"London Town" by Paul McCartney & Wings (1978)

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Key Tracks:
London Town, Backwards Traveller and With a Little Luck are all near-Beatles tunes.  Deliver Your Children is a great song without any precendence or previous success to compare with - it's just Mac being Mac.

Obvious Filler:
Cafe on the Left Bank is 100% NOT The Beatles.  Cuff Link is pure 70's instrumental schlock.  Girlfriend is pure 70's schlock where I can't even tell if Paul or Linda is carrying the lead vocals.  Morse Moose and the Grey Goose is not filler, but it is an amazing, yet terrible swing-and-a-miss.

My Overall Rating of the Tracks Separately: Average (2/4 stars)

Random, absurd lyrics:
- "The ocean's a sea of snow."  I get that the ocean's a sea.  That may be one of the most self-evident lyrics ever written.  However, I have visited the ocean and can confirm that it's not snow - not even marine snow.

- "I should be worried but they say you're okay for a bomb."  Huh?  You should ALWAYS be worried when there's a bomb involved, Paul.

- "There was a lead guitarist in Epping Forest and all he ever wanted was to blow."  I'm trying to keep my observations at a PG-13 level, so... no comment.

- "Right on down at the bottom of the sea; tell me are you receiving me?  My name is Morse Moose and I'm calling you."  What's up with Paul's oceanic fixation?  That's two oceanic lyrics on one LP, not to mention Yellow Sumbarine and Octupus's Garden.  Sheesh.


Paul McCartney's post-Beatle recordings tend to aggravate, confound and disappoint me in equal measure.  With Wings in particular, he seemed to be trying to recapture the lightining in a bottle that he stumbled across in the sixties.  But his wife and some random guitar player didn't come close to replacing John and George.  Paul's songs were always the most easily accessible - they had timeless, monumental melodies.  However, the lyrics rarely held up. In addition, those lyrics tended to be the least coherent and downright weirdest of the group.  (Sorry, John.)  Get Back is a prime example of that perpetual McCartney melody vs. lyric tetherball match.  All of these tendencies were accentuated in his seventies recordings - usually to the most adverse effect.  Compounding this problem, I heard Paul say in an interview once that he tries to write a new song every day.  That philosophy seems to water down his output dramatically. 

I really think Paul is unabashedly ripping off everyone (including himself in his younger days) on "London Town".  The title track desperately wants to be a Beatles song.  That trend continues throughout the LP with ever-diminishing returns.

Here are a few examples:

Cafe on the Left Bank strives to be a poignent vignette.  However, it is everything that A Day in the Life is NOT.  The story behind A Day in the Life is well-known.  Paul and John had been writing separately and each had half-a-song - unfinished and no clear idea as to where to go with it.  When they compared notes and put it all together with George Martin at the helm, the result was amazing.  Cafe on the Left Bank is less than that original half-a-song, written almost a decade later and without John or bunch of pianos hitting an E chord to counterbalance it.

Famous Groupies is clearly NOT Rocky Raccoon, but Paul doesn't seem to get that. 

If that weren't bad enough, he starts appropriating sounds from artists who were blatantly chasing the Fab Four back in the sixties, rather than trying to lead a new charge.  I'm Carrying and Don't Let It Bring You Down both sound like songs Paul Simon feverishly rejected.  I'm almost positive that I'm Carrying is the same up-tuned chord progression as The Sounds of Silence.  Name and Address is yet another unveiled attempt to be somebody else - this time it's Elvis Presley.  (Paul would carry the Elvis wannabe torch for decades with only marginal success.)

So, is it an album?  No.  This thing is all over the place.  It feels like all the worst parts of The White Album patchworked together into something that wants to look like a tapestry but really feels more like an amalgum of disperate parts.  It's like putting jelly on a tuna sandwich.

Up next, we hit the hair rock scene from the early eighties with "Breaking the Chains" by Dokken.   Let me just say, "breakin' the chai-yee-ains!!!!"  Oh, and let me also say, "George Lynch!"  Now, what did I do with my AquaNet?