The Peace Ballad of John & Yoko
April 2 - June 21, 2009 - Free Admission
The avant-garde experiments conducted with Yoko Ono as of 1968, even though heavily covered—and criticized—in the media, became the hidden side of John Lennon’s work; he no less continued to produce, along with Paul McCartney, the masterpieces that were the albums Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Magical Mystery Tour, The Beatles (The White Album), Abbey Road and, finally, the swan song of a collaboration begun in 1958, Let It Be. In 1970, he pronounced his official goodbye to the foursome with the song “God”: “I don’t believe in Beatles / I just believe in me / Yoko and me / That’s reality / What can I say? / The dream is over.” He had embarked on a new dream with Yoko Ono, a fertile artistic dialogue whose aesthetic, uniting a novel blend of pop culture and the avant-garde, would prefigure some of the era’s most radical experiments. In 1969 the couple formed the conceptual group the Plastic Ono Band, of which they were the two official members. Various musicians, including Keith Moon of the Who, Eric Clapton, George Harrison and Ringo Starr, joined the couple on different albums. If many of John Lennon’s original fans viewed this transition as a sacrilege, it was a natural progression for Lennon who, just before his untimely end, remembered that their first “attempts at being together and producing things together, whether they were bed-ins, posters or films, we crossed over into each other’s fields, like people do from country music to pop . . . We tried to find a ground that was interesting to both of us. And we both got excited and stimulated by each other’s experiences.”
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