Marking
its 55th anniversary today is the second in John Lennon & Yoko
Ono's trilogy of experimental albums, Unfinished Music No. 2: Life with
the Lions, which was released on May 9th, 1969. It was released in
tandem with George Harrison's second solo outing, Electronic Sound, with
both titles released on the short lived Apple Records subsidiary,
Zapple, which was intended to function as a budget priced outlet for
spoken word and sound experiments. The label was quickly shut down
after this pair of inaugural releases, however.
Life
with the Lions continued John & Yoko's attempts to push the
boundaries of what pop musicians could get away with. With Ono coming
from a background in Fluxus performance art, she was setting the example
for John to follow. The album kicks off with a side long live
improvised performance recorded on March 2nd, 1969, at Cambridge
University. Cambridge 1969 features Yoko wailing away in her trademark
high pitched vibrato while John, who performed the entire show with his
back to the audience, accompanied with electric guitar feedback. It was
his first live performance without the Beatles. Near the end of the
piece, some other musicians chime in to finish it off. The second side
includes recordings of John & Yoko reading press clippings in the
hospital where Yoko stayed during her miscarriage, and the unborn baby's
heartbeat before it was miscarried, which is followed by 2 minutes of
silence. The record closes off with a recording of John scrolling
through random radio signals. The cover photograph shows the couple in
the hospital during Yoko's miscarriage. As with the nude photo of the
couple on the cover of Two Virgins, the image and the record's contents
clearly show how open the pair were to sharing their most intimate
moments with the public.
The
trilogy would be closed out with the release of The Wedding Album later
that year. Public reception for these releases was certainly not
enthusiastic, though they have acquired cult audiences since their
release. While many consider them something of a grand joke by Lennon,
he is quoted as saying their intent was to activate people into becoming
contributing participants in the listening experience, finishing off
what he and Yoko had started expressing, thus the series title of
"Unfinished Music". These works may lack a certain sophistication in
some senses, but they do set a precedent that creators are NOT bound by
anyone's expectations and that expression can occur in many forms and
address even the most traumatic subjects.
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