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Paul and Linda McCartney - 'The Back Seat of My Car' (Ram - 1971)

Whilst watching The Beatles’ Get Back documentary at the end of 2022, there was plenty of focus on the section where Paul McCartney wills ‘Get Back’ into existence. It is a remarkable portrait of a genius songwriter pulling at threads until he has yet another number-one hit on his hands.

As stunning as that moment is, one that surprised me was when McCartney turned up and casually emptied ‘The Back Seat of My Car’ into the studio on 14th January 1969 by announcing that he had a song he was working on that morning. It is as if Paul is saying, “No big deal, if you don’t the song, I’ve got dozens more I can offer you over the next few days.”

The song ultimately failed its audition as a Beatles song and didn’t appear on Let It Be, Abbey Road or even McCartney’s solo, one-man-band, self-titled debut. It ends up on a Paul and Linda McCartney record, recorded with Denny Seiwell, soon to be a Wings member, on drums.

The public perceptions of Paul McCartney during the Beatles’ split significantly impacted the commentary around Ram. As many viewed Paul as responsible for the band’s break-up, they didn’t want to give him any leeway to do something different and negative perception was reflected in the early reviews of Ram, which were often critical and dismissive. In Rolling Stone, Jon Landau said that;

Ram represents the nadir in the decomposition of Sixties rock thus far. For some, including myself, Self-Portrait had been secure in that position, but at least [Bob Dylan’s] Self-Portrait was an album that you could hate, a record you could feel something over, even if it were nothing but regret. 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

The rest of the review reads, fifty years later, like someone having a pop at Paul McCartney for not being John Lennon, the type of double standard which was never reversed and used as a critic of the other member of the 20th Century’s most enduring songwriting partnership.

With the passage of five decades plus, the album is now looked at fondly by critics who now appreciate the innovation and experimentation that imbibes the indie spirit of the album.

The concept of an indie record as being an album on an independent record label is older than The Beatles’ first official recordings,

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so we can’t claim Ram as the first indie record based on that type of technicality - especially given the Beatles put out their last few records on Apple Records. At the same time, there is undoubtedly something in the idea that the mash of rock, folk, country, twee pop, and DIY ethos is as much proto-indie as the way that The Stooges were proto-punk.

You can hear the types of ideas that post Orange Juice, The Smiths, and The Go-Betweens would deck out the pages of Melody Maker and NME for years to come. It celebrates the minutiae and unimportant with big melodies and enthusiasm, an attitude that contemporary reviews treated like an actual crime.

The album finishes with a joyous paean to teenage love, which, even though it was written by someone approaching thirty, is as welcome an addition to that cannon as the earliest work by The Beatles and, in the future, songs by The Arctic Monkeys, Ash, Supergrass and Green Day.

The song, like ‘Two of Us’ and ‘Helen Wheels’, was forged from the long car journeys Linda and Paul would take while the Beatles were ending.

Paul has said to Billboard;

‘Back Seat of My Car’ is the ultimate teenage song, and even though it was a long time since I was a teenager and had to go to a girl’s dad and explain myself, it’s that kind of meet-the-parents song. It’s a good old driving song. [Sings] ‘We can make it to Mexico City.’ I’ve never driven to Mexico City, but it’s imagination. And obviously ‘back seat’ is snogging, making love.

Often as people who listen to a lot of music, we can tend to fixate on songs that allow us to hang on to feelings of nostalgia. This song evokes that in spades. If you’ve ever longed for simpler times when the most you had to worry about was being caught canoodling by your girlfriend’s father, driving with no purpose and the feeling of invincibility that you can feel when you are young confident and, most importantly, together.

Like those road trips, the song starts slowly and builds and builds to a crescendo, with the orchestra backing competing with Paul’s soaring vocals at the song’s climax. The ability for McCartney to have such a narrow, intimate and focused setting across the album’s whimsical songs and mood pieces but then to pull back into widescreen and give us such a cinematic and epic ending showed that there was life in the old mop-top yet.

It’s not ‘A Day In The Life’ or ‘The End’ in terms of comparing to some of the climatic songs that ended classic albums by The Beatles, but it is at least a song of strength and quality to inhabit the same universe as some of McCartney’s old band’s masterpieces.

Even Jon Landau thought that back in 1971;

All of which makes it no less easy to deal with this very bad album from this very talented artist. 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.

1. Frank Sinatra’s Reprise Records was launched as a subsidiary of Warner in 1960.