Paul and Linda McCartney - Ram

Let's talk about Ram. It's the 2nd Paul McCartney album after John Lennon called them all into a staff meeting and quit the Beatles, and the first official Paul and Linda album before they named themselves Wings.

I mentioned that after the Beatles McCartney hid on his farm for a while and reemerged as a solo artist, but the story is actually much more complicated. Whole books could be written about what happened from 1969 to 1972, but i'll paraphrase. John and Paul were joint owners of 3 major corporations: a private publishing company, a publicly traded publishing company that eased the tax burden of the private corporation, and a record label that did all the actual work. John thought he could quit the band without losing his stake in Paul's future successes, and he turned out to be wrong.

The first solo album, McCartney, deserves its own write up so i'll simply describe it as what Paul did before the depression set in. Ram is what happened when Linda couldn't take living on their farm in Scotland with drunkenly depressed Paul McCartney and 3 kids anymore. She basically said "make another album, ya jackass. You aren't actually dead like Beatles fans pretend you are. I'll help you if that's what it takes."

That's where it got tricky. John and the corporate side of things thought they owned Paul McCartney the person's creative output. When Paul and Linda released "Another Day" as a single, they claimed it was Beatles property and that Paul was in breach of contract. To be fair, he had brought that song to the Let It Be sessions, and he was intentionally messing with Apple's release schedule out of spite. But, after they sued themselves, the legal verdict was that the corporation did not own the choice of who their songwriters wished to collaborate with, and they all agreed to a new 7 year contract with Paul and Linda rather than lose even more revenue.

So, Ram is an autobiographical album about headbutting your way forward, and it takes jabs at everything standing in Paul's way: the Beatles, John himself, Linda's ex-husband, Paul's own tendency to not finish songs, and so on. Sadly, the public and press didn't really understand what any of this stuff was about, so everybody said it was terrible and/or got offended. I can point you to some terrible crap written by McCartney, but this album isn't it. For starters, it's a real album. The songs about Linda aren't just romantic lip service, and the jabs at everybody else are legitimate things a hurt and depressed person might say about people who tried to ruin his life.

He wasn't going to let other people tell him what he could or couldn't do, and he succeeded. You're allowed to not like it, but it turns out i do. To quote my wife, "'Too Many People' is a very underrated song," and it leads off an equally underrated, as well as under-understood, album.

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