Review Summary: The ultimate guilty pleasure album? Maybe so. Any good on its own? Not even remotely.
Once upon a time, there was a New York-based Southern-tinged classic rock band named Ram Jam. Re-appropriating a traditional folk song into a bluesier jam session with one of the all-time best hooks, they became a household name overnight with their rendition of Black Betty in 1977. And then...there was nothing. Well, okay, not nothing, they had one more album besides, but Ram Jam are maybe the best example of a one-hit wonder. Their hit was inescapable and is still very much around today, but good luck finding anyone who can name you another Ram Jam song. At all. The closest someone will come is that remix of Black Betty they might have caught in 2002's Kung Pow, and for as much as I like that movie, that is not an endorsement.
That remix was actually made by Dutch producer Ben Liebrand back in 1990, and it had some minor success on a few European charts, likely enough to get the bump to appearing in a movie. And if you listen to the title track and first single on this album, you'll know exactly where the inspiration for it came from. But the story of Ram Jam gets a little hazy from here, and even with forgotten rock music's cultural cul-de-sacs and contradictions, you'd think the guys who made Black Betty would have their story straight by now. Wikipedia suggests one-off Trans Siberian Orchestra singer Maxx Mann was fronting the group during this period, but all signs point to session/tribute singer Don Chaffin, with his face being the one to grace the cover (though this may not be an indicator either; Boney M and Milli Vanilli were big around this time, after all). That is really our collective best guess: some production team somewhere observed the minor success of the Black Betty dance remix, cobbled together a band to cash in and released an album under the Ram Jam name. Well, if we have to acknowledge this album as part of a classic rock band's canon for the sake of making record execs more money (off the back of a fluke dance hit, no less), then we must also examine how it stacks up critically to the rest of their work. And this album is, frankly, an embarrassment in just about every way. Including, in some facets, to myself.
The biggest thing going for Thank You Mam is the hooks. Even if you're sick of it, you have to acknowledge the hook to Black Betty is untouchable, and Thank You Mam recognises this because the thing pops up everywhere. Black Betty isn't a song that needed a "sequel"; certainly the lyrics are not why it got popular. But the title track takes the base hook and chords and shifts it around a bit to still make for an effective earworm. But then you have songs like Turn Me On, which just uses the "bam-balam" hook for no real reason other than it being recognisable. Black Betty '95 threw me for a loop, until I actually heard it and realised it was a cover of the Liebrand dance remix, almost to the T. Rounding out this set of weirdness is Down And Dirty, which re-uses the dance remix bass line and has a hook very similar to Thank You Mam. So that's four songs that target the exact same niche. To which I wonder, why even stop there if you're going to be that lazy?
Why indeed. The rest of the album is not 70s rock befitting of the "artist" but cribs mostly from the hair metal playbook, with some songs in the latter half sounding like post-makeup Kiss. But not all of these songs are that bad, because the team behind this project is able to recognise at least a few good hooks outside of just the one. Do The Nasty and Rock Hard are not-terrible arena rockers, with big boisterous hooks that flow well and aren't too gaudy. Though they definitely are a little, what with this album's insistence on playing isolated chorus vocals at the start of most tracks for no real reason. Every time, it's like this foghorn of noise because the delay is so overblown and cheap. Sex Love and Dynamite also features a stomping groove that is enjoyable despite...well, everything else in it.
Bear in mind, when I call something in this album "good", it is extremely relative, and never indicative of the actual level of talent or effort on display. This album's sonic palette is still botched head to toe. Considering the circumstances of some no-name producers quickly conjuring up an album based after another no-name producer's random hit, this should not be a surprise. Guitar and vocals are the only legit instruments on display, and the guitars are so overprocessed and lack any raw feel they could just as well have been MIDI samples for all the good the real recording time did. And in fact, they are sometimes, leaving us with just cheap canned drums with static rhythms, plonky bass tones with no depth and Casio keyboard runs that are so embarrassing they're inaudible for most of the production anyway.
Then you have Don Chaffin's vocals, which aren't exactly terrible, but definitely fall right into that tribute singer mold. He has good grasp of melody and can hit high notes fairly well, but his delivery is completely flat and has no real flair or character, the kind of singer that might make it past the first round of Idol but never lasts long. Without any grit in his tone, he always sounds well out of his depth, especially since pretty much every song on Thank You Mam is about sex and sexiness, a mood he cannot project to save his life. Overall, he doesn't come close to saving the album from sounding like a cheap cash grab. Which it is. But it makes the attempted authorial marks even more strange.
Ram Jam and 80s arena rock aren't the only genres cribbed shamelessly from, and it's in some other songs you'll find some of its weirder, almost "so bad it's good" moments. Roxy Roller is a fairly shameless Sweet rip-off, but man does Chaffin's delivery really falter here, the whole thing sounding so stilted it's like they barely tried. Turn Me On, alongside the hook re-use, also features...umm, rapping, if we're being charitable. Don't Turn Me On, really confusing title aside, sounds like sports movie montage music with delivery so flat and absurd I have trouble thinking about the creative process that led to that point at all.
But the weirdest track, and by far the worst, has to be Help Me. With its dire sounding lyrics, distorted filter on the vocals and an electronic rock background powering a driving riff, I believe it's trying for Broken era Nine Inch Nails. But what makes Broken work is that the production is tight, dense and at a professional level, none of which is ever true for Thank You Mam, often riding big AOR hooks on a five dollar budget at its best moments. Help Me just puts the paradoxical scale into true focus, best demonstrating the complete artistic misunderstanding of the whole project. Though an off-key rendition of Lonely Days, a rare Bee Gees cover not from their disco era, is a close second in this regard too.
And I could keep going. The Phil Collins-esque meeting of classic rock and new jack swing on Hanging On with terrible ad-libs. The moody ambient creep of Break It Down that goes absolutely nowhere. The waste of time that is Get It On. And just how forgettable all of these titles are now I have to sit and type them out. But hopefully you get the picture. A mostly glam metal inspired record, actually inspired from a fluke dance hit, made on the budget of a Big Mac value meal, running off the back of a one-hit wonder and occasionally milking said hit to hilarious results. This is the sort of ephemera that's great for historians of weird media whose origins make no sense, cool for "so bad it's good" experiences with friends but so obviously terrible for any sort of artistic or creative addition to the medium. Even the "good" tracks on here were outclassed by fare made a decade earlier, and all the contemporary trends they tried to emulate are so, so much worse. In the end, Don Chaffin would go back to various session gigs and solo ventures, this album's two (!) singles would fail to do anything, and Ram Jam would cease to exist once again. Well, if they ever actually came back at all.
