John & Yoko - Unfinished Music No.2: Life with the Lions

Unfinished Music No.2: Life with the Lions is an album of experimental music released by John Lennon and Yoko Ono in 1969, and the successor to 1968's highly controversial Unfinished Music No.1: Two Virgins. The title parodies the BBC radio drama Life with the Lyons, which had been a favourite of Lennon's. The album opens with an extended and improvised recording entitled "Cambridge 1969", recorded on 2 March at Cambridge University, before a live audience. The piece consists of Yoko Ono's vocalisations accompanied by electric guitar feedback from John Lennon. Saxophonist John Tchicai and percussionist John Stevens join Ono and Lennon towards the end of the piece. The remainder of the album was recorded on a cassette tape in their suite at Queen Charlotte's Hospital in London during November 1968, where Ono would suffer the first of three miscarriages by the couple. "No Bed For Beatle John" consists of John and Yoko singing the text of press clippings about themselves, in acapella chant style. "Baby's Heartbeat" is a recording (made with a Nagra microphone) of the ill-fated child's actual palpitations. "Two Minutes Silence" follows, sometimes compared to composer John Cage's 4'33", but intended as a memoriam for the baby, "and for all violence and death." The album closes with "Radio Play"; thirteen minutes of a radio dial flipped back and forth with brief moments of John Lennon making a telephone call in the background. (Incidentally, The Beatles song "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" is discernible amongst the radio static during this recording.) The album's front cover photo was taken while Ono was bedridden at Queen Charlotte's with Lennon by her side, while the back cover was a news photo of Lennon and Ono leaving Marylebone Police Station, after their arrest for hashish possession on 18 October 1968. (The back also carried a 'quote' from Beatles producer George Martin: "No comment.") -Wikipedia

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