Good Lord, the First Ram Jam Album Is Awesome

http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=10:1ykqoaqabijz

is one of the best things i ever picked up.

a totally perfect saturday night album.

they are still going and gigging according to a recent google dig.

Second album is a different band altogether. A Kasenatz-Katz proposition, they'd gone from wanting steak and taters hard rock to glammy OTP metal with "KId Next Door" and tunes cited by Myonga.

Second album is lost classix bazooka glam metal by entirely different set of ringers still entirely worth your cash money and ear damage.

seems kind of unique to me for the genre!

George starts to answer this, but what is Ram Jam's genre? I only know "Black Betty"; "bubblegum metal" seems to me a good description of the song but (1) I'm not sure why I think it's a good description, and (2) I don't know if "bubblegum metal" is a genre, or if it is, that "Black Betty" belongs to it. The reason I'm not sure why it's a good description is that in my mind a bubblegum metal track would apply blues-metal to catchy sweetly toonful-oonful nonblues melodies, and while "Black Betty" is catchy all right, where's the sweetly toonful-oonfulness? Maybe something about the vocals is engagingly bubblegum. (I don't require something that's bubblegum to resemble everything about everything else that's bubblegum, just some things about some other things that are bubblegum.) "Ram Jam"'s bubblegum provenance in itself doesn't make "Black Betty" bubblegum. Even if there'd been no Kasenetz-Katz connection I'd still feel that "bubblegum" was a good description. As for whether there is a genre here, I'm not too hard-nosed about what needs to be a genre (and you can retrospectively invent genres for your own ad hoc purposes), and something can be in more than one genre. We can call "Black Betty" folk rock as well as bubblegum metal. Or if we're hesitant to call it "folk rock," that tells us something interesting about the genre "folk rock," that it would exclude this particular rock version of a folk song. Anyway, just curious as to whom Tim is comparing Ram Jam to.

FYI for those who haven't heard it, "Black Betty" is an old African American stomp whose most famous non–Ram Jam version is by Leadbelly. In Chronicles, Bob Dylan associates the song with the idea of rootin' the mountain down, which isn't something one usually says about bubblegum. (But bubblegum can be used to root down a mountain. Creemsters used it that way in the late '60s and early '70s. But they were rooting down a different mountain.)

(I might understand all this better if I were to hear the entire album.)

bubblegum genre fits in terms of K/K, use studio musicians, pro songwriters etc but not as sonic description.

an early version of Ram Jam's "Black Betty" was a local radio hit in Cincinnati. (Bartlett's from nearby college town Oxford, Ohio). more country-rock boogie, less syncopated plod. maybe it was a demo? I was still in hs, so a couple years before "BB" hit in 77.

who were Kastenezt/Katz aiming at: bubblegumm or heavymetal kidz?

pathetically I haven't heard the albums and they're not on Rhapsody.

I think they were aiming at selling as many records as possible to as many people as possible as they always did!

So DJ's take note: This is a versatile song. (I agree about the disco affinity noted above. Might work spun back-to-back with AC/DC for that reason.)

bbbbut they have taken note. for years and years.

K&K assert on the liner notes to the album that "Black Betty" is "not a bubble record!" I do hear it as one, though, I think partly because Dadaismus is right that K&K did hard rock stuff early on (the Lemon Pipers' Green Tambourine album ends with two hard rock tracks) and partly because blues/soul melodies were the earliest bubblegum w/ Tommy James and then you had records like "Gimme Gimme Good Lovin'" and further moves toward bubblegum within soul proper (from Jackson Five through Sylvers and stuff) and so why not hard rock, too? There's something about the structure of "Black Betty" that works as bubblegum. And the dance music element reinforces it. (I think the hi-hat in it is at least part of why it's hard as being sort of disco, btw.)

yeah, why not, and we can call it glam!

With Tommy James, you've got blues diatonic melodies as early as "Hanky Panky" (which was just rock and roll). And re. structure of songs, maybe if "Mony Mony" (and "Rock and Roll Part Two") are gum, then "Black Betty" is also gum.

As opposed to Kid Rock's North of [Windsor] Canada faux Southern rock, Frank?

You gotta be kidding me. Slayed?! Slade Alive Sladest kill by stomping with boots. Play It Loud Old New Borrowed & Blue and Nobody's Fools ain't bad, either.

Kasenetz-Katz were definitely trying for mass appeal in the hard rock arena, which probably had something to with the shuffling of Ram Jam players after the first album didn't blast off quite like they wanted. Lucky us, the fortuitous accident resulted in one of the odd pleasant surprises of rock and roll. Stylistically almost completely different but still real good. And the pop shuffle of "Right On the Money" still should have been heard by as many who heard "Black Betty." Could've easily been a second single off the first album.

Very much an acquired taste unless you saw them live regularly, at which point you probably thought they were the greatest thing ever. Especially after 8 beers.

picked this up for $12 and after two listens have to say: GREAT! don't know which I like better, trax 1-10 (the Bartlett lineup)are unique countryrock/metallic/bubbleglam, while trax 11-20 are highenergy popmetal...it's all good. "Too Bad On Your Birthday" is definitely my favorite song, like glitter-encrusted farmboyzz covering T Rex while wearing flannell shirts & platform shoes.

" I've always been baffled by that strange edit near the beginning of "Black Betty" - the way the song's first 30 seconds or so is spliced in to repeat itself just after the first verse. Kinda like "Run Lola Run" or something. Very peculiar; I wonder why that was done?

apparently it was edited from an earlier version by Bartlett's band between the Lemon Pipers and Ram Jam

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I73T5EJmaS4

p cool but i think i like the Ram Jam version better.

Wow! That's crazy, I had no idea. I like this version, though it really doesn't lend itself to playing over the end credits of college sports radio.

Playing Rayman the other day, and Black Betty makes a guest appearance. In all seriousness, I think this is the definitive version:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yOEuOuhINc

"It's such a fine line between a rut and a groove..."