In between those two acquired tastes, RAM proved that McCartney could still work at his full powers if he felt like it, which makes the half-assed records all the more frustrating. Yet, there was always something to enjoy on those records. McCartney may have sounded like it was recorded and mostly written over a weekend, but it still had one major moment in the enduring "Maybe I'm Amazed" and some really nice small ones in "Junk", "Teddy Boy", and "Every Night". If McCartney barely took advantage of his considerable talents as a composer when making Wild Life, at least he sounded like he was enjoying playing with a group again, and once again, he managed two strong songs in "Dear Friend" and "Tomorrow".
Red Rose Speedway is no less frustrating than those non-RAM albums, but at least it sounds like he took a lot of care in the production. This is McCartney's most polished studio work since Abbey Road, and that slickness paid dividends when he scored a number-one hit with the whoa-whoa-whoa-ing ballad "My Love". It may be the worst thing he recorded in the seventies, but "My Love" was pretty par for the course for early-seventies radio, which favored mealy dreck by The Carpenters, Mac Davis, and Bread. Later on the LP, "Hold Me Tight" gives "My Love" a run for its money with perhaps drippier music, dopier lyrics, and a title recycled from a throwaway early Beatles song.
Elsewhere, Red Rose Speedway is actually fairly weird. McCartney reprises the jam that ended the reprise of "Ram On" on RAM for the funky "Big Barn Bed", easily the best thing on Red Rose. "Loup (1st Indian on the Moon)" drifts from a culturally questionable pseudo-Native American thump into spacey blips and bloops worthy of Pink Floyd. "Little Lamb Dragonfly" is a trippy, mercurial love song to a baby sheep. "Get on the Right Thing" sounds like some bizarro collaboration between Little Richard and ELO. McCartney also tries to recreate the medley of Abbey Road for the first, but hardly the last, time in his solo career.
Red Rose Speedway clearly got something out of Paul's system, because he then buckled down and began a new phase in which he really took advantage of his talents with good songs, good production, and good performances, beginning with what is often considered to be the finest LP of his post-Beatles career. But Band on the Run will likely be a story for next year. For this year's Record Store Day, we're getting a half-speed remastered vinyl reissue of Red Rose Speedway.
Like last year's half-speed mastered edition of Wild Life, there's some inner groove distortion that affects the final moments of each side, and there's slight sibilance from time to time, but otherwise, this disc sounds clear and well detailed with natural bass that never becomes overbearing. The LP needed a quick cleaning, but it was very quiet afterward. Like all LPs in this series, Red Rose comes wrapped in an obi and it also includes a reproduction of the original album's photo/lyric/collage art booklet.
