted with him but had *absolutely no idea* he had played on this when we spoke. Boy, I would've annoyed him with questions.

Smiley Smile comparison makes a lot of sense

Well well well well weeeeeellllllll

Listening to a boot of RAM backing tracks and ... wow... this was his big Beach Boys homage, wasn't it? The vocal harmonies on just about every track are truly Wilsonian.

surprised to learn this already had the AMG 5 stars in 2004, i'd assumed that grade came later.

he made a better smile than brian wilson did

xp Yes. The 1997 edition (available on archive.org) gave it three-stars with a capsule review by William Ruhlmann.

FWIW, AMG generally raised a lot of grades online (at least for mainstream releases) after they were taken over by another company. Michael Erlewine posted a review on the Rolling Stones' Blue & Lonesome on Amazon back in 2016, and he wrote about AMG and what happened to it in the comments discussion of that review after another user asked him about it. Amazon has since deleted comments on all of their reviews, but luckily this was shared before that happened, so here it is:

I created AMG, but no longer own or run it. When I left AMG, we had 150 full-time employees and over 500 freelance writers. I believe it is much less today, very few working on it. The good news is that I saw that the reviewing, discography, biography, etc. of all the main music up until the late 1990s was done thoroughly and by experts in the field. That work will stand. However, the first thing the buyers of AMG did was to inform me to neutralize ALL negative reviews, since it might impact the record companies. I did not like that, was soon sidelined, and pushed out. However, as mentioned, all that good work of the music we all love is still there. I doubt the present is being covered well, with so few employees, etc. That is life.

His observation about the older reviews no longer holds because many of them have since been replaced, possibly as part of that new policy to "neutralize" negative reviews.

yeah BAck Seat of My Car is really Wilson-y

Where can I hear these Ram offcuts etc?

Look up ioRR and CaptainAcid ;)