Day 202: Paul & Linda McCartney – Ram

I’ve had Ram on my list of things to listen to for ages. I heard that it was some sort of precursor to indie pop. Also, it was apparently critically panned when it came out and later became viewed as some of the finest post-Beatle work, which of course piques my interest, I love to see what kind of stuff people couldn’t appreciate when it came out. So how far ahead of its time was Ram? Let’s find out.

Album cover courtesy of Apple Records

Paul McCartney was going through his Beatles break-up and a horrendous response to his first solo release, so he decided to take his family and run away with them to a property that he’d bought in a rural area in Scotland. Ram resulted from this time in isolation on a farm with his family, where he said he finally got the chance to grow up: he’d been a world-famous celebrity who always had people do things for him, but now he had to do things on his own, like driving a tractor, fixing the roof or shearing sheep, with no one else around to do things for him.

Ram is the result of this period of normalcy and domesticity that he was getting to have for the first time in his adult life. However, the folksy and homespun feel of the album went against all  expectations that people had of him, and people just didn’t understand what he was doing. It was a big seller, but critics panned it as garbage, with Rolling Stone saying that it was “so incredibly inconsequential and so monumentally irrelevant” that despite how bad it is, you can’t even muster u the effort to hate it.

Some of the album’s biggest critics were his former members of the Fab Four. Firstly, Ringo thought that the album signified that he’d gone a bit mad, saying “I feel sad about Paul’s albums. I don’t think there’s one tune on the last one, Ram. I just feel he’s wasted his time. He seems to be going strange”. John Lennon also took offence to some of the lyrics on the album that he thought were jibes at him and Yoko, which he responded to with his own diss track “How Do You Sleep?”, accompanied by George Harrison.

Ram is one of those albums that reminds me that all you can do as a music writer is stay  true to your own taste, because there’s just not a single chance that no one was able to see the merit in any of the songs on this album. It’s simple rootsy rock music about the little joys that you can and should enjoy in your life, which bounces around from some more psychedelic tunes to the slower bluesy rock, with Linda’s lovingly imperfect background vocals accompanying them.

The older I get, the more I think that the general population are a little bit too repressed to appreciate things that are earnest and joyful. I read the Rolling Stone review and it said it’s an album of Paul McCartney pretending to enjoy a simple life, saying “his lyrics about the joys of the country ring false. Rather than a sense of self-acceptance or pride, I get a feeling of self-pity and self-justification”. I will pay actual money for someone to point where the album exhibits any self-pity, because there is none. The author is projecting something that clearly isn’t there.

I went down a Ram rabbit hole when I was looking at flats for sale in Campbeltown. Glasgow rents have gone mad and I honestly can’t really afford to rent here anymore, so I spend a fair bit of time dreaming of a simpler life somewhere on the coast. I was mincing around on Google Maps when I found a statue of Linda McCartney, so I started reading a bit more about their time living in the area. Genuinely, my dream is to buy property in the middle of nowhere in Scotland and just noodle around, do a bit of woodworking and pottery, play some music and hang out while doing arts and crafts. This is clearly the album for just that.

I think there’s two parts to the hate that this album received: one is that it was just so far left field from what people expected that they didn’t know how to deal with it, and the second is that some critics couldn’t wrap their heads around an album about leaving behind a life of luxury and embracing the simple things, and crucially also feeling happier for it. They’d be devastated if they did it, so they tell themselves that the premise of the album is fake – secretly he hates it, too.

But Paul McCartney had never mowed lawns or fixed things, of course he was going to enjoy doing the everyday things that being one of the most famous men in the world had taken from him. I think you can really hear it on Ram. He’s happy being in the middle of nowhere in the fields with his wife and his family, singing sort of whimsical songs about the joys of family and country life. I just want to listen to this laying on a blanket in the great outdoors, thinking that life is good. 9/10.