FREEDOM SUITE
MARCH 1971 AND PAUL McCARTNEY WAS IN LOS ANGELES, TRYING to lie low. While the local press speculated whether he was in town to shoot a US TV special with a new band, or if he’d indeed already left LA and flown to Hawaii, McCartney bunkered in Sound Recorders on Yucca Street in Hollywood, in the shadow of the ringed storeys of the Capitol Records building, putting the final touches to his second post-Beatles album, Ram.
He only broke cover once, at the Grammys on March 16, rolling up to the podium, hand-in-hand with Linda, to accept an award for Let It Be from movie legend John Wayne. Outside, when leaving, a reporter caught up with Paul for a quote. “I have a knife and fork and I’m here to cut a record,” he quipped before speeding off in a Cadillac to the sound of fans screaming on the sidewalk.
It wasn’t long before Beatles devotees tracked McCartney down to Sound Recorders. Some left gifts for him, others had to be gently escorted away by members of the LAPD. One day in the studio, Paul stuck on a pair of shades and announced to startled engineer Eirik Wangberg that he was popping out for a stroll along Hollywood Boulevard. Not long after, the still-newly-ex-Beatle returned, bursting into mock tears before grinning: “No one recognised me!”
What else was he doing in LA? Perhaps, partly, living out fantasies harboured during The Beatles’ mid’60s game of creative one-upmanship with The Beach Boys. The McCartneys were staying in a beachside Santa Monica house rented from the Getty family, and together with Linda at the microphone in the studio, Paul was layering distinctly Pet Sounds-like harmonies on some of the new tracks, purposely echoing the 1966 album he would later assess as “the classic of the century… unbeatable in many ways.”
In marked contrast to his self-recorded McCartney solo debut, Ram was to be a far lusher and more hi-fi affair. “Well, Hollywood is Hollywood,” Eirik Wangberg – dubbed ‘The Norwegian’ by McCartney – tells MOJO today. “This is where Paul wanted to come, and Ram is the sound he naturally got there.”
And Wangberg should know – the London-born, Oslo-raised engineer had already scored credits for The Beach Boys (Smiley Smile and Wild Honey), Buffalo Springfield and The Mamas & The Papas. “The album sounds more intricate, deep and wide than the home-made McCartney,” adds Wangberg. Moreover, it was McCartney’s first concerted effort to distance himself musically from The Beatles.
“Absolutely,” Macca told your writer decades later. “Definitely trying to do something else. To have to invent something new was difficult, y’know. But I just felt like that was the way to go. I just wrote in a different direction and tried to avoid any Beatles clichés.
“So, the songs became, I dunno, a little more episodic or something like that,” he added. “I took on that kind of idea a bit more than I would’ve with The Beatles. I suppose I was just letting myself be free.” ➢
Moreover, the sunshine vibes helped to counteract the hangover from The Beatles’ court battle. While that had concluded only days before – on March 12 in London – and with a ruling in McCartney’s favour, dark clouds lingered.
“I could tell that Paul was under stress,” says Wangberg, “even though he acted very professional, calm and focused in the studio. Y’know, he did not know how and where his career would go after The Beatles. This was a chancy period for him.
“Paul wouldn’t talk about his troubles, though. We were in the studio to make a great record. Linda didn’t even want Paul and I talking about The Beatles: ‘Stop it, we want to look forward!’”
Indeed, even the title of Ram, which had come to McCartney some months earlier when driving through rural Scotland, denoted propulsive force and onward motion. “It meant,” he explained, “ram forward, press on, be positive.”
FIVE MONTHS EARLIER, OCTOBER 1970, PAUL, LINDA and the kids (Heather, seven; Mary, one) boarded the SS France in Southampton, bound for New York. The Beatles had never recorded in American studios and it was clearly a time for new horizons and experiences.
David Spinozza was a studio guitarist on the New York R&B scene, bagging most of his session gigs through a booking outfit called the Radio Registry. One day he received a call from someone he took to be a new girl at the agency. “She called my house and she said, ‘Oh, this is Linda,’” Spinozza remembers today. “‘My husband would love to get together with you and play.’ I remember saying, ‘Well, who’s your husband?’ I really didn’t know who it was (laughs).
She might have said, ‘McCartney’, but for some reason I just didn’t put it together with Paul McCartney in my head.”
Spinozza was duly invited to a rundown loft rehearsal space on W. 45th Street. It was a surprisingly grimy setting for a former Beatle, and an indication that McCartney was keeping things lowkey. “As you know, they were still very famous,” says Spinozza. “I don’t think they could just walk down the street that easy without being accosted by fans.”
Expecting a jam session, Spinozza was quietly annoyed to find himself in a waiting room alongside other session guitarists. He realised it was in fact an audition. When he was summoned upstairs into the practice space, he was tasked with strumming the relatively simple acoustic chords for what Spinozza later realised was Another Day, the single that would precede the album.
Subsequently, he’d hear on the sessioneer grapevine that other New York musicians had been similarly affronted by having to try out for McCartney. “Some of the studio drummers were really belligerent,” he laughs. “Like, they’d say to Paul, ‘Well I heard you play a little drums. Why don’t you play some drums?’”
A more amenable drummer was found when Denny Seiwell turned up, slightly alarmed, at what he remembers as a “burnedout building” in another, sketchier location on W. 43rd. He tentatively walked down the stairs into the basement to find Paul and Linda and a bashed-up set of rented drums. “They said, ‘Do you mind playing for us?’” Seiwell recalls. “And I just went right into Ringo on the tom toms.”
The preliminary sessions for were conducted on the other side of Midtown, in the more salubrious surrounds of Columbia’s Studio B, where a daily routine quickly developed. Paul and Linda, always with the kids, would arrive and install a playpen for Mary in the control room.
“I wasn’t used to children being in the studio,” Spinozza admits. “So, that was at first a little distracting to me. The children were there the whole time, and Linda was basically attending to them and Paul was showing us the music. It wasn’t like we hung out or smoked pot together.”
Day one, McCartney, Spinozza and Seiwell cut Another Day, the daydreamy tale of an office-working girl – Eleanor Rigby transported to Manhattan, reckoned the drummer. As the weeks of nine-to-five sessions progressed, Paul would play through a song each day for the others and they’d work for hours to achieve a band feel before pressing the record button.
“Immediately what dawned on me was how good the songwriting was,” says Spinozza. “I couldn’t believe how well Paul could sing the melodies to these songs, and sometimes even change the melody. He would just sing it different each time.”
“I’d never seen that kind of talent before,” agrees Seiwell. But while Ram was to be the sole album jointly credited to Paul and Linda McCartney, the musicians admit that the latter’s musical input was not so obvious at this stage.
“She never really played,” says Spinozza. “I didn’t ever hear her play anything or even sing anything. We just basically cut the tracks with Paul singing a dummy vocal.”
Denny Seiwell’s take is that Linda’s contribution was far more significant: “She was the one that got Paul off of his ass when he was having to sue the other Beatles. His heart was broken. He would’ve sat up there in Scotland and just become a drunk. She said, ‘Come on, you’re a songwriter. Let’s go to New York and make a record.’ If she hadn’t got on his case, Ram never would’ve been made.”
“Linda was great,” McCartney would confirm. “She just eased me out of it and just sort of said, ‘Hey, y’know, you don’t want to get too crazy.’ And made me feel a lot better. And then I moved again into music therapy, which was Ram.”
As the songs flowed, it was clear to the participants that Ram was shaping up to be far more ambitious than McCartney. Spinozza was taken aback by run-throughs of the multi-movement Uncle Albert/ Admiral Halsey: “I remember thinking, ‘Wow, this is an incredible piece of music, with all the tempo changes.’” Significantly, McCartney was now freed from argumentative bandmates and fully in charge as he marshalled his hired hands – with the late Hugh McCracken in place of Spinozza, who had moved on to other bookings.
“So, if I wanted to do Monkberry Moon Delight with ‘a piano up my nose’, then I figured, ‘That’ll be OK,’” McCartney reasoned. “Now I can do that kind of thing. To give everyone their credit, I think everyone felt that way, y’know. George felt that way about All
Things Must Pass. I’m sure John did.”
In spite of his desire to turn a fresh page, a Beatle-y imprint can be heard on Ram, as well as a playful experimentation. On Oh Woman, Oh Why, a rocker with a murder theme destined for the B-side of Another Day, McCartney even used a revolver to overdub gunshots.
At Phil Ramone’s A&R Recording, working from arrangements scored in London by George Martin, McCartney conducted the New York Philharmonic on Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey, the similarly episodic Long Haired Lady and gold-standard McCartney ballad The Back Seat Of My Car. Martin had urged Paul to chart the tracks ➢
for orchestra himself, but the singer insisted, “Why should I when I have you?”
David Spinozza would go on to play with John Lennon on 1973’s Mind Games and so finds himself in the unusual position of having worked on solo albums with both Lennon and McCartney. “They were both very biz-like,” he says. “Paul took a little more time with the production. John liked to work fast. Paul was into a lot of the detail. He was always looking for a special, special sound.”
ON FEBRUARY 19, 1971, WHEN ANOTHER DAY was released in the UK as a taster single from the New York sessions, McCartney was in London, sporting the dark grey Tommy Nutter suit he’d worn on the cover of
Abbey Road, attending the opening hearing of The Beatles & Company partnership case at the High Court. As he later told me, all he could really think was, “Jesus, am I really going through this?”
It was the only date on which he would appear. None of the other Beatles showed for the near-month-long proceedings, preferring to have their statements read out in court. But McCartney was determined to block Allen Klein – representing the other three – from seizing full control of the band’s affairs: “I was the lone voice, y’know. So, it was really painful because I knew I had to stand up. Apple would’ve by now been called ABKCO [Klein’s company]. I realised that everyone didn’t get it, but they sort of felt secure in the middle of this thunderstorm.”
His mess of bitter and confused emotions spilled over into one song in particular on Ram. Gently driving groover Too Many People laid into what he perceived as the “preaching practices” of John and Yoko and even opened with the words “piss off ”.
“Well, it doesn’t actually say, ‘piss off ’,” McCartney argued. “‘Piece of cake’ it says, which was thinly disguised as ‘piss off, cake.’ And hey, come on, how mild is that? It’s not exactly a tirade, is it? ‘Too many people preaching practices’… I felt that was true of what was going on. ‘Do this, do that.’
“At the time, I wouldn’t have minded if the preaching of the practices were wise. ‘Do this, do that, and y’know, you’ll make good music and Allen Klein won’t steal your company.’ To me, the fool
ishness that was going on was not something to be followed, y’know?”
Later, the public and even the other Beatles would hear digs in other Ram tracks, including 3 Legs. To be fair, it was easy to interpret the lines “My dog he got three legs/But he can’t run” and “I thought you was my friend/But you let me down” as pops at his ex-bandmates. McCartney insisted, however, that 3 Legs was “just kind of a joke blues song in my mind. Everything was being interpreted.”
Others speculated that Dear Boy was directed at Lennon, when in fact McCartney had had Linda’s first husband, Joseph Melville See Jr, in mind, as he reflected on a rival who didn’t “know how much you missed”. But one other track
did feature a deliberate Beatles reference, when McCartney’s fleeting Silver Beetles stage name Paul Ramon – also his pseudonym when he guested on Steve Miller’s My Dark Hour in ’69 – was twisted into Ram On. Here he really did sound like he was imparting advice to his younger self: “Give your heart to somebody soon/Right away.”
Although still only 28 when he wrote the songs on Ram, McCartney clearly had a lot of emotions to work through. “Like I say, that was my saviour,” he would tell me. “Just making tracks.”
BACK IN CALIFORNIA AT SOUND RECORDERS IN spring 1971, McCartney belied his controlling reputation by giving Eirik ‘The Nor wegian’ Wangberg a surprising amount of latitude in the final shaping of Ram. On Long Haired Lady, Wangberg boldly stripped away extended passages of George Martin’s orchestration. “I thought it was a bit tedious during a long run,” he says today. “So I built the music from the ground up again, bit by bit, as the final section repeated. I turned towards Paul and saw tears running down his cheeks. Then I knew the mix was a winner.”
Wangberg also removed the orchestra from the raucous, Beatle-y coda of The Back Seat Of My Car, then got in touch with Universal Pictures to request sound effects tapes of thunderstorms, which he added to Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey.
In return, McCartney unveiled for Wangberg some of the freewheeling production techniques The Beatles had pioneered. On slightly daft bluesy rocker Smile Away, McCartney broke all the rules, asking the engineer to fuzz up his bass before adding overdub upon overdub. “This showed me how The Beatles had been thinking untraditionally when recording their music,” Wangberg says. In years to come, both Michael Jackson and Elton John would compliment Paul and Linda McCartney on the unique character of their vocal harmonies. From behind the desk at the time, as their tracks went down to tape, Wangberg was equally impressed, particularly with the elaborate inter weaving on Dear Boy. “I had worked with The Beach Boys on [Smiley Smile’s] Vegetables,” he reminds MOJO, “but Dear Boy took the cake.”
In a last remarkable act of trust, McCartney allowed Wangberg to make the final song selection and sequence the running order. Then, before the first full playback, McCartney insisted they all toast the completed album with 12-year-old Johnnie Walker. As The Back Seat Of My Car faded to a close, the McCartneys hugged one another, before adding Wangberg to the clinch and weeping with joy and relief. The latter now views Ram as “Paul’s family album. He needed this closeness after The Beatles.”
As slick as it was, Ram was also deeply quirky, with its in-jokey lyrics and stylistic about-turns. Underlining the point, the McCartneys pressed up 500 copies of a one-sided vinyl radio promo titled Brung To Ewe By, intended as 15 intro jingles for DJs to use when playing Ram songs, with sheep noises, nonsense spoken word and a repeated piano ditty not on the album, Now Hear This Song Of Mine. The cover artwork for the LP was similarly eccentric, with Macca’s childlike felt-tip scribbles framing a shot of him wrestling with a ram on the McCartneys’ High Park Farm in Scotland, alongside the cryptic message L.I.L.Y. (later revealed to be Linda, I Love You). But it was a nature shot, featured twice on the back of the sleeve, of two beetles copulating, that raised eyebrows. It was a coded message that seemed to say: fucking Beatles. McCartney later assured me that it hadn’t been intentional.
“No, I swear to God,” he laughed. “Things like that seem so ➢
obvious afterwards. You go, ‘Oh yeah, of course, that must have seemed like that.’ A photograph of two beetles shagging. I mean, that had to get on the cover. Then afterwards, you go, ‘Oh, but they were beetles.’ To me they were just a couple of little ladybirds or insects or something, y’know. It was just a really funny shot.”
NONETHELESS, SOME OF HIS FORMER BANDMATES didn’t react at all well to the album. “I don’t think there’s one tune on Ram,” said Ringo upon the album’s release. “I just feel he’s wasted his time. He seems to be going strange. It’s like he’s not admitting he can write great tunes.”
Lennon, of course, went further. Commenting on Uncle Albert/ Admiral Halsey, which became McCartney’s first solo US Number 1 single, he said, “I liked the beginning. I liked the little bit of ‘hands across the water’, but it just tripped off all the time. I didn’t like that bit.” His real ire he saved for his own How Do You Sleep?, recorded for the Imagine album at the end of May, less than 10 days after the release of Ram. Full of blatant gibes (“The sound you make is muzak to my ears”), the song upset McCartney deeply.
“It was a massive, massive bug,” he would tell MOJO. “I was just really sad, y’know, ’cos there we were… we’d worked together, we’d loved each other – although you wouldn’t have called it that then. But we’d been really tight mates since about 16 or something. So, it was a very, very strange turnaround.”
Lennon twisted the knife by including in the Imagine album package a postcard of him grappling with a pig. Elsewhere, the critics, perhaps expecting the smooth, radio-friendly side of McCartney, weren’t impressed by the oddities of Ram. Rolling Stone dismissed it as “monumentally irrelevant”, while Melody Maker reasoned, “It must be hell living up to a name… you expect too much from a man like McCartney.”
In a revealing side move, McCartney claimed that six of the 12 songs on Ram had been straight 50/50 co-writes with Linda, sidestepping the terms of his agreement with The Beatles’ publishing company Northern Songs, now owned by media magnate Lew Grade’s ATV. Grade felt that McCartney was trying to pull a fast one and slapped him with a lawsuit for $1 million, a dispute not settled until the singer made the James Paul McCartney TV special for Grade in 1973.
Ram, meanwhile, was a commercial success, Number 1 in the UK albums chart and Number 2 in the US. Half a century on, it has been critically re-evaluated as perhaps McCartney’s greatest post-Beatles album. While the general public might favour the hits of Wings’ Band On The Run, Ram is the aficionados’ choice: the sound of Paul McCartney gleefully revelling in his creative freedom. “I like the fact that people will come up to me and say, ‘I love that
Ram album,’” said its creator. “Or Wings’ Wild Life. ’Cos, y’know, what you find now is people like the obscure stuff.”
Ultimately though, for Macca himself, Ram seemed to represent vindication and proof that there was life – and a career to be had – after The Beatles.
“It was doubtful, it was never a fait accompli,” he told me. “Another impossible ingredient was to take my missus, who had no [musical] experience whatsoever, to accompany me on this adventure. And it was a wacky thing, y’know. But come on, man, we were hippies.”
Ram, The 50th Anniversary Edition on limited edition half-speed mastered vinyl, is released on May 14.