Understanding the meaning of Paul McCartney’s album cover for ‘Ram’
Former Beatles man Paul McCartney has enjoyed a long and storied career that has taken many guises. From his days as a young heartthrob during ‘Beatlemania’ to those when the band were deeply ensconced in their LSD-loving lifestyle, there are many notable chapters in the story of one of the finest songwriters the world has ever seen.
One of the most intriguing chapters in McCartney’s life is his early solo career following the fallout of The Beatles’ split. As is well known, things did not end as anybody would have hoped for the ‘Fab Four’. After the schism, the band became an awkward topic for an extended period, as each member explored different creative projects in an effort to put the past behind them.
As things were winding down for The Beatles, McCartney was fearless in jumping into a solo career, releasing his debut solo effort McCartney in April 1970, three weeks before the group’s final album, Let It Be. Tunnel-visioned in his quest to go it alone, McCartney even refused to delay the release of his debut, meaning that Ringo Starr’s debut effort, Sentimental Journey, which arrived in March 1970, did not perform as well as he would have hoped due to his bandmate hogging the limelight.
Whilst McCartney is loved by his diehard fans, its follow-up, 1971’s Ram, is universally hailed as one of his finest. Boasting tracks such as ‘Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey’ and ‘The Back Seat of My Car’, it is the only album credited to the husband-and-wife duo of Paul and Linda McCartney.
Whilst the album contains some of McCartney’s best and most profound work, it is also famous for holding a handful of subtle digs at his former bandmates, with John Lennon his number-one target.
The track ‘Too Many People’ includes the most famous critique of Lennon, with McCartney telling Playboy in 1984: “I was looking at my second solo album, Ram, the other day and I remember there was one tiny little reference to John in the whole thing. He’d been doing a lot of preaching, and it got up my nose a little bit. In one song, I wrote, ‘Too many people preaching practices’, I think is the line. I mean, that was a little dig at John and Yoko. There wasn’t anything else on it that was about them. Oh, there was ‘You took your lucky break and broke it in two'”.
Despite much of the conversation surrounding the ill will that McCartney may or may not have imbued in Ram, the album contains many positive aspects that far outweigh the negatives. Perhaps the most heartfelt of these is the secret message that Paul included to Linda on the album’s front cover. For a long time, the tiny letters ‘L.I.L.Y.’ were a source of mystery for fans before it was revealed that they stand for ‘Linda I Love You’. Beautiful.
