Throughout the 1960s, it felt like The Beatles existed in their own little bubble. The rest of the world may have been trying to keep up with them, but every time the Fab Four put out a record, they felt well ahead of the curve compared to everyone else, hoping to push the limits of rock and roll. Although Ringo Starr was always the lovable drummer trying to keep the band ploughing forward, even he could admit that he had problems listening to John Lennon’s Two Virgins album.
Then again, there’s a good chance that anyone with functional eardrums would have had issues going into this album for the first time. While that’s not to say that every avant-garde project is bad by default, the thought of one of the biggest pop stars in the world teaming up with his significant other to make nothing but abrasive soundscapes was not going to go over well with people wanting to hear the next Beatles hit.
But it was never marketed that way, either. This was meant to cater to the avant-garde community rather than any mainstream record stores, and Lennon made that perfectly clear when he took the photo for the record sleeve.
The Beatles’ shots had always been about getting back to basics, like the blank cover of The White Album, but seeing Lennon and Yoko Ono standing naked looking into the lens was more than a little bit shocking. While making a move like this takes a massive amount of courage for Lennon to do, Starr hated having to be associated with it at the time.
While there is no Beatles insignia on the logo of the record or anything, Starr remembered getting relentlessly asked about it, recalling in The Beatles Anthology, “I said, ‘Ah, come on, John. You’re doing all this stuff, and it may be cool for you, but you know we all have to answer. It doesn’t matter; whichever one of us does something, we all have to answer for it.’”
Starr did have a point, but this might have been one of the greatest bait-and-switches that Lennon ever made during his career. Fans had known him to be the sharp-witted intellectual behind the Fab Four, so the idea of bringing him back to Earth as nature intended is actually one of the better ways to play with the listener’s expectations.
Considering the amount of attention they received at the time, this may have been one of the only ways that Lennon could show his human side to his fans. The myth behind The Beatles has been etched in stone more than a few times, but the fact that Lennon had the balls (no pun intended) to actually show everything to his fans made him look a lot more natural, if only for the people who thought he was losing his mind doing something like this.
But throughout his career, Lennon never included anything in his records by mistake, and the fact that Two Virgins managed to piss off that many people is more of a testament to what he created. It was more than a little bit off-putting and had the rest of the band uncomfortable, but you can’t argue that it was Lennon being his authentic self.
