Beatles Book of Revelations

Lennon’s recollection of events is told below; The story, as described by John Lennon to Jann Wenner for a 1971 Rolling Stone magazine, tells the conventional tale of how they met in November 1966 and is as follows: WENNER: How did you meet Yoko?

LENNON: I’m sure I’ve told you this many times. How did I meet Yoko? There was a sort of underground clique in London; John Dunbar, who was married to Marianne Faithful, had an art gallery in London called Indica and I’d been going around to galleries a bit on my off days in between records. I’d been to see a Takis exhibition, I don’t know if you know what that means, he does multiple electro-magnetic sculptures, and a few exhibitions in different galleries who showed these sort of unknown artists or underground artists. I got the word that this amazing woman was putting on a show next week and there was going to be something about people in bags, in black bags, and it was going to be a bit of a happening and all that. So I went down to a preview of the show. I got there the night before it opened. I went in – she didn’t know who I was or anything – I was wandering around, there was a couple of artsy type students that had been helping lying around there in the gallery, and I was looking at it and I was astounded. There was an apple on sale there for 200 quid, I thought it was fantastic–I got the humour in her work immediately. I didn’t have to sort of have much knowledge about avant-garde or underground art, but the humour got me straight away. There was a fresh apple on a stand, this was before Apple–and it was 200 quid to watch the apple decompose. But there was another piece which really decided me for-or-against the artist, a ladder which led to a painting which was hung on the ceiling. It looked like a blank canvas with a chain with a spy glass hanging on the end of it. This was near the door when you went in. I climbed the ladder, you look through the spyglass and in tiny little letters it says “yes”. So it was positive. I felt relieved. It’s a great relief when you get up the ladder and you look through the spyglass and it doesn’t say “no” or “fuck you” or something, it said “yes.”

And so the two star-crossed lovers met, however, outwardly, the two had little, if anything, in common. Lennon was the product of a working class family but had been brought up in a distinctly suburban, middle class environment and had traversed a path via art school and sweaty teen-age dance hangouts in Liverpool and Hamburgto world fame and fortune as a rock-and-roll musician,