« Back to Top Level | John Lennon & Yoko Ono

John Lennon & Yoko Ono - Life with the Lions: Unfinished Music #2 (1969)

Track listing:
  1. Cambridge 1969 26:32
  2. No Bed For Beatle John 4:40
  3. Baby's Heartbeat 5:09
  4. Two Minutes Silence 2:00
  5. Radio Play 12:39
  6. Song For John 1:31
  7. Mulberry 8:57

Notes


Experimental
Released May 9, 1969 (UK) and May 26, 1969 (US)

John Lennon and Yoko Ono's second collaborative album consists of five tracks: all of Side One is taken up by "Cambridge 1919," and a live recording at Lady Mitchell Hall in Cambridge of Lennon playing an electric guitar backup to Ono's singing and screaming. Side Two includes an a cappella rendering by Ono of "No Bed for Beatle John," which discusses the refusal of a hospital to give Lennon a bed so he could stay during his wife's troubled pregnancy; "Baby's Heartbeat," which is what it says it is; "Two Minutes Silence" in commemoration of Ono's miscarriage, which also is what it says it is; and "Radio Play," 12 minutes of a radio dial being turned back and forth to pick up random stations. If, as they suggested, their lives were their art, then this is, too. Maybe. The 1997 CD reissue adds two bonus tracks: a previously unreleased version of Ono's "Song for John," and the previously unreleased "Mulberry," which is nine minutes of Yoko's vocal improv backed by careening, atonal guitar runs.