John and Yoko in Their Own Words
Fifty years ago Wednesday, on Nov. 9, 1966, John Lennon met Yoko Ono. The English musician and the Japanese artist met at one of her art exhibits, were married in 1969, and had a son together, Sean, in 1975. With the exception of a year-and-a-half-long separation, which Lennon called his “lost weekend,” they created music — and controversy — together until his death in 1980.
On the day of their meeting, Lennon visited Ono’s conceptual art show in a gallery in London. He was won over by one of her pieces, which was experienced by climbing a ladder and looking through a spyglass onto an apparently blank canvas, where the viewer can see, in tiny letters, the word “yes.” “So it was positive,” Lennon told Rolling Stone’s Jann Wenner in 1971, in the series of interviews that would later comprise Lennon Remembers. “It's a great relief when you get up the ladder and you look through the spyglass and it doesn't say ‘no’ or ‘f--- you’ or something, it said ‘yes.’” The gallery owner introduced the Beatle and the artist, and the rest is history.
Lennon discovered he was in love with Ono when “I called her over, it was the middle of the night and [Cynthia Lennon, his then-wife] was away, and I thought, ‘Well, now's the time, if I'm gonna get to know her anymore.’ She came to the house and I didn't know what to do, so we went upstairs to my studio and I played her all the tapes that I'd made, all this far-out stuff, some comedy stuff, and some electronic music. She was suitably impressed and then she said, 'Well let's make one ourselves,' so we made [the experimental album] Two Virgins. It was midnight when we started Two Virgins, it was dawn when we finished, and then we made love at dawn. It was very beautiful.” — Lennon in the 1971 Rolling Stone interviews
Source: Entertainment Weekly
