RAM

Raise your hand who knows a living legend of popular music (at least Western) greater than Paul McCartney. When he dies, the 20th century will finally be over for us. This album, and the one that came before, McCartney (Apple Records, 1970), shows him in one of his most vulnerable moments: deciding what direction his life would take after the definitive separation from The Beatles.

There is a lot of gossip on this album and in the reactions to it, a lot of pullita. Lennon felt alluded to at various points - for example, in the opening song, Too Many People, with that of: “That was your first mistake. You took your lucky break and broke it in two ”- and then, in one of the photographs that made up the art of his acclaimed album Imagine (Apple Records, 1971), released less than a month later, he comes out clutching a pig's ears , direct reference to the lid of his former partner's Ram. Paul even came to recognize later that he was thinking of Lennon and Yoko when he wrote, for that same initial cut: “Too many people preaching practices. / Don't let them tell you what you want to be ”, due to the fact that the woman with the rising sun and her boyfriend with glasses began to get heavy on the subject of meditation and orientalism, as I did with my smoking friends when I quit after reading a bad and effective self-help book; And it is very difficult for the enlightened - which is, only, who thinks they are - not feel the need to distribute the light they have found, at least with the people who care. Harrison and Ringo weren't very comfortable either, especially with the second track, 3 Legs, where they sing: "My dog, he has three legs, but he can't run"; that dog had a lot of beetle.

If we review Paul's songs in the post-Beatles and pre-Wings stages, we will see that, in this way or that, almost all revolve around three main themes: his Scottish farm, his love for Linda, and his empingue for the breakup of what few hesitate to call the greatest band of all time. Much of the latter is here. McCartney was trying to get on with his life, forget about the past, but he can't hide his anger. In this album there is the anger "I'm not just The Beatles", and also the anger "there are no Beatles without me"; one intentional, the other residual; hence one of the central themes of the record, Ram On, is, in essence, a harangue (presumably to himself) disguised by the candid sound of the ukulele and a very Paul McCartney magnetic melody: “Ram on, give your heart to somebody. Soon. Right away ”. Turn the page, give your heart, do it now, but do it charging. It is stronger than him. Try, but in the end neither forgive nor forget.

This album seems like no, but yes, and a lot. Perhaps that not seem like it was the reason why the critics did not pay much attention to him at the time, although he did have good numbers in stores, because people know.

I remember listening to it the first time in its entirety, and when the last song ended I went back to Dear Boy and played it like three times in a row, which is the worst thing you can do with a song that you really like, because you turn it into one. scrape, or - at best - spaghetti pesto, delicious at first and boring at the end. Luckily this never happened and I still really enjoy them all.

The thing with this record is that it's not balanced. It has two kinds of themes: those that appear completely tilted inwards, towards a place where there is some kind of sorrow, and those that don't, those that have a certain stability in their course. I'm sure this has a barbaric tonal explanation, but since I don't know about it, I have to find my life in the fickle territory of emotion. The ones I like the most, the ones that make me talk about this album today, belong to the first group: Ram On , Dear Boy , Heart of The Country , Monkberry Moon Delight and The Back Seat of My Car . Except for the latter, none were released as singles. The people at Apple Records were obviously going down the opposite path from me. They believed – and it cannot be said that they were wrong – that where the piticlines were, it was in the songs of the other class, such as Uncle Albert / Admiral Halsey or Eat at Home , which are very good but do not manage to camouflage the plague of the portals of Belascoaín, nor do they weaken the ritual achievement of your stride as you walk down that downtown Havana street with your eyes fixed on the sea.

Do you know what makes Paul McCartney different from the rest of the song-makers in the world? That no one can make a simpler melody without questioning its compositional ability. The ex-Beatles tunes are the very border between a "serious" song and the improvised tune that my mother hummed to make me fall asleep. They can no longer be simpler, they have been completely de-tuned, if you take away one more bargain they stop being a song. Paul knows exactly where that point is where the universe is balanced. Providence placed the treasure map on his head, which is why everyone likes it: the gypsies with bracelets and the ascetics; that's why when someone tells you "no, I don't like it", the first thing that comes to mind is that you are talking to a soulless robot or that they are burning you. I imagine that his creative process is like a jenga game: he assembles the tower first, and then he strips it of the excess until only the amount of elements required remains so that the structure does not collapse. The key is that Paul never gets to remove the last block. The rest of the mortals either remove the last piece and the game ends there, or else they think the tower is going to fall, when in fact they can still take two or three orthohedra.

The melodic role in McCartney's songs is very marked. They seem made specifically for humming. This man is a tycoon in the production of shower and workshop whistles. But that doesn't mean by a long shot that they work the same without the lyrics. Paul himself went with the rag and, under the pseudonym Percy “Thrills” Thrillington, released in '77 a dreadful instrumental version of the RAM verbatim: Thrillington, which, of course, was a critical and sales failure. And it is already known that the song is an indivisible mass, or divisible only for strictly descriptive reasons. To the all It is not made up of a sum of partsbecause you are simply parts they do not exist by themselves; when they do, then there is no more all. Monkberry Moon Delight, for example, is a great song, but only because of the harmonic participation of each of the elements that compose it. The lyrics are nonsense I Am the Walrus, a scarecrow made of pieces, on the fly, which is nothing more than an amusing anecdote; however, if you take it back, as Percy Thrillington did, then what you're left with is a to-and-fro string that nobody cares about. The thing works because Paul sings that melody, with his cracked voice of a good-natured uncle, and at the same time articulates these words: “So I stood with a knot in my stomach, / and I gazed at that terrible sight / of two youngsters concealed in a barrel / smoking monkberry moon delight"

Paul McCartney will die soon, as so many unique people of the past have died. That day a large part of the world's music teams will be reproducing his voice, his face will be seen as soon as there is newscast and when we write a letter "P" in the Google search engine, the first suggestion that we will see will say: "Paul McCartney death ”. I too - as I did with Bowie, Krahe and Santiago - I will pray my anonymous requiem, which will be to put this album upside down.

I'm leaving with Martí, with this fragment of the presentation he made to his Simple Verses, where he asks himself: “Why is this simplicity published, written like playing (…)? (…) Why exhibit now, on the occasion of these wild flowers, a course of my poetics, and say why I repeat a consonant of purpose, or do I rank or group them so that they go by sight and hearing to feeling, Or do I jump for them, when the tumultuous idea does not ask for rhymes or support reprints?