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

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.

the 2004 posts are nuts. i don't even like Macca all that much but Ram and his first album are great

yeah that is weird. I don't think the tide has turned on this album in the past few years; as far as I remember it's been considered a classic since the 80's at least. I dont' think it was super well received when it came out but that feeling didn't last long. maybe people were just feeling bad in 2004, what with bush being reelected and the world beginning to suck.

Ram: the choice of the Obama generation.

yeah pretty strange to see spittle-flecked contrarianism on ILM eh

its like the Stevie Wonder c/d thread where the first 100 posts are all people complaining about his sappy balladry

Nice work thus far Davey D!

kudos on all those Dear Boy vocals! damn

Thanks! Just finished "Eat At Home," BTW.

http://www.paulmccartney.com/web/guest/news/-/blogs/paul-and-linda-mccartney-s-legendary-album-ram-set-for-deluxe-reissue?_33_redirect=/web/guest&#p_33#top

RAM will be available across a variety of different formats:

Standard Edition: 1 CD digipak Single disc, digitally remastered 12- track standard edition

Special Edition: 2 CD digipak Remastered album and 8-track bonus audio CD including rarities, b-sides and the hit single, 'Another Day'.

Deluxe Edition Box Set: 4 CD/1 DVD box set & download Remastered album, bonus audio CD, remastered Mono album, Thrillington CD, bonus film DVD, 112 page book, 5 prints in vintage style photographic wallet, 8 full size facsimiles of Paul's original handwritten lyric sheets and mini photographic book of outtakes from the original album cover photo shoot.

Hi-Res: 24bit 96kHz files of the remastered and bonus audio CD, accessed via a download code inserted on a card within the deluxe edition package

Vinyl: 2LP 180gm, gatefold vinyl with download Remastered album, bonus audio disc plus digital download of all 20 tracks

Limited Edition Mono Vinyl: 1LP, Remastered mono album

Digital: RAM will be available for download across a variation of digital configurations including Mastered for iTunes and High Resolution

Right...

Love this album. So many memories of my grandmother's house in the South of France where she had this record (used to belong to my aunt). Of course, being French, she would mishear a lot of lyrics and on "Another Day" (Paul's single from the time) she scanned the chorus as going: "Sau-sage/Sau-sage/Sometimes I feel sau-sage"...

I want that deluxe edition. I love, love, love this record, and did even as a kid. My father had it, and I think I wore out the binding opening and closing the gatefold cover. (Just as so many kids first hear "Yellow Submarine" as their gateway into the Beatles, I got into solo McCartney as a result of "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey.")

Sorry I missed on the covers project, totally woulda been into that!

One of my friends suggested a full-LP "Ram" cover band for Halloween one year, which sounds like a dream.

the backlash to the backlash!!!!!

http://www.pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16651-ram/

Is not wrong.

Half the album is listenable but "Uncle Albert" was and remains a piece of shit – and I'm the guy who defends Press to Play.

It's strange how UA/AH got to number one in the USA, but never even got released as a single here.

Also that "Back seat of my car" (which is great), only got to 37 or thereabouts. Were the great UK public really so bored of McCartney then?

^^^ Drunk talk, you'll regret that later

Bought the deluxe version of this with a gift card I had sitting around from Xmas. It sounds terrific, I've always loved this album. (My dad had it when I was a kid, and I remember hearing it a lot in like 1974-75). The accompanying disc with the singles from the same period is great as well, and mastered so well that, e.g., I hear backing harmonies in "Another Day" that I've never heard before, and I've heard that song at least a hundred times.

er xp to Alfred, not Mark G

oh I love "Another Day," which nails the domestic vibe that John kinda misses in "Just Like Starting Over."

#26 on the midweeks.

Too late for me, however, I did this review some while back with only the ancient vinyl original to hand.

I like the 'Uncle Albert' part of UA/AH, but I've never really been keen on the 'Admiral Halsey' part.

I've always had a fondness for Ram, although it's probably my 5th favourite McCartney album overall.

I always thought "Hands across the water" was pretty damn brilliant myself.

this album is amazing front-to-back imho

third best Beatle solo album behind ATMP and Imagine

yeah, Ram is really, really great. I grabbed a bunch of his other solo stuff based on the awesomeness of Ram and was kind of bummed that it's head and shoulders above the rest (there's some decent stuff on McCartney and McCartney II, and a few Wings songs that grab me, but nothing so consistently fantastic as Ram).

I haven't checked the credits lately but isn't the first and last Macca album until TOW to feature session men? Does he play that terrific bass lick in "Too Many People"?

Paul plays everything on this record, except for some random shit (vox/keybds) credited to Linda. He recorded it at home.

for someone so often pilloried for his sentiment and cloyingly obvious lyrics, it's funny how much of this album's lyrics are elliptical proto-nonsense. nothing is expressed in a very straightforward matter, everything is buried in a lot of goofy stoner imagery

matter manner

but Hugh McCracken, Dave Spinozza, etc are in the credits.

Paul plays everything on this record, except for some random shit (vox/keybds) credited to Linda. He recorded it at home.

Yeah, no. He recorded it at CBS Studios in New York, with Denny Seiwell on drums, the guitar guys listed above by Alfred, and orchestra overdubs arranged by George Martin.

In the book in the deluxe edition, Seiwell says he got a call from his booking place about an audition, showed up to discover Paul and Linda in some craphole studio with just a drum set, and Paul asked him to play various beats -- straight rock, a shuffle, something funky, etc. All unaccompanied. He just wanted to hear the dude play.

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 ;)