It’s been a big year for Beatles nostalgia. The band recently released their remastered back catalog to the starving masses and got their own Rock Band game. But it wouldn’t be a full Beatlemania revival unless Yoko Ono barged in on it. Ono has released a new album under the Plastic Ono Band name. You can listen here, or you can kick a dolphin in the face to elicit a similar kind of sound.
And now, Alexander Autographs of Stamford, Conn., is auctioning off this 45 minute audiotape of a conversation between Ono and John Lennon, in which Lennon probes Ono about her views on sex and love. And if the idea of that causes you to mentally envision the couple’s infamous Rolling Stone cover from way back when, I sincerely apologize. Let’s get to the sales copy!
In this intense, intimate and revealing original cassette recording of a private conversation in 1969 between John Lennon and Yoko Ono, the couple speaks primarily about Yoko's past relationships, her music and art, and their random views on sex, love, promiscuity, and homosexuality.
Also, if you play the tape backwards while banging on a skillet, it sounds EXACTLY like Ono’s music.
She also complains that she believed that her mentality was far beyond that of her contemporaries.
Indeed. Even today, Ono remains misunderstood. It will only be in the year 3045, when robots have enslaved us all and banned music from existence, that we’ll truly “get” what she was trying to say.
[Lennon] adds that he had never met an attractive woman that had sexually aroused him to any great degree.
This is actually quite a sad tidbit. It suggests that “From Me to You” may have been written in tribute to a particularly good scone Lennon once ate.
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He very candidly quizzes Yoko about the meaning of fidelity in a relationship, and asks her about her sexual abilities.
Again, someone is suggesting you pay actual money for this. In fact, Alexander Autographs estimates the tape to be worth $20,000 to $30,000. And the tape doesn’t even have a proper Maxell label on it. Regardless, the auction house states, “This recording provides an important insight into the very beginning of one of the most talked-about love stories of the last one hundred years!” and who am I to argue with that.
So get your bidding paddles ready, America. For a mere $30,000, you too can own a piece of history. A piece of history that may or may not get chewed up by the tape recorder you haven’t used since 1989.
Drew Magary is a co-founder of Kissing Suzy Kolber, a writer for Blue Star and Deadspin, and author of Men With Balls, now in bookstores.
