camberwell market

Nothing much to say about it actually. The last picture is of the only thing I bought. It was $2 and George Formby is an interesting figure. I just read about him on wikipedia and I am really worried about this line: 'George Formby was born George Hoy Booth in Wigan, Lancashire, on 26 May 1904. He was the eldest of seven surviving children born to James Lawler Booth and his wife Eliza, née Hoy, although this marriage was bigamous because Booth was still married to his first wife, Martha Maria Salter, a twenty-year-old music hall performer.' I really feel like there is something stunningly wrong with those sentences, but I don't trust myself today to identify a major error. Anyway. 

I did identify this error: at the record stall above (second picture) they had a copy of this record: 

They'd put a post-it note on the album saying it was rare, $95, and was by 'Toy Mahal'. Hey, I know that is what that looks like up there, and sure maybe they'd never heard of the actual Taj Mahal, but how did they look it up to find out who it was by, and not realise that it was by Taj Mahal not Toy Mahal? It was bad enough to be mansplained about some Beatles Let It Be era bootleg by some dufus, then this (oh and also another stall was playing a Kiss greatest hits tape, which reminded me, what is it with Kiss? What redeemable features did they have? I suspect none). 

I actually really like Camberwell Market, actually I really do. Also, it's not like I had a bad time or anything. It's just, you know, sometimes things get to me.
 

baltimore sun 10 march 1968

 

beatles get back #1

Have to get into the day so won't spend forever writing about this but I have to say that if anything the first episode of this Peter Jackson spectacular seems pretty much to accurately reflect everything everyone has ever said about the actual experience. It additionally reminded me of how boring it can be rehearsing and/or writing music, although when I've been involved in that in a group scenario I certainly never felt the weight of the entire world's expectations on me as well.*

George's constant rambling which the others can barely be polite about is true to the band experience as well. There's always someone doing a self-interested commentary on proceedings, not just at band things, I mean it's human nature. The guy playing George is great, I hope to see him in more things.

As Alexis Petridis said in the Guardian today, after all that stuff people have said about Yoko over the years, you just have to admire her fucking patience during that week. And seriously considering she's a better artist than 9/10 of the tossers in that room I am amazed she didn't just walk out or at least just go and do her thing. For crying out loud. 

That said, viewing this schemozzle 50+ years later, we have the luxury (if you can call it that) of hearing them play 'Don't Let Me Down', a rubbish song in and of itself, a hundred times over, badly, and thinking 'god it's so obvious, why can't you get it right?' but I suppose it's that 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration thing. I certainly feel like I've been given insight into a process, a process in this instance of polishing a really worked-over turd (btw the story in the Get Back book is that George was constipated throughout, not sure the talking cure was ever going to work though).  

*TBF much more boring watching it than doing it. 

old-fashioned

 

I have no idea why I decided to read this book but I actually found it pretty readable in a way. However what really surprises me about it is its inherent sexism. It's ten years old (published 2011) and yet it seems as antiquated in its gender politics as the year it's 'about'. So interesting in that regard. So, basically, Browne puts a lot of interesting links (aside from: they were all massive and 'edgy' believe it or not acts of the year 1970, as western culture grappled with what the new decade was going to look like) sharing various backing musicians, managers, and being compared to each other (CSNY was regarded by many as the New Beatles apparently, as bizarre as that may seem now). Pleasingly to me with my historian's hat on, Browne generally resists telling us what happened after 1970, so basically if you know, you know but essentially someone could have written this book in 1970, it doesn't go far beyond, and even makes little insider references eg Art Garfunkel ends the year looking forward to an acting career, lol good luck mug. 

But also, we have the weirdest take on the times where Joni Mitchell is everywhere in Taylor's and CSNY's lives, and Carole King is a big part of Taylor's, and Rita Coolidge is yoko-ing CSNY (entirely in their own minds) but these women's actual careers are basically apartheided out of the story, happening in some kind of weird parallel universe. At very least, JM's a huge part of 1970, clearly, since she (for instance) gives Taylor's career a big fat boost and provides CSNY with a massive eternal hit in that (awful) Woodstock song. I would also say that seriously, while this is a story of 1970 and not a story of what came after it - except implicitly - Mitchell's 1970s were a hell of a lot more interesting than most of the people who are the subject of this book. I was surprised, for instance, to discover how much Stephen Stills was the Lindsey Buckingham of CSNY because tbf his subsequent fifty years of career have been kind of, well, less exciting than he or anyone might have hoped. Stills wrote some decent songs but Mitchell is basically a giant who the rest of these dudes barely match in ambition and scope - McCartney the obvious contender but even then, McCartney hasn't gone out on a limb in terms of threatening his own commerciality. 

So I guess essentially Browne was like hey, I've found a few connections in some classic rock stars, 'I want to write about the guys I want to write about. Some of them even dicked the same sheilas!' and Da Capo press were like cool Brownie. But I reckon even he would have to concede you couldn't write a book like this today, and perhaps also, there's a certain dishonesty to relegating the women of equal commercial and innovative status to homemaking duties? 

1234

 

OK, I brought this one on myself obviously, and shouldn't complain. I had got some kind of sense through the ether that this book would be different and it was critically acclaimed etc. Also, all I really wanted was, as per the Late Shift book, something I could listen to that would fill the gaps between my usual podcasts. But to my mind Brown makes some really big stupid errors early on that completely put me offside (let's put aside the fact that this book is read by three people and they all put on funny German, Liverpudlian etc accents - that's on Audible not Craig Brown). Obviously if I was to be utterly fair to CB I would invest the full 18 hours 46 minutes I still have to go with this work and then make a pronouncement. Instead, these are the reasons I'm writing this one off and going on to something else (btw Audible now makes it impossible to delete things - you make one purchase you live with it forever apparently): 

(1) I don't know how far I am in to the work but over an hour and already he has committed, well, not a cardinal sin but one of the stupidest errors anyone writing history can do, IMO. Relaying the various (admittedly fairly famous, so maybe you figure you have to do something with the incontrovertible facts of the biographies of the Beatles) milestones in Beatle lives, he has so far posited two 'scenario A' and 'scenario B' situations where, for instance, Paul passes Latin at school and goes on to a university career, or, Paul doesn't pass Latin and stays down a year (that's what happened) and is suddenly in the same year as, and befriends, George Harrison. I would like to posit a scenario C: the comet which created the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event hits another piece of space rock in the asteroid belt instead and smashes to bits there, and so evolution on Earth is not impacted by mass extinction in the way that the Earth experienced it in our current timeline, and Louise Harrison gets rostered on to work at the shop on the night of June 1942 when she and Harold would otherwise have conceived a boring and grumpy guitarist. The impacts on the Travelling Wilburys are minimal. 

I understand (I think) why Brown goes for this stupid approach - he wants us to understand that the universe is random whimsy. But once you unleash that genie you are fucked, Craig. There are literally infinite ways to go. 

(2) The early part of the book is an account of CB going to visit Lennon's and McCartney's childhood homes, wherein CB goes on a big riff on how stupid it is that the National Trust UK has accumulated representative household items from the 1950s-60s to make the houses look as they did the day the lads wrote 'I Saw Her Standing There' (or whatever). It is not clear what he would have preferred, but the message is seems to be 'this isn't history unless this is really Mimi's wooden spoon'. He goes into big detail about the Beatles industry (like he's not, and we his readers are not, buying into that shizzle here and now) and then relates his unease about being caught surreptitiously recording the tour guides and then how he then decides to take notes and gets told off for it. Hey, since I am not going to read/listen to the rest of the book, I shouldn't pronounce but seriously the disrespect he has for the whole situation and the people involved does not make him come out shiny and pristine. 

Btw he then goes to Hamburg and does another Beatles tour and this time we get (as mentioned, this is not CB's fault) interminably extensive parody German accent as some guy who's been making a living (presumably) from being a Beatles in Hamburg tour guide for fifty years (not an exaggeration, he's been doing it since 1970) goes through the motions. This is where I stopped. 

Now I've written it down I feel maybe I'm missing out on a very fine set up for something bigger but fuck it even though I just wanted something to listen to while I stacked the dishwasher I can't take it anymore. Particularly the accents. 

a scritti politti record review from fifteen years ago. not sure where (or if) published.

Scritti Politti

White Bread and Black Beer

Rough Trade/Shock

I never set much store by record labels, although I suppose there might be something in the notion that a certain culture at certain record labels give a certain something to certain artists. And this could perhaps explain why the new Scritti Politti album – the group’s umpteenth but their first back on their basically-original label Rough Trade – is their best since their first album, Songs to Remember.

The above paragraph was so freakin’ complicated, I didn’t want to have to add in the additional information that the group is not really a group, just a guy, or perhaps the guy, Green Gartside, this just-pretty-much-a genius, at home doing some recording on equipment that, if it doesn’t exactly constitute a home studio, is at least enough recording equipment to fit into his home. The album is sparse, fragile, slipperier’n an oily rag, and glows like a gold brick. I think it’s a masterpiece.

Scritti last bothered the charts in 1984 with ‘Wood Beez’, a song that was surely a hit because it was an early example of a record no-one, including its perpetrators probably, could ever sing along to (so you had to buy it). T(he)y had a pretty prominent near-hit in the ‘91 with a minor Beatles song, ‘She’s a Woman’, in which Shabba Ranks often popped in and said ‘Shabba!’ (or did I dream that?). And then there was a decent album called Anomie and Bonhomie a few years ago which I haven’t listened to since it came out.

Now, Green appears to have a beard and has become funnier than ever. Even as slight a slice of funk as ‘Throw’ is a hoot (‘you could throw a party and maybe I’ll be there’, he sings, which amuses me, anyway). Green, like Jon Michell, likes Marc Bolan, and like Jon Michell, it shows (just listen to ‘After Six’, forget the strange godbotherer references, and imagine it speeded up – it’s Jesus in a Jeepster). He also – you’ll remember he once covered the Beatles – likes, or likes to sound like, Paul McCartney; that final track, ‘Robin Hood’, one of the best, would have fit perfectly on any McCartney album except, um, Run Devil Run. There’s a crazy, slightly creepy song called ‘Mrs Hughes’ which is kind of Simon and Garfunkel and scary but totally brilliant.

Can’t recommend this record highly enough.

By the way (this is me in 2021 now), I still stand by this review, uninterestingly written as it may be. I see that in the original I slightly erred in the record's title - it's White Bread Black Beer, that's not particularly important. I would like to hear this album again because who knows what's happened to my CD of it. I think it might have come out on vinyl but I'm trying to keep a lid on my vinyl purchases if at all possible. Instead I'm spending all my dosh on books and films, what a prat. And ornaments and car repair. And food. And, you know, bills. 

i am the cliche

I seem to recall that my first blog entry on Lorraine Crescent was about coffee, probably about my attempts to give up coffee which was an obsession of sorts in the first decade of the twenty-first century (why? Partly I think because someone had told me that coffee increased one's desire for carbs, and I wanted to lose weight without doing anything icky like exercising; also, living with an addict as I was, I wanted to prove that I could get by without any addiction to anything, and that was my one addiction) (and is). But I bet it wasn't long before my blog entry on cats. Also, dogs. So, coffee and pets, coffee and pets, and pop music, these are the things that move me. Oh, and shitty old television. It's sick, and worse, it's a sickness so many people of my generation/class have, maybe less so my gender but there's plenty of men who have this. Just not as many as nice middle class ladies. 

Coffee entered my life with my first girlfriend, Rachel. I was 15. She drank coffee, I am guessing probably instant, a lot, and so did I therefore. Her family also ate a lot of chinese cabbage, they relished it, but only one of those things have stayed with me (now I think about it, maybe I should try chinese cabbage again, just to see if it evokes anything e.g. the first time I ever saw/heard Duran Duran on Countdown, doing 'Planet Earth'). Coffee has been with me pretty much ever since and probably always will be, though I did successfully give it up for a couple of months some time - I forget when, it's been a long life, but I think I switched to decaf for a time either late 90s or early 00s, but of course like heroin you crave the rush. 

Pets were always there it's silly to even discuss. I have had times in my life with no pets, it's true, but seriously, why would you.

Pop music was always there, but I specifically remember a long drive with a family my family were close friend with, where they as a family sang 'Let it Be' in the car (now, obviously, that could have happened last year or ten years after 'Let it Be' came out, and if I was five I wouldn't have known whether 'Let it Be' was released in 1970 or 1850, but it was almost definitely before 1972, because we moved away from Kew at the beginning of '73 and I wouldn't have gone on a long drive with that family after that time). So that marks for me an early memory, my earliest memory, of contemporary pop music. By the mid-70s I was actually Beatles obsessed, when at school the divisions were clear: Beatles vs Abba. I switched to, or accommodated, Abba in 1976, via two sources: visiting my father in hospital I think when he was having a back operation, and seeing 'Mama Mia' on tv (extra interest because 'mama mia' was a thing kids - Italian kids? - said at school that was exotic enough to almost be swearing) but I was still not ready to be swept up in anything, but then a schoolfriend, John, described 'Fernando' to me on a school excursion, as being about the Swedish-Mexican war, and that made it stick in my mind. He also raved about it and I guess his taste had currency for me. However, I also vaguely remember mentioning it to him again a few months (a few days? who knows) later and he was entirely uninterested. I might be extrapolating false memories with that last bit. So by 1976 it was Abba vs Bay City Rollers, although some girls were still uncertain whether they were aligned with BCR or 'horses'. After the Abba thing crashed (1977?) I went into abeyance with pop music interest until around 1980 when I became heavily engaged. Rachel broke up with me and I had been saving money to buy her a nice impressive birthday present, so since I didn't have to do that anymore, I bought myself some albums (I already had the first Pretenders and B-52s albums, and I added The Undertones' Hypnotised, which I'd read about in the NME, the first Dexy's Midnight Runners album, Devo's Freedom of Choice and John Foxx's Metamatic: I actually still own copies of all of these). 

Bad TV was always good. If I am grateful to my parents for anything it is the way they encouraged me, leading by example, to regard mass media as always potentially idiotic, venal, etc. I recall at a very young age my father explaining to me that Reg Ansett misled the Australian public/government by claiming that if he was allowed his own television channel, he would produce high-quality local content, which of course he never did. I don't remember my father saying that Ansett had pals in high places who probably didn't care either way what happened, although if he had that might have gone over my head. I recall (as I have probably bored you in years past on this blog) holding uncritical attitudes to cartoons,* though on reflection, maybe having cartoons like Road Runner, or Secret Squirrel, was a chance to have something that was mine, and where my parents' hypercritical attitude didn't matter. Ditto Adventure Island. But at the same time, we would happily ridicule all stupid, obvious, mainstream television but in some instances also enjoy it because we could ridicule it. So, my sarcastic, unproductive, casual arsehole attitude was cultivated from an early age through my parents' own responses cultivated I suppose in the case of my mother, from her parents' highbrow attitude to popular culture and in the case of my father, his university arts degree removing him from his parents' lower middle class attitudes. It shocked me, as I got older and saw other people's lives, how uncritically they accepted mass media, though for all that, I am aware that my own response of trusting nothing mediated by (for instance) commercial television was/is as much a learned reaction. I wasn't taught to think critically, I was taught to always find a way to be critical. I had to unlearn that and enjoy (to pluck something from my brain's offering up of an immediate example, without thinking hard about it) 'Into the Heat' by The Angels, without wondering about who the fucking Angels thought they were or were trying to be or who they thought they were appealing to or what Doc Neeson's theatricality was supposed to indicate. I realise that's a weird example, it's just the first example I thought of, and so I went with it on the assumption that that would be more 'pure'. To problematise this, I guess we all liked older things better in our family on the understanding/assumption that artisans were more involved in the old days, and skill was more prevalent, there was some kind of talent recognition mechanism, whereas the 'present' (eg the 1970s) was more about trickery and faddishness - though if I had challenged my father, for instance, on this assumption I am pretty sure he would have happily reeled off 20 names of actors, artists, writers who were as shit as anything currently popular, and as popular in their day if not more so.  

Hence, by the way, the character of Elyse in Persiflage, who has an uncritical, base, positive response to a tv sitcom which she is too naive to even understand and on which she imprints other emotional ideals, but from which she filters through everything else in her waking life. Sorry to bring it back to my silly graphic novel but of course that's what that shit's about. I'm fascinated by the reality behind fiction/drama/play-acting and I'm fascinated by popular culture tropes and what they really 'mean' to an audience. I am also of course fascinated by the perceived background or underpinning or context to music, or to celebrity. 

To go back to Abba: they fascinated us as 12 year olds at Auburn South Primary. Two girls and two boys in our class (one of the girls was an absolute crush of mine at the time, and I was not alone) were allowed to use the classroom during lunch time to workshop a play they were formulating about the lives of Abba members. I think in hindsight probably more likely they were learning how to kiss, but what do I know (one of the boys later told me and other boys he had fucked the girl I had a crush on, which I accepted uncritically. The story went like this: 'she came to my house with her parents for a party, and I said do you want to come up to my room and she said yeah, and we fucked'. About twenty years later I thought - hey wait a minute - that actually is really, really unlikely, not least because I'm pretty sure the girl in question only had a mother not a father but also for class reasons - those people would never socialise, ever). Another Abba story, from a girl in I'm guessing grade 6: 'Abba all went into a sauna together naked, and the boys went out to roll in the snow and the girls locked them out of the sauna, naked'. This is actually much more likely than the local fucking story, but still that it was told at all shows how exotic and exciting Abba's lives were to us, as we modelled our understanding of what it was to be physically perfect and sexually active super-white adults. Boy were they a cultural manifestation as Australia got over White Australia. They were with us at exactly the same time as the first Vietnamese refugees started to be accepted (or not) as Australians. 

I don't know how to end this but it's not like I'm writing for The Monthly or something** so I don't have to have a neat ending, I can just end. 

*Also comics, which were however a very different beast to me, as different as novels are from films - of course. 

** They wouldn't have me

the age old question

I was a big Beatles fan in the mid-1970s (following on from picking up a copy of 'She Loves You' at the Auburn South Primary School fair in, I'm going to guess, 1975). Funny to think that, while at that stage it was a retro concern, there was at least the possibility that the Beatles would reform with their classic line-up. Also, while at the time it seemed like the five years since the Beatles broke up was a really long time, I didn't fully appreciate that one day it would be 50 years since they broke up, and that would be an even longer time.

So I more or less know the Beatles canon, perhaps absent a few of the earlier songs - you know, the With the Beatles or Hard Day's Night songs, because I didn't own those albums when I was a kid but I probably have heard them all, probably on numerous occasions actually. I suppose that Beatles enthusiasm turned me towards a few things in life that have occupied me ever after, too, arguably via the Roy Carr and Tony Tyler The Beatles: An Illustrated Record, a big 12" sized book that, now I come to think of it, was designed to sit in your record collection with I suppose your Beatles records. 

Carr and Tyler were all the usual things, pro-Lennon, anti-saccharine McCartney, etc. They actually, I now realise, were toeing a pretty lazy line with a lot of the things they wrote about Yoko,* and so on, and they weren't eager to get vested in any unpopular opinions. I didn't realise that in 1975/6 because I was hearing all this for the first time. I couldn't help but be really keen to hear all of the stuff, particularly the solo early 70s material, a lot of which was actually hard to come by, even then. So in (say) 1976 I had a copy of the Imagine album, and a copy of Ram, and a copy of Wings over America (that came to me new) and a copy of Ringo and the fairly tawdry Harrison greatest hits that, surely to his extraordinary irritation, was one side of his Beatles tracks and one side of solo tracks (I think that was a kind of punishment, when he left EMI). 

Anyway I think there have been enough words written on the Beatles for my opinions to be even less important than usual, but I just wanted to say that over time, I have come to be firmly of the opinion that Paul McCartney is by far the most talented member of the Beatles, and that he considerably outperforms the others in terms of his curiosity and interest in making new sounds and working in his chosen medium - when they're all together, they're riffing off him or motivated to try and work against him or within his sphere, and even when they're apart, they're still all working against or sparking off each other in different ways, but McCartney is at the heart of it. Lennon's Beatles work is about half as good as McCartney's most of the time; what screws Lennon up is he has no particular desire to push the envelope musically, only a wish to use the Beatles as a vehicle, so for instance the song 'Revolution' is, yeah, fine but it's - and Lennon himself used this description a few years later - an example of his general output after the mid-60s, and perhaps even during and before, 'just rock and roll at different speeds'. 'Revolution' is an OK song but it's no 'Helter Skelter' or 'Hey Jude'. Those are songs which seriously advanced matters. On some level, Lennon and Harrison must have appreciated that McCartney was doing amazing things, and they were lucky to have him providing a scaffold for them to fuck around the edges of. 'I Want You/She's So Heavy' is passable, you know, but no-one would buy a Beatles record with just John Lennon songs on it. He and Harrison leaven the great work that McCartney does. 

So when McCartney strikes out on his own - unwillingly, incidentally - or with Linda, and then with Wings, he's really an adventurer. He doesn't have Lennon and Harrison dragging him down, and he does some of his best work in the 70s. After that time, I agree with most critics, he gets a bit complacent; he is 'near enough is good enough' with some notable exceptions. He's still got it, but he pushes himself less often, perhaps in realisation that his new work is slowly becoming less relevant through the 80s. Which might have been a relief as much as an irritation. 

So it's fun from my POV to bait the Beatles fans by hinting that Wings are a better band than the Beatles but in many ways I believe it, notwithstanding the obvious truth that there would be no Wings without the Beatles. But the Wings albums essentially hold up, in the way that few other Beatles solo records don't (of course, Wings is a band - McCartney was the only one of the ex-Beatles, I suppose Harrison/Travelling Wilburys aside, who actually put himself back in a band). 

McCartney first picked up a guitar, I gather, about a week after his mother died. If there's a better way to understand his particular genius and drive, I can't imagine what it would be. He seems to be a somewhat damaged figure all along, and being damaged is what drives him. He's keeping it together. I don't know if his music is an articulation of his pain, or a wish to deny it (I suspect the latter) but while I have nothing more than pop culture understanding of psychology (Linus' blanket) it seems painfully obvious that music is what keeps Paul from falling into the precipice of despair and anguish he's always on the edge of.

Of course, unlike - blah, Ian fucking Curtis, to pluck someone from recent conversations because I think it was just the 40th anniversary of his death or something - McCartney's stock in trade is rarely explorations of his or anyone's pain, only sometimes allusions to an abstract notion of pain, which could easily be just dabbling in sadness for the sake of colouring a lyric. I suppose it would have been nice on one level for Paul to have made his own version of John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band but on the other hand, he's doing what works for him. I still hold that Ram, Wings Wild Life, Wings at the Speed of Sound*** and Back to the Egg in particular are some of the best albums of the 1970s and better than most Beatles albums, a kind of false competition because you can't (as I said above) give Wings/McCartneys albums a status above the Beatles in terms of impact and adventurousness: McCartney is always working, and perhaps was doing so most particularly throughout the 70s, in the shadow of his 1960s. Wild Life did not, and could not, have had the impact Sergeant Fucking Pepper did, on any level, whatever it was.** But it was a hell of a lot more revolutionary than freakin' Two Virgins. Anyway, I have already admitted my opinions are unimportant, and I hold to that, but as I have so often said over the last 15 years, my blog my rules, and it makes me feel better to write these things. It's reasonably wholesome right. 

* To continue being a cliche I have to add that I think Yoko Ono is far more talented than Lennon and at least as important a figure as McCartney, but it's hard to compare their respective impact because they work(ed) in such different worlds. But christ, I love Yoko getting Harrison, Starr etc to back her on for instance Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band doing things a hundred times more compelling than they really ever achieved again in their careers, just by accepting their place: we're session people, the Mike Joyce and Andy Rourke of our day.  

** Of course Ram (and I suppose Band on the Run) was an attempt to return to the general richness of the late 60s Beatles epics, but people couldn't see them necessarily like that anymore. I am surprised that Band on the Run is so often cited as the best Wings album though, because it's actually a little subpar compared to, for instance, Back to the Egg or Speed of Sound, although I suppose it has a consistency of sound (and a wild back story) that those albums lack. 

*** Update a year late: I'm such a fucking idiot, only today (30 May 2021) did I realise that this picture, from the inner sleeve of the album:

was a joke on the idea of 'Wings are playing at a venue called the Speed of Sound... yeah... Wings at the Speed of Sound'. I wonder if this image was an original album cover proposal. It's pretty good except for the photo in the middle which is stupid and makes the whole thing look bad.

my opening chapter for proposed 33 1/3 on Paul & Linda McCartney's Ram, 2015 (rejected)

RAM

‘Piss off.’

How many albums (let alone books) start with those words? How likely would anyone be to imagine, for that matter, that an album – a cheery, funny, lively multiplatinum album – by one of the world’s most beloved pop stars would start with those words? Unframed, unattached to anything else, conceptually adrift, nothing at all to do with the rest of the song that kicks off the album (‘Too Many People’), but undeniably there – undeniably except to those billions of people who heard the words, but chose not to hear them. Because that’s not what someone like Paul McCartney would think, say or sing.

It’s just one little beserk component of Paul and Linda McCartney’s Ram. But there are a lot more sides to Ram, few mystical, but many mysterious. It’s a multilayered record.  The duo – he the most commercially successful pop composer of his generation, she a completely untested and indeed hitherto unambitious novice – were experimenting with how to write their lives, how to project as role models, which they were whether they wanted it or not, and how to produce pop that was satisfying to them and also their, or rather his, fans. 

Even more than many albums with a life beyond their original few months of initial release, Ram has had a few lives and iterations. There are also (at least) two whole-album covers compilations from the 21^st century, which indicate the resilience of the concept. But it’s a lot more than just a wild card LP with an extensive half-life. It’s a multifaceted document that can give the sensitive listener insight into the world of the Beatles, particularly in their post-breakup public trainwreck but also the world of pop in the early 70s as it consolidated its breakthrough from kids’ trivial entertainment to ‘rock’: social commentary and mirror of the counterculture. The album was produced in the context of the Kent State shootings, Ohio’s state guard response to student protests against the invasion of Cambodia; the trial of Charles Manson, who claimed his killing spree was sanctioned through a Paul McCartney song. During its recording, 14 US Army officers were charged over the Mai Lai massacre; an earthquake killed 50 000 in Peru and the painter Mark Rothko killed himself. Elvis Presley met Richard Nixon in the middle of the Ram recordings: a stark illustration of the establishment taking pop music seriously (fifteen years after Elvis was anything like a threat) but also of the co-option of youth rebellion into the conservative heartland. All recaps of 1970 include another crucial, defining moment: the official breakup of the Beatles.  

Ram first came into my life in 1978. I was thirteen, and assiduously gathering a Beatles record collection largely through the purchase of secondhand albums, grabbing what I could on the assumption that (a) I would eventually have them all, so it didn’t really matter the order I acquired them; (b) although Roy Carr and Tony Tyler’s book The Beatles: An Illustrated Record – which introduced me to the idea that popular music writing did not always have to be swooning fandom or respectful chin-stroking nods of approval but could also occasionally call out a dud – was broadly a good guide to value in Beatle releases and also often funny, an adolescent schoolboy in Melbourne, Australia did not need or want the same taste as a couple of late twenties New Musical Express writers who’d seen it all a hundred times over; and (c) while you might want Lennon on your side in an argument, Paul McCartney was more fun. I had a materially adequate middle-class life and I was comfortable, too, with what no-one then would have called my feminine side to not feel in any way threatened by syrupy ballads or heavy sensitivity. I saw that McCartney could wear his heart on his sleeve, and that was gutsy. I liked punk and would come to love what we now call postpunk - that was really the music of my generation – but I recognized a spirit of artistic inquiry when I saw it. I felt then, as I feel now, that McCartney was trying for, and often getting to, that sweet spot where he could be artistically fulfilled and connect with much of the rest of the world, too. That was admirable.

Ram ticked all the boxes, on quite a few levels (Carr and Tyler hated it, but then, they also hated Yoko Ono). It was a pop album and who’s worth knowing who doesn’t love pop? It was so riddled with ideas that no fewer than four tracks morphed into variations or new songs before your very ears. It had the requisite number of weird noises, strange notions and, of course, like many of the ex-Beatles’ records, it was part of the long strange unresolvable mess of largely antipathetic communications amongst themselves which made you feel half like you were privy to juicy scandal and half like you were on the other side of a thin wall.

But what Ram has which could not be in dispute (except for those who could not hear it, like that ‘piss off’) was amazing songwriting. ‘Dear Boy’, sonically a tribute to the Beach Boys but lyrically the most extraordinary tightrope walk between sensitivity and schadenfreude imaginable: addressed to Linda’s first husband, Joseph Melville See (not, as some thought, to John Ono Lennon) it finds Paul commiserating, but perhaps also just slightly berating, See for failing to… sorry but it has to be said… see the value of Linda. In 1963 he’d effectively abandoned Linda and their young daughter Heather to travel and study in Africa for a year, his negligence killing the marriage. The story goes that he never forgave himself – but that he maintained a cordial relationship with the McCartneys ever after.

It has the spectacular ‘Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey’, psychedelia’s last gasp and Paul McCartney’s first number one hit, in a post-Beatles incarnation; almost an album’s worth of musical ideas in itself this track, clashing concepts and references, some of them harsh and troublesome, some of them high camp, all inventive and effective; it’s a patchwork of melodies and silliness that works because of its own crash or crash through exuberance. That line about the butter not melting, so the singer put it in a pie still raises the hairs on the back of my neck, largely because I find it so silly – indeed, I might almost say ‘stupid’. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t work, and that Herb Alpert-esque trumpet line cures anything.

Those were Paul and Linda compositions. Of Paul’s own, there’s ‘Back Seat of My Car’ – a paean to teenage sex and driving, a theme he would return to a few years later on one of the more raucous Wings singles, ‘Helen Wheels.’ Here, Paul and his date – you can’t help but imagine it as him and Linda half their lives ago, even though they’d only known each other three years – are triumphant against the grim forebodings of a conservative, fearful world who tell them in voices that sound like someone’s put their finger on the record to drag it down slower and more stentorian – ‘making love is wrong.’ As if!

Those are three of today’s favourites. But there is, in fact, not a dud track anywhere on Ram. Perhaps, in a way, it’s self-indulgent, but it’s self-indulgence by people who not only accept their fame and celebrity – unavoidable – but also the good fortune they have, to be welcomed into a million homes as entertainers and, in some strange way, role models. If the whole world really only wanted the Beatles to reform, well, that wasn’t going to happen in a hurry (forty-five years later, we know it was never going to happen at all) and in the meantime, the McCartneys welcomed the world – ‘piss off’ or no ‘piss off’ – into (a version of) their partnership. There was some arrogance to this album, and its stance, but then – if you know something’s great, how arrogant are you really being by acknowledging that mere fact?

When I began working on this study of Ram and the way it fits into the story of the western world’s political, social and cultural 1970s, I suddenly found myself surrounded by messages from my own universe that confirmed that the McCartneys and their story continue to be relevant. I had to wonder whether these were ubiquitous but I was just suddenly spotting them now, because I was thinking about Ram.  One night on facebook two friends – people I don’t know terribly well, from different spheres of my life, and who certainly don’t know each other – spontaneously posted on Paul McCartney within an hour of each other. One simply posted Paul’s 2013 song with the surviving members of Nirvana, ‘Cut Me Some Slack’, and suggested that anyone who thought McCartney was irrelevant in the 21^st century had to listen to this (I agree). Another was apparently moved by the spirit of the times to proclaim:

Excuse me, but why do so many "hate" Paul McCartney??? I don't get it. WHY??? It is the same as people who hate Yoko ... WHY??? I love them both.. and they are supposedly responsible for breaking the Beatles up.. even though it is NOT true.. . That only meant the Beatles all brought out great solo records..!!!

So WHY the hatred to Paul ... and YOKO??

But that energy into something more constructive..

PS George is my favourite Beatle.

just saying.

Facebook is, of course, a dynamic thing that panders to any hints you give it. So, unmysteriously, these posts (and my benign responses to them) dislodged a piece of detritus I’d forgotten about from a few months earlier when my friend Barry had posted an image of the cover of the Ram album with my face over Paul’s and one of my beagles’ – also Barry, no relation – over the ram in question. This also suddenly appeared in my timeline again. The universe, it seems, was coming together to celebrate a venerable septuagenarian whose past still resonated for many, and whose current work still struck a chord for new fans; and the labour of love he created with a genuine soul mate whose worth he never underestimated or took for granted (and, from all reports, vice-versa).

1971 was a good year for diversity and adventure in popular music: the beginnings of decades often are, particularly once the grip of the old recedes, hyperbole drops away and society looks forward to how to encapsulate or typify the spirit of the new. But the 70s themselves were also an extraordinary and wonderful (in the sense of: full of wonder) decade; the era seemed, to many at the time, to be a shallow echo of the revolutionary 60s, two steps forward, six steps back – to purloin from the Gang of 4’s own caustic song from the other end of the 70s, ‘At Home He’s a Tourist’. History is not, however, about how people were wrong or where they ended up. It’s also about what they thought, felt, believed, did and how they responded. Ram is an early seventies album, British-written, New York-recorded; like the McCartneys themselves, it’s a blend of two cultures (each culture itself a hybrid, multifaceted culture). The album can reveal volumes about the time it was made in, and its own creation to that time can be tracked in numerous ways.

The ‘piss off’, by the way, was Paul saying it was easy as pie, a deliberate non-sequiteur. The joke – such as it was – was, it seems, ‘Piss off, cake.’ He explained, long after the fact, ‘a piece of cake becomes piss off cake, and it's nothing.’[i] But Ram is a lot more than that: memoir, philosophy, diarizing, satire, surrealism, retribution, commentary; all to freewheeling, esoteric music often evoking the past (be it Buddy Holly, the Beach Boys or even the Beatles) but aiming squarely at being a part of 1971 and into the future. It only looked like a piss off cake.

---

[i] http://www.beatlesbible.com/people/paul-mccartney/albums/ram/