JOHN & YOKO - UNFINISHED MUSIC NO. 1. TWO VIRGINS @ 55

 

Marking its 55th anniversary today is the debut album from John Lennon & Yoko Ono, Unfinished Music No. 1. Two Virgins, which was released on November 11th, 1968. A record like this can only exist if one of the people making it is a Beatle who doesn't have to worry about whether anyone buys it and has access to a record label owned by his band. That's not to say this shouldn't exist. The fact it does is a wonderful thing because it's such an incredibly bizarre, self-indulgent mess of chaotic fun. It's the sound of two people rediscovering their inner children and sparking a whirlwind romance in the process.

John Lennon first encountered Yoko Ono in November of 1966 when he was invited to attend one of her exhibitions in London. She was an obscure Japanese underground artist and John found her work possessed a decidedly positive world view, something he found exceedingly appealing given the general pessimism of most alternative artists. After the exhibit, he kept in contact with her and, two years later, while wife Cynthia Lennon was away from their home on vacation, he invited Yoko over to spend the evening in order to show her his home studio and play her some of his sound experiments. These were totally avant-garde improvisations he knew the Beatles would NEVER have any interest in, but Yoko was fascinated by them and the two began to work on making some noises together that night. The next morning, Cynthia came home unexpectedly and discovered the pair dressed in matching white robes and sitting cross legged on the floor, staring into each other's eyes.

What they created for this album was essentially a lot of random incidental noises and vocalizations layered over-top of a series of tape loops and snippets of pre-recoded bits and pieces. They had no arrangements in mind or plans for any of it. Lennon described Unfinished Music as "...saying whatever you want it to say. It is just us expressing ourselves like a child does, you know, however he feels like then. What we're saying is make your own music. This is Unfinished Music."

After it was recorded, Lennon had to spend the next six months trying to persuade the rest of the Beatles to release it on Apple Records. Their hesitance was somewhat justified, given it was generally reviled by both fans of the band and music critics. Actress Sissy Spacek, using the pseudonym Rainbo, even recorded the song "John, You Went Too Far This Time" in response to the album's cover! Despite its bizarre nature, John & Yoko still ended up working with George Harrison to construct the similarly inspired sound collage, Revolution 9, for the "White" album.

The album ended up becoming the first of a trilogy created by the couple, all working within the same strange cacophony of experimentation. Not exactly the kind of "music" most Beatles fans were looking for. As a result, these albums have become rather obscure artifacts within the canon of both The Beatles and John Lennon. The cover for the album featured the couple stark naked in their birthday suits. The distributors for the record were none too pleased with such an image and the LP ended up shipping tucked inside a brown paper bag for retail sales, which were unsurprisingly minimal.