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.
