My Amazon Reviews: Paul & Linda McCartney "Ram"

McCartney's Solo Masterpiece
5 Out Of 5 Stars

Finally. In the slow trickle of Paul McCartney reissues, we get the second of his masterstrokes as a solo artist. "Band On The Run" marked his finest work under the Wings banner, but it was "Ram" that set the bar so very high for his work after the demise of the Beatles. Since 1971, "Ram" has only gained in stature, remaining the most Beatles-like of his solo albums, and is the lone album Paul and Linda McCartney are credited on as artists together.

"Ram" is something of a wedding album, with Linda's presence as songwriter and prominent back-up vocalist. It's also a continuation of McCartney's one-man-show albums, with guest players credited but not attributed to any particular songs. The songs themselves are freewheeling odes to love ("Backseat of My Car"), life ("Heart of the Country") and proving to those who doubted that he could both rock ("Monkberry Moon Delight") or knock-off an appropriately Beatles-sounding single without any help from his former teammates ("Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey").

Something else the re-issue does is prove McCartney's ear for good sound; the remastering makes you wish more of the current flock of producers/engineers gave a whit about the spaces between the notes and the atmosphere of your recording. Just the strummed opening and Paul's "hey hey hey" opening are enough to give you goosebumps. The whole album does what not many can do in this day and age, and that's make an album that holds together as a full piece. Even if the album before this (McCartney) seemed ramshackle and rambling, "Ram" erased all doubts that Paul was capable of delivering an album that both lived up to his prior work and would establish him as an artist on his own.

     

Jobs, Steve Jobs

I just heard that Apple founder and frontman Steve Jobs has passed away. I felt a lump in my throat come and go as the news was broadcast, as Apple has been involved with so many of my years in my life. When I first started working in publishing, the main room was a set of Macs, all rigged up with Pagemaker, along with a slightly more powerful Mac for the graphics. Every week, for three years, we turned out a Radio/Broadcast musical tipsheet on that room full of Apple computers.

When I decided to start my own magazines, I bought an Apple PowerPC. I remember not buying the new One Gigabyte version, thinking "who needs a gigabyte?" That computer lasted me from 1996 until just a few years ago. All the Rubber Rebel and Vulcan America magazines were composed on Apples. And the revolution of scanning...wow. No more huge darkrooms with cameras the size of refrigerators. It meant that I could take the pictures for my own magazines, without having to depend totally on studios and models. All the stories I wrote for my first two books (and much of Skin Tight) were written on an Apple.

So much of my creative life has been devised on machines that Steve Jobs helped invent and, more importantly, design. A recent Newsweek article profiled him, describing him alternately as brilliant and driven, but difficult and autocratically demanding. The chatter on TV behind me as I type is how Jobs The Visionary democratized the computing world. All I know is that he made a huge impact on mine.