Paul McCartney sings to John Lennon in Bed

Paul McCartney sings to John Lennon in Bed

According to Peter Brown, John Lennon believed that a number of songs on Ram contained jibes aimed at him, particularly "Too Many People" and "Dear Boy" Brown also described the picture of two beetles copulating on the back cover as symbolic of how Paul McCartney felt the other Beatles were treating him. George Harrison and Ringo Starr were said to consider the track "3 Legs" as an attack on them and Lennon ("Three Legs" being McCartney's nickname for his former band-mates).

McCartney later claimed that only two lines in "Too Many People" were directed at Lennon. "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 Ram that was about them. Oh, there was 'You took your lucky break and broke it in two.'"

As well as conducting a war of words via Britain's musical press, Lennon's response was the scathing "How Do You Sleep?", and it has been considered too that "Crippled Inside", also from his Imagine album, was directed at McCartney. Early editions of Imagine included a postcard of Lennon pulling the ears of a pig in a parody of Ram's cover photograph of McCartney holding a ram by the horns.

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