Celebrating Sir Paul: Café on the Left Bank

Tweet

As you peruse through these songs and think, “DANG, couldn’t you come up with better songs?!”, remember it is just one hillbilly’s opinion. I’ll admit right up front that a lot of the songs I like, both by Paul McCartney and many, many others, aren’t the deepest or best. That’s part of the fun of albums, though: those throwaway “filler” songs to someone turn out to be someone else’s favorite. Here we go with an example of that. Café on the Left Bank (Wings) For most of the first part of Paul’s post-Beatles career he was fed through the shredder of critical badmouthing (to the point where Rolling Stone trashed “Chanson Pour Les Petits Enfants” off Jimmy Buffett’s Volcano album with a snide “Shades of Mom and Pop McCartney!” remark ). Then came Band on the Run and people shut up and started admiring the daylights out of his work. After the big tour of America, McCartney called off another tour because his keyboard player (and wife) was pregnant in 1977. Jimmy McCulloch and Joe English left Wings (English for a career in contemporary Christian music, and McCulloch for a heroin overdose death at 26 ), leaving the Band on the Run trio of Paul, Linda, and Denny Laine to finish up the album that became London Town. Critics went back to trashing Paul. No, this album was NOT “Band on the Run Part 2,” and it wasn’t meant to be. This is another “observational” song, where McCartney watched “English speaking people drinking German beer, talking way too loud for their ears” and other scenes, and made a song out of it. It doesn’t have the pain or the sentimentality of “Another Day” or “Eleanor Rigby,” but I still like its rocking sound. Café on the Left Bank Written by Paul McCartney From London Town (Wings), 1978 Watching Charles de Gaulle make a speech: