JOHN LENNON & YOKO ONO - WEDDING ALBUM @ 55

 

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."

JOHN LENNON & YOKO ONO UNFINISHED MUSIC NO. 2: LIFE WITH THE LIONS @ 55

 

Marking its 55th anniversary today is the second in John Lennon & Yoko Ono's trilogy of experimental albums, Unfinished Music No. 2: Life with the Lions, which was released on May 9th, 1969. It was released in tandem with George Harrison's second solo outing, Electronic Sound, with both titles released on the short lived Apple Records subsidiary, Zapple, which was intended to function as a budget priced outlet for spoken word and sound experiments. The label was quickly shut down after this pair of inaugural releases, however.

Life with the Lions continued John & Yoko's attempts to push the boundaries of what pop musicians could get away with. With Ono coming from a background in Fluxus performance art, she was setting the example for John to follow. The album kicks off with a side long live improvised performance recorded on March 2nd, 1969, at Cambridge University. Cambridge 1969 features Yoko wailing away in her trademark high pitched vibrato while John, who performed the entire show with his back to the audience, accompanied with electric guitar feedback. It was his first live performance without the Beatles. Near the end of the piece, some other musicians chime in to finish it off. The second side includes recordings of John & Yoko reading press clippings in the hospital where Yoko stayed during her miscarriage, and the unborn baby's heartbeat before it was miscarried, which is followed by 2 minutes of silence. The record closes off with a recording of John scrolling through random radio signals. The cover photograph shows the couple in the hospital during Yoko's miscarriage. As with the nude photo of the couple on the cover of Two Virgins, the image and the record's contents clearly show how open the pair were to sharing their most intimate moments with the public.

The trilogy would be closed out with the release of The Wedding Album later that year. Public reception for these releases was certainly not enthusiastic, though they have acquired cult audiences since their release. While many consider them something of a grand joke by Lennon, he is quoted as saying their intent was to activate people into becoming contributing participants in the listening experience, finishing off what he and Yoko had started expressing, thus the series title of "Unfinished Music". These works may lack a certain sophistication in some senses, but they do set a precedent that creators are NOT bound by anyone's expectations and that expression can occur in many forms and address even the most traumatic subjects.

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.