JOHN & PAUL SIDE BY SIDE

PLASTIC ONO BAND, RAM & THEIR FIRST STEPS ON SEPARATE PATHS

Time comes for everyone and everything. But The Beatles were always different. They are sealed in amber. Footage that’s aged by a half century worth of scratches and dust, dizzy in focus and bright with color and grain, holds tight to something that makes their very existence feel modern, new and exciting. As if the band were born yesterday. Even now, their story and their influence is unimaginable. A complete, starry-eyed phenomenon made real and everlasting by something unknown and untold. But because they stopped at their height, disbanding just when the rollercoaster paused to breathe after its long climb to the clouds, as a unit they will always be remembered as they were: forever young and side by side – one single and superhuman entity. It was only after the drop, when they were no longer the tight knit team the world knew, that they lost the balance that made their artistic choices unsurpassable. Immediately, they were back down on Earth as separate voices and imperfect creators, capable of both brilliance and fault.      

As solo artists, they were doomed to endure endless comparisons and interest in the life they lived before. I suppose that’s fair and unfair, though no body of work could ever realistically compete with the avalanche of music made between 1963 and 1970 – not even their own. Instead, the unmistakeable genius and charisma of the group would shine through in glimpses and fragments. Away from the direct influence and input of one another, there were masterpieces and there was filler – full records and single songs of incredible depth and artistry and others that would suggest they just didn’t know what to do with the space. In the sixties, that kind of mediocrity seemed impossible. But by the seventies, their independence made them as mortal as they’d always claimed to be.  

Paul McCartney was the first to release something under his own name after making the breakup official, though 1970’s McCartney was less of a statement and more of an experiment, demo like in nature and loudly free of the precision and polish of a Beatles recording. Its follow-up, 1971’s Ram, was noticeably more ambitious, rife with the charming, whimsical and weird. Meanwhile, John Lennon’s first official solo album, 1970’s Plastic Ono Band was a brutally honest examination of alienation, trauma and grief. Suddenly, the two men behind the most successful, beloved songwriting partnership in history were finding their way forward at the same time their separate efforts were not so subtlety reinforcing the public images they had long been deigned. There was Lennon, as sharp and serious as barbed wire, and McCartney, his sunny opposite. But while there are shades of truth to long simmering myths that paint them so flatly, the complexity of their natures and talents is something else altogether.     

The funeral bells that open John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band are murky and distant, as far away and remote as the artist’s former self. He was only a teenager when he lost his mother, Julia, fifteen years earlier, though the heavy sadness surrounding her absence never dimmed. He was thirty years old, twice married with a son and globally famous by the time he recorded the songs that were most directly inspired by the shock of it all, though to hear the album from beginning to end is to witness everything he buried finally bubbling to the surface. He confronts unprocessed childhood pain, unravels the allure of the celebrity that nearly swallowed him whole and exposes the hardships of an adult life lived under the glare of a microscope. But he also sheds his skin in unsubtle and dramatic fashion, destroying the pedestal The Beatles stood perched upon in a heartfelt bid to reintroduce himself to the world as he truly saw himself. “I was the walrus, but now I am John,” he famously sings, unburdening himself of a weight and identity that he no longer wished to carry.   

For sixty years, McCartney has been a master of disguise, fluent in the long held musical traditions he has celebrated and spearheaded. As a composer, he’s been known to hide in plain sight, adopting different vocal styles and production techniques in order to fit the shape of whatever he’s written. That quest for something new has been a key part of his creative existence, though not all of what he’s made over the last half a century has worked, and the instincts that make him a trailblazer have just as often led him astray. But on Paul and Linda McCartney’s Ram, brisk, beaming melodies illuminate the risks and rewards that wait on the other side of the horizon. At twenty-nine, he was a new husband and father, unmoored by the idea of a life without The Beatles, but buoyed by the salvation he found amongst the hills of his Scottish farm. Ram reflects that blissful adventure through the lens of a young family and their country daydream, while simultaneously solidifying McCartney as a songwriter who has always viewed music as a means for joy as much as catharsis.          

Plastic Ono Band originally received mixed reviews, while Ram was all but dismissed completely. Fifty years on, those milestone birthdays were celebrated with reissues that reflect how they are remembered: a revolutionary, startling self portrait and an experimental, eccentric pop gem. Yet when heard in tandem, the distinct personality and style of each takes on heightened significance, providing a fascinating look at the direction their creators were called to. But perhaps because the songwriters came of age together, meeting on and growing from the same wavelength of shared musical experience, it’s hard to know what they were born with and what they absorbed from one another. Although all along, each could be just as sentimental or acidic, and to ignore that is to greatly oversimplify the narrative of the music they made together and apart. And if a song is a snapshot of an artist’s inner world and circumstance, these records do more than capture a moment in time – they offer proof of what made them great as two voices and as one. Because its not that they ever needed one another, its that they, like all The Beatles, just seemed to belong together.   

By Caitlin Phillips
08.15.21