Ram (album) - Release and Reception

Release and Reception

"The Back Seat of My Car" was excerpted as a UK single from Ram that August, only reaching number 39, but the US release of the ambitious "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey" proved much more successful, giving McCartney his first number 1 single since leaving The Beatles. The album reached number 1 in Britain and number 2 in the US, where it spent over five months in the Top 10 and went platinum. The album has sold over two million copies.

At the time of its release, Ram was given a poor critical reception, and McCartney was particularly stung by the harsh reviews − especially as he had attempted to address the points raised in criticism of his earlier album, McCartney, by adopting a more professional approach this time around. Jon Landau in Rolling Stone labelled Ram "incredibly inconsequential" and "monumentally irrelevant". Writing some four years later, Roy Carr and Tony Tyler from the New Musical Express explained the situation: "It would be naive to have expected the McCartneys to produce anything other than a mediocre record ... Grisly though this was, McCartney was to sink lower before rescuing his credibility late in 1973."

His fellow ex-Beatles, all of whom were riding high in the critics' favour with their recent releases, were likewise vocal in their negativity. Lennon famously hated the album, dismissing his former songwriting partner's efforts as "muzak to my ears" in his song "How Do You Sleep?". Even the affable Starr told Britain's Melody Maker: "I feel sad about Paul's albums ... I don't think there's one tune on the last one, Ram ... he seems to be going strange."

Decades after the initial release of Ram, critics have reviewed the album more favourably. Some prominent critics have even called it one of McCartney's finest solo works. George Starostin has called Ram "unquestionably the best pop album of 1971 and one of the best pop albums of the entire decade. A true classic." In his All Music Guide review, Stephen Thomas Erlewine wrote: "in retrospect it looks like nothing so much as the first indie pop album, a record that celebrates small pleasures with big melodies". In a review of the 2012 reissue of Ram by Pitchfork Media, Jayson Greene gave the album a 9.2 out of a possible score of 10 and noted: "Ram is a domestic-bliss album, one of the weirdest, earthiest, and most honest ever made."