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A Look At Two Virgins
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A feature originally published in the Wire.
THE INNER SLEEVE
By Tom Recchion
John Lennon/Yoko Ono “Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins”
Designed by John and Yoko
LP covers have so much more power than the eventually extinct CD ever will. I worked in the belly of the beast at Warner Bros. Records as a designer when the invention hit the music industry and then again when LP’s were scrapped as a viable product. It was hell reducing your ideas from a 12”x12” space to a measly 4 ¾” x 4 ¾”.
I remember lots of great relationships with my album covers. As a kid I brazenly carried the Blind Faith cover around with me on Main Street, making sure the pubescent topless little girl was exposed for maximum outrage.
King Crimson’s first cover astonished me and forced me to buy it as an expensive import without ever hearing a note. Dr. John’s “Gris Gris” used to scare the hell out of me and I have even younger memories of trying to see the nipples on the woman of my parents Herb Alpert record “Whipped Cream…” or trying to decode the rumored homoerotic hints on Donovan’s “Greatest Hits. But when Lennon and Ono’s Two Virgin’s came out I was transfixed by the weight of the gesture. Not only was the music totally free form and weirder than shit but then there was the cover. John and Yoko as some 20th Century Adam and Eve in their birthday suits. Naked front AND back, without any kind of celebrity considerations whatsoever.
This was the consummate proto-hippy action born out of a Fluxus strategy of blending art and life. We were asked to take them as they were. This was so controversial at the time that Capitol/EMI wouldn’t touch the record, so they found refuge on Tetragramaton Records who took a safety step by packaging the thing in a sealed brown paper bag with only a mock circle cut-out of their faces showing thru. To some, this was pop music relegated to the level of pornography. Yet it was a Beatle who was exposing himself. That alone, made this cultural phenomenon all the more risqué, scandalous, enticing and brave. You have to give them credit for attempting to dismantle the pop machine they had helped create. Too bad it didn’t work.
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Tom Recchion is a sound and visual artist and has designed packaging for David Lynch, Robert Wyatt, Terry Riley, Prince, Van Dyke Parks and many others. He is an occasional contibutor to the Wire.
By Tom Recchion
John Lennon/Yoko Ono “Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins”
Designed by John and Yoko
LP covers have so much more power than the eventually extinct CD ever will. I worked in the belly of the beast at Warner Bros. Records as a designer when the invention hit the music industry and then again when LP’s were scrapped as a viable product. It was hell reducing your ideas from a 12”x12” space to a measly 4 ¾” x 4 ¾”.
I remember lots of great relationships with my album covers. As a kid I brazenly carried the Blind Faith cover around with me on Main Street, making sure the pubescent topless little girl was exposed for maximum outrage.
King Crimson’s first cover astonished me and forced me to buy it as an expensive import without ever hearing a note. Dr. John’s “Gris Gris” used to scare the hell out of me and I have even younger memories of trying to see the nipples on the woman of my parents Herb Alpert record “Whipped Cream…” or trying to decode the rumored homoerotic hints on Donovan’s “Greatest Hits. But when Lennon and Ono’s Two Virgin’s came out I was transfixed by the weight of the gesture. Not only was the music totally free form and weirder than shit but then there was the cover. John and Yoko as some 20th Century Adam and Eve in their birthday suits. Naked front AND back, without any kind of celebrity considerations whatsoever.
This was the consummate proto-hippy action born out of a Fluxus strategy of blending art and life. We were asked to take them as they were. This was so controversial at the time that Capitol/EMI wouldn’t touch the record, so they found refuge on Tetragramaton Records who took a safety step by packaging the thing in a sealed brown paper bag with only a mock circle cut-out of their faces showing thru. To some, this was pop music relegated to the level of pornography. Yet it was a Beatle who was exposing himself. That alone, made this cultural phenomenon all the more risqué, scandalous, enticing and brave. You have to give them credit for attempting to dismantle the pop machine they had helped create. Too bad it didn’t work.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tom Recchion is a sound and visual artist and has designed packaging for David Lynch, Robert Wyatt, Terry Riley, Prince, Van Dyke Parks and many others. He is an occasional contibutor to the Wire.
