Classic Album Cover Art - Lennon/Ono Two Virgins

John Lennon & Yoko Ono: ‘Unfinished Music No.1: Two Virgins’

"Unfinished Music No.1: Two Virgins" is a noise music/art LP released by John Lennon and Yoko Ono in 1968. The result of an all-night session of musical experimentation in Lennon's home studio at Kenwood, John and Yoko's debut album is known not only for its avant garde content and silly sounds, but also for its cover. The album's title came from the couple's feeling that they were "two innocents, lost in a world gone mad", and because after making the recording, the two consummated their relationship for the first time. Too much information for me.

The recording consists largely of tape loops, playing while Lennon tries out different instruments (piano, organ, drums) and sound effects (including reverb, delay and distortion), changes tapes and plays other recordings, and converses with Ono, who vocalises ad-lib in response to the sounds. Lennon's longtime friend Peter Shotton remembered later in his memoir (The Beatles, Lennon and Me) that many of the loops were made by Lennon and himself, in the days before the recording. Lennon recorded directly to two-track stereo, but much of the source material was monophonic.

The couple used a time-delay camera to take nude photographs of themselves, for the album's cover; the front showed them frontally nude, while the rear showed them from behind. The photos were taken not at Kenwood, but at Ringo Starr's basement apartment at Montagu Square, where Lennon and Ono stayed later that year.

The cover provoked an outrage, prompting distributors to sell the album in a plain brown wrapper. Copies of the album were impounded as obscene in several jurisdictions (including 30,000 copies in New Jersey). Lennon wryly commented that the uproar seemed to have less to do with the explicit nudity, and more to do with the fact that the pair were rather unattractive (and the photo unflattering; Lennon described it later as a picture of "two slightly overweight ex-junkies"). Nevertheless, the taboo-breaking album cover was perhaps the first time that a male celebrity of any consequence had exposed himself so thoroughly to the public.

As a courtesy to people who are offended by male genitalia (and Yoko naked), and to keep my reputation intact, I am posting the 'brown paper' version of the album cover.

Notes:

Two Virgins never charted in the UK (and only 5000 British copies were ever pressed), but managed to reach #124 in the US.

The album was reissued by Ono through Rykodisc in 1997, with an additional bonus track — "Remember Love", Ono's B-Side to "Give Peace A Chance". The Rykodisc reissue however, is an edited version. It is missing about a minute or two of audio from the end of each side. A complete recording was questionably issued on CD in 1991 by a company called Creative Sounds, Ltd., stating on the back cover: "Issued under and in association with Tetragrammaton Records". It was NOT mastered from the original master tapes however, but merely a recording of an Lp copy. While you listen to it, you can hear pops and clicks from the record they used to make the CD.

The album was reprinted in the US and Japan during the 1970s and 1980s. While the American reissues were of inferior quality, the Japanese pressings were made on virgin vinyl and enclosed in rice paper inner sleeves.