Marking
its 55th anniversary today is the third LP in the triptych of
experimental records released by John Lennon and Yoko Ono in the late
1960s, with the Wedding Album being released on October 20th, 1969. It
followed Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins (1968) and Unfinished Music
No. 2: Life with the Lions (earlier in 1969). The album was intended
as a fan souvenir of the nuptials for John Lennon and Yoko Ono.
The
first side of the album, John & Yoko, is something of an homage to
Stan Freberg's 1951 novelty single, John & Marsha, where male and
female voices are heard saying each other's names with varying emotional
inflections atop maudlin romantic music, escalating the melodrama as
the recording progresses. For John & Yoko, the music is replaced
with recordings of the heartbeats of Lennon & Ono, and the exchange
is extended across the entire side of the album, delivering nearly 23
minutes of an endurance test for listeners as the couple emote each
other's names in dramatic exhortations.
Amsterdam,
the side long recording on the flip of the LP, is something of a
collage of interviews explaining their campaign for peace,
conversations and captured sounds during the couple's "Bed-In"
honeymoon. An early form of what would become "John John Let's Hope for
Peace" forms the beginning of "Amsterdam". There were also four other
musical interludes, including Lennon performing a blues-style
composition on acoustic guitar, featuring the words "Goodbye Amsterdam
Goodbye". Ono sings "Grow Your Hair", a song regarding peace. Lennon
sings a brief excerpt in a cappella of the Beatles song "Good Night".
The last interlude is a short recitation of the words "Bed peace" and
"Hair peace".
The album was first
issued in the US on October 20th, followed by the UK release on
November 7th, 1969. The record came as an elaborate box set designed by
John Kosh, including sets of photos, drawings by Lennon, a reproduction
of the marriage certificate, a picture of a slice of wedding cake
(inside a white sleeve), and a booklet of press clippings about the
couple. It also included a Mylar bag that had the word "Bagism" printed
on it. While it failed to touch the UK charts, it grazed the bottom of
them in the US, peaking at 178 and lingering for three weeks. Regarding
the limited success, Lennon later addressed it saying, "It was like our
sharing our wedding with whoever wanted to share it with us. We didn't
expect a hit record out of it. It was more of a... that's why we called
it Wedding Album. You know, people make a wedding album, show it to the
relatives when they come round. Well, our relatives are the... what you
call fans, or people that follow us outside. So that was our way of
letting them join in on the wedding".
Melody
Maker critic Richard Williams was given two single-sided test pressings
for his review (which appeared on the front page of the November 15th
issue). Each had a blank side featuring only an engineer's test signal,
but Williams mistook it for a double album. In his review, he noted that
sides two and four consisted entirely "of single tones maintained
throughout, presumably produced electronically", and that the pitch of
the notes appeared to change slightly. Lennon and Ono sent a telegram to
Williams thanking him for his review and writing: "We both feel that
this is the first time a critic topped the artist. We are not joking."
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