Oscar-Winner Sissy Spacek Released a Song to Scold John Lennon for His ‘Two Virgins’ Album
In 1968, John Lennon and Yoko Ono released an experimental album that many people, including actor Sissy Spacek, did not like. Critics derided the album but Spacek took a different approach. She was trying to make it as a musician at the time and released a song about Lennon. In it, she scolded the Beatle for posing nude on the cover of his Two Virgins album.
Sissy Spacek released a song about a new John Lennon album
After she graduated from high school, Spacek moved to New York with the hopes of becoming a folk singer. She signed with a record label and decided to go by the name Rainbo. Her career as Rainbo was short-lived, but she did record one song about Lennon’s Two Virgins album.
On the album cover, Lennon and Ono posed naked, a choice that sparked outrage at the time. Spacek referenced it in the song “John You Went Too Far This Time.”
“Now I gaze in awe before that picture/ My mind retires to the place it was before you came/ I love the things you showed me up ’til now, John/ But since that picture, I don’t think my love will be the same,” she sang.
She didn’t write the song and, while she admitted she found the song interesting, she was glad that Rainbo had a brief career.
“The single got some attention, mainly as a footnote to the controversy about John and Yoko,” she explained in her book My Extraordinary Ordinary Life. “But thankfully, Rainbo never recorded again.”
The ‘Two Virgins’ album cover caused controversy
While Lennon and his first wife Cynthia were still married, he began an affair with Ono. As Cynthia was on vacation, they spent all night working on music for Two Virgins before consummating their relationship.
Lennon and Ono posed naked on the cover of Two Virgins to present themselves as flawed and human.
“We used the straightest, most unflattering picture just to show that we were human,” Lennon said, per the book John Lennon: The Life by Philip Norman. “We felt like two virgins because we were in love, just met, and we were trying to make something … People are always looking at people like me, trying to see some secret. ‘What do they do? Do they go to the bathroom? Do they eat?’ So we just said ‘Here.’”
Unsurprisingly, the cover caused a stir. Record labels refused to market it and police seized copies for obscenity. Distributors began selling the record in a brown bag to conceal most of the image.
Sissy Spacek wasn’t the only person who didn’t like the John Lennon album
Spacek criticized the album cover in “John You Went Too Far This Time.” While the cover was controversial, the record itself brought bad reviews. The music was avant-garde and, though some critics applauded the effort, others disparaged it. They criticized the ambient background noise and Ono’s wailing. It felt aimless.
Despite Lennon’s success in The Beatles, the album did not sell particularly well. It even failed to chart in the United Kingdom.
