Yoko Ono : Goodbye Sadness
In early June, 1981 Yoko Ono released Season Of Glass. Released six months after Lennon's murder, making music may very well have been Ono's most therapeutic way to deal with her grief, anger and sadness. It was recorded with the same New York session musicians who played on Double Fantasy and Phil Spector is credited with producing the album. There is another contributor who is not credited, the memory of her husband. And that weight hangs over every song.
Unfortunately there were people who saw it as a cash grab and found the cover, with Lennon's blood-soaked glasses, distasteful. Some American radio stations used that as an excuse not to play the album. A program director in Key West found the cover morbid and use of her son Sean telling a story about her dad "shocking enough to make even the Plasmatics seem tame...Season is more than not nice--it is strongly distasteful and it will be a cold day in Key West before this trash is played on the station".
Yoko's response to the criticism:
I felt like a person soaked in blood coming into a living room full of people and reporting that my husband was dead, his body was taken away, and the pair of glasses were the only thing I had managed to salvage – and people looking at me saying it was in bad taste to show the glasses to them. "I'm not changing the cover. This is what John is now," I said.
The album peaked at US#49 and finished #29 in the Pazz and Jop Critics Poll. Pitchfork ranked Season of Glass 188 of the best 200 albums of the 1980's.
George Harrison : All Those Years Ago
On June 1, 1981 George Harrison released Somewhere In England, which was preceded by the US#2/UK#13 single "All Those Years Ago", a tribute to Lennon (They don't act with much honesty /But you point the way to the truth when you say/ All you need is love) that featured the surviving Beatles. What's not often mentioned is that Ringo played his part weeks before Lennon was murdered and Paul and Linda merely came in to add backing vocals. The song is surprisingly upbeat considering the subject matter.
There are several gems on this album and there's quite a bit of humor. "Blood From A Clone" is about the Warner Brothers record executives who rejected the original album as too laid back but Somewhere In England left many critics unmoved. As Rolling Stone's Harry Thomas concluded in a a review that gave the album two starts out of five:
The most paradoxical of the ex-Beatles, George Harrison is an enigmatic mixture of exquisite craftsmanship and heavy-handed hack work, touching sincerity and plain disingenuousness. As it stands, Somewhere in England is neither here nor there.
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