And “Monkberry Moon Delight” is the bore to end all bores: Paul repeats a riff for five and a half minutes to no apparent purpose. The “When I’m Sixty-Four” school of light English baubles is represented by “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey,” a piece with so many changes it never seems to come down anywhere, and in the places that it does, sounds like the worst piece of light music Paul has ever done. “Smile Away” is sung with that exaggerated voice he used for the rock & roll medley in Let It Be: it is unpleasant. On “Three Legs” they do strange and pointless things to the sound of the voice to liven it up it doesn’t work. The album’s genre music-blues and old rock-is unbearably inept. For myself, I hear two good things on this record: “Eat At Home,” a pleasant, if minor, evocation of the music of Buddy Holly (with some very nice updating), and “Sitting in the Back Seat of My Car,” the album’s production number. Lennon has the better of it for the moment, but he may falter yet: “Power to the People” was as awful in its own way as anything on Ram, and only a fool would write off a man of McCartney’s past accomplishments on the basis of two albums (I’m not much of a fan of the last one either).Īll of which makes it no less easy to deal with this very bad album from this very talented artist. Thus the dissolution of the Beatles reveals that their compromises had always been psychological first, and musical second, and that without each other they both drift naturally to their own emotional-musical extreme. And it is so lacking in the taste that was one of the hallmarks of the Beatles that it strongly suggests Paul is not happy in his role as a solo artist, no matter how much he protests to the contrary. On the one hand there were the rockers: “She’s A Woman,” “I’m Down,” “If You Won’t See Me,” “Get Back,” and “Lady Madonna” on the other, the ballads and the schmaltz, including (in descending order), “Hey Jude,” “She’s Leaving Home,” “Yesterday,” “And I Love Her,” “Taste of Honey” and “Till There Was You.” Ram fulfills all the promise of “Till There Was You” and loses touch with the entire remainder of McCartney’s own past. McCartney’s work in the Beatles was always schizoid. Ram is so incredibly inconsequential and so monumentally irrelevant you can’t even do that with it: it is difficult to concentrate on, let alone dislike or even hate. For some, including myself, Self-Portrait had been secure in that position, but at least Self-Portrait was an album that you could hate, a record you could feel something over, even if it were nothing but regret. Ram represents the nadir in the decomposition of Sixties rock thus far.
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