When Paul McCartney released Ram, he caught a lot of flak.
After the breakdown of The Beatles, the question of what the different band members would do put each of their first solo offerings under an intense limelight. All four wanted to prove themselves on their own, and it wasn’t just the press or the public they wanted to please, but they obviously wanted to impress each other.
Naturally, there was some competition between them group. After splitting and falling out, the tensions bubbling under the surface showed up clearest in their music. In particular, they showed up for Paul McCartney, who was the member who gained the most public blame for the end of the band. It all seemed to end up getting pinned on him, and so his solo works felt even more highly scrutinised.
With his debut, McCartney, he didn’t start on a great foot. Despite ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’ now being a timeless classic, at the time, the record recorded fully solo, didn’t get glowing reviews. It was deemed dull and unimpressive while people were still made about the end of their beloved band. But on Ram, the artist brought in a whole team of musicians again, going all out for a record designed to get his spark back. Yet, the record came along with scrutiny, and this time, it came from his old friends.
After the release of Ram, Ringo Starr said to Melody Maker that McCartney “seems to have gone strange”. With nothing nice to say about the whimsical album, he added, “I feel sad about Paul’s albums…I don’t think there’s one [good] tune on the last one, Ram”.
John Lennon seemed to feel the same, especially given that Ram included some veiled digs towards him on the track ‘Too Many People’. “I thought it was awful,” he said of his first listen, adding, “I don’t like all this dribblin’ pop-opera jazz. I like pop records that are pop records”.
The press seemed to side with the ex-Beatles. Despite the record-hitting number one, Rolling Stone deemed it “incredibly inconsequential” and “monumentally irrelevant”.
However, by now, Ram is a classic. If there is any record from McCartney’s entire solo discography that feels like an essential listen, it’s this one, which seems to provide a perfect bridge between eras. It captures the storytelling McCartney of late-stage Beatles, but then with tracks like ‘Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey’, it also looks towards the new type of hits Wings would come out with. Also standing as his first named collaboration with Linda McCartney, this was truly the opening of the next chapter, as they’d start the band together soon after.
Listening back, Ram is a necessary middle ground. If you played these tunes blind to someone who didn’t know the history, chances are they’d think ‘Too Many People’ was just a straight-up Beatles tune, or think ‘Long Haired Lady’ was from a Wings record. This is the album that smoothed out that transition and proved that McCartney’s talent never dipped or faded; it was only clouded by the dark period it was released within, when he stood as musical enemy number one to all the fans still in mourning.
