Ram at half speed
May 14: Ram (half speed mastered)
Pre-empting the market for full blown luxury boxed set by his own Archives series, Paul McCartney’s 50th anniversary album releases takes a different path. To mark the 50th anniversary of the release of RAM, the album will be pressed from a master cut at half speed using the original master tapes at Abbey Road. Last year, «McCartney» got the same treatment.
The only album credited to both Paul and Linda McCartney, RAM reached Number 1 in the UK and stayed in the US Top 10 for five months. Recording after he’d left The Beatles and before the formation of Wings, Paul initially flew with Linda to New York to record the songs they’d written but arrived without a band.
As Paul recalls, “We were thinking of forming a group at that time, Wings. We went to New York, found a really grotty little basement somewhere and auditioned a bunch of people. We got someone to throw a lot of drummers at us, out of which we picked Denny Seiwell who’s one of the best, and his personality fitted. Then we went in, worked with him, Hugh McCracken, Dave Spinozza, a couple of New York session men, and did RAM.”
To avoid arousing too much interest, the auditions were held under the guise of a session for a commercial jingle. As well as Paul’s lead vocals there are harmonies from Linda.
“I gave her a hard time, I must say, but we were pleased with the results. Elton John later said somewhere that he thought it was the best harmonies he’d heard in a long while. It was very much the two of us against the world at that point.”
The new half speed mastered vinyl release will be available May 14 in limited quantities.
How come Paul didn’t learn how to do a proper celebration of an album? Remixing and adding good extra takes like it happened with the white album and abbey road… I simply don´t understand, Paul has the money to make it happen.
Paul was releasing deluxe boxed sets of his albums for years, long before The Beatles and John Lennon, he just didn’t wait for the albums to turn fifty. So if you want deluxe boxes of McCartney and Ram, they are already out there.
Hopefully he won’t have at least 10 different versions of it coming out like with McCartney III
And also will there be a CD version as well? I only see information about vinyl
No, this is a vinyl product.
Half-speed mastering is only relevant to analogue media.
April Fool’s – right?
If rick ever had a sense of humour, it has surely been ground out of him by McCartney’s ceaseless campaign to rob him blind in a succession of canny “cash grabs”.
There really is a ‘reimagined’ Ram coming out as well. I believe Denny Seiwell is involved and it has different vocalists for each track. I just hope it’s not as bad as ‘McCartney III Reimagined’.
Great. Just great. Do they even make 16.6 rpm turntables anymore? How are we supposed to play these half-speed masters??
You mean that as a joke, I guess…
Half speed is crap. I’m waiting for quarter speed.