How Paul McCartney got his excitement back: “Ram on!”
“I was depressed. You would be. You were breaking from your lifelong friends,” Paul McCartney said of his life at the end of the 1960s. After John Lennon announced to the band in 1969 that he wanted a divorce, The Beatles were over. McCartney’s life as he knew it was changed; the family he’d existed in since his teenage years was over, and suddenly, he was flung out into the world solo. On McCartney, he coped, but on Ram, he thrived.
Both albums played their own essential role in McCartney’s healing. After the split, the musician, in his own words, was depressed. He retreated to his homelife wife Linda and their family, even admitting that he wondered “whether I was still going to continue in music”. But as is always the way with artists, whether they want it to or not, art comes to them. Even when hidden away, songs found their way into his head until he seemed to have no choice but to put them down on tape.
That’s the story of McCartney, his 1970 debut solo album. Made in total isolation in his home studio without telling another person or getting anyone beyond his wife involved, it was an introverted project. “I was like a professor in his laboratory. Very simple [set-up], as basic as you can get,” he said of the record. It seems like it was an attempt to get back to basics. Like with recovery from anything, the first steps are the hardest and have to be taken carefully and mindfully. For McCartney, this was that, as he tested the waters in private to see how music interacted with his life now without the band around him.
It’s a great album that more than proved that he was still capable of incredible songwriting and compositions without the support of the Beatles. But really, it wasn’t until the release of Ram that the palpable joy that is so present in his work found its way into his solo stuff. It wasn’t until he returned to the joy of collaboration on that project with Linda and a band around him, sharing in the excitement of music and creativity, that McCartney truly bounced back.
It makes sense. McCartney’s origins and entire career as a musician up to this point had been as part of a collaborative unit. Especially with his songwriting, Lennon and McCartney had learnt the craft together and were undeniably at their best when bouncing ideas back and forth. When isolated in his home making his solo debut, he proved to himself that he could do it alone, but the energy of Ram suggests that maybe he never wanted to.
“Ram on!” McCartney laughed with a journalist when he first discussed the process of making the album, as that became the kind of creative ethos. While McCartney was controlled and somewhat careful, Ram was the decision to just run at the job and see what happened. “If you ever get a block, just steamroll through it and fix it later,” McCartney said as his songwriting advice and the approach he started to take during this era. It was an approach definitely informed by the presence of Linda McCartney, who became a kind of step-in for Lennon and a sounding board to bounce ideas off to keep the energy flowing, as well as the band they brought in to play on the album.
With all those things, it was more like the Beatles where McCartney would get swept up in the flow of creativity as there were other people to keep it moving along. Giving him less time to overthink things and bringing the social element of music making back in, Ram captures the fun atmosphere it was made in. You can here on tape how McCartney was getting his joy back.
While the songs on McCartney feel simple and reminiscent of his more balladic, straightforward words, the tracklist of Ram returns to the playful world that the Beatles had discovered, creating a record full of life and colour. There’s the characterful delivery of ‘Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey’ as he uses silly voices for a spiralling story. There’s the tongue-in-cheek witty lyricism of ‘Smile Away’ where you can almost feel him laughing through your headphones. There’s the spontaneous, ditty-like vibe of ‘Heart Of The Country’, as if he just plucked the tune from thin air one night and had fun with it. There’s even the beautifully domestic, country-twanged rockabilly of ‘Eat At Home’, a track that undeniably came from an inside joke between the couple.
Across every song, Ram is governed by a sense of play, thoughtlessness and sponentiety. It doesn’t feel like a man in a lab doing experiments to see if he still works, or trying to prove his genius in a new context. Instead, it feels like a musician having fun with other musicians again.
