Not every album is necessarily brought out at the right time. Even though an artist tries as hard as they can to get the right sound they hear in their head, that’s not normally what many people expect to hear half the time, which tends to be an issue when it ends up slowly falling off the charts. Most of The Beatles didn’t really care about if they sold a million records all over again as solo artists, but John Lennon knew that he was listening to a significant downgrade when he heard Paul McCartney’s RAM.
This is strange, considering how Macca’s sophomore release as a solo artist has gone down. This was the moment when he started to get back to the studio experimentation of The Beatles with his wife, Linda, and McCartney created some of the wildest noises that anyone could have ever conceived of.
Throughout every track, there seems to be a new surprise waiting, from the downhome folk of ‘Heart of the Country’ to the strange spaghetti western style fever dream on ‘Monkberry Moon Delight’. There was a lot to unpack with a record like this, but it didn’t seem like most people would listen.
Outside of the opening diss at Lennon on ‘Too Many People’, everyone seemed to think that the former ‘Cute Beatle’ had completely lost his edge, instead trading in his charm for some of the most discordant music of his career. Lennon didn’t necessarily need to have warm feelings about being told that he broke his lucky break in two, but he still thought that the record was far from what McCartney should have been aiming for.
When talking to Hit Parader, Lennon claimed that there were more than a few spotty moments on the record, saying, “The first time I heard it, I thought it was awful, and then the second time, ahem, I fixed the record player a bit, and it sounded better. I mean, it doesn’t matter anyway. In general I think the other album he did was better in a way. At least there were some songs on it.”
At the same time, it is kind of interesting to hear Lennon come down so hard on McCartney for not having songs, given his fascination with the avant-garde. He had already made experimental records with Yoko Ono, so if his former partner was looking to make kooky songs that didn’t quite fit into the usual pop song formula, that should have been a breath of fresh air, right?
Either way, Lennon was still hard at work on his next musical venture, putting together the songs that would make up Imagine, while McCartney would eventually reconcile with his old mate later on the song ‘Dear Friend’ off Wings’ first album, Wild Life. While Lennon lobbed the ball back at McCartney with ‘How Do You Sleep’ and made the whole world think that his partner had fallen off, McCartney wasn’t ready to pack everything in.
If anything, RAM was the real watershed moment where he started to realise his vision, and regardless of what public opinion was at the time, the modern sounds of rock and roll can benefit from listening to a few of its tracks.
