"When two great saints meet, it is a humbling experience." - Paul McCartney

Apart from professing his undying love for Yoko Ono and shocking the world with a full-frontal album cover, it is difficult to see what John Lennon hoped to accomplish with these experimental doodles. It is even more difficult to comprehend why he would trash his artistic integrity. "Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins" was rubbish in 1968 and no historical revisionism (let alone digital remastering) can salvage this aural embarrassment.

"Two Virgins" lives up to its title--it sounds like it was created by someone with absolutely no musical experience at all. While I'm a big fan of Lennon's Beatles and post-Beatles solo albums (even the weakest Lennon album "Sometime in New York City" has its minor moments), I found this completely unlistenable and a waste of 30 minutes of my time.

Is "Two Virgins" misunderstood? If it is it's because it's in an incomphrensible musical langauge. The cover was the only thing this album was notable for--a nude portrait of a couple who had found love. It created controversy (EMI didn't want to distribute it). As avant-garde its too simplistic as music it's a disaster. Avoid unless you must have everything (including every fart, belch and toe nail trimming) from Lennon.

Two Virgins was an experimental journey into an avant-garde world of psychedelic sounds, snippets, piano pecking and John's and Yoko's screams and howls. Yoko sounds like a parrot on crack. Some people refer to Yoko as the godmother of punk. I've listened to this several times and come up with the conclusion that it was just them being them and whatever came out got recorded. The overall effect is confusing at best. For completists go out and get it, for others, beware.

Quite possibly the most unique thing the 2 made together, the story behind this album is that they cut the record the night before they first made love. Hmmmm...Now getting past the nudity, you hear, NOISE! Pure noise, seemingly random, no harmony. I love it, you'll probably hate it, though.

What is being lost in this discussion of Two Virgins is the effect it had on the White album. For those of us who were teens then, there was a lot of confusion about the two albums with both being released at about the same time. First came Two Virgins and the very bad press it got in a much more conservative world, ie our parents. Everyone thought that the album that came out with a nude John and Yoko was the new Beatle album. It got pulled out of the stores, then came rapid fire the real White album and the Two Virgins in the brown wrap. So a lot us thought we were getting the nude album now with no cover, simply The Beatles. Well the damage was done. You have to think about the times, our parents thought that the Beatles were clean cut and okay. Well we got the White album and it pushed the sexual envelope with some of the songs and the insert. I can tell you I caught in the cross fire when I bought the White album. I had to play it late at night. That was the real effect of Two Virgins. When we did find out what it was really about, we really didn't want to have anything to do with it. I guess as a true collector you might want to have it, but you have revolution #9 on the White album and that is as close I want get to it.