McCartney Times

Nearly everything written about Paul and Linda McCartney’s Ram at the time of its release in 1971 strikes me as utter twaddle. In his crushing review of the post-Beatles release, John Landau – who would later serve as Bruce Springsteen’s manager – described the effort as not only representing the “nadir in the decomposition of Sixties rock thus far” but of being “emotionally vacuous”. I would posit that it’s actually far more joyful than anything the Beatles ever released.

For listeners at the time, Ram was coloured by the dramatic fallout of The Beatles. It is perhaps for this reason McCartney chose to open the album with ‘Too Many People’, a scathing critique of former bandmate John Lennon. He clearly wanted to address the bad blood between the pair but also wanted to get it out of the way as quickly as possible. Landau, meanwhile, can’t seem to let it go, leading to an immediate distrust of the musician’s efforts. For the critic, everything McCartney does is self-indulgent or boring or false. It is, in his eyes, the very antithesis of rock ‘n’ roll. It’s ‘Muzak’, elevator music for an era degrading the sanctity of popular music.

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Source: Why Paul McCartney’s ‘Ram’ is the best post-Beatles album