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. In honor of 50 years of John and Yoko, see the couple in photographs and in their own words, ahead.

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

After their marriage in Gibraltar in 1969, John and Yoko staged two “bed-ins,” in Amsterdam (above) and Montreal, to promote peace. The Beatles’ “Ballad of John and Yoko,” which was written by Lennon (though credited to both him and McCartney, as always) and describes the days surrounding his marriage to Ono, includes the lines:

Drove from Paris to the Amsterdam Hilton

Talking in our beds for a week

The newspapers said, “Say what’re you doing in bed?”

I said, “We’re only trying to get us some peace”

The couple appeared on The Dick Cavett Show in 1971. “I resent to think of [John] as one of the four, or any one of the four, because I just met him as another artist,” Ono told the host. “I didn’t particularly realize that part of it, really.”

“If she took [the Beatles] apart, can we please give her credit for all the nice music that George made and Ringo made and Paul made and I’ve made since they broke up, if she did it?” Lennon said. “She didn’t split the Beatles. Because how could one girl split the Beatles, or one woman? The Beatles were drifting apart on their own.”

“I can be [without Yoko] but I don’t wish to be. There is no reason on Earth why I should be without her. There is nothing more important than our relationship, nothing. We dig being together all the time, and both of us could survive apart, but what for? I’m not going to sacrifice love, real love, for any f—in’ whore, or any friend, or any business, because in the end, you’re alone at night. Neither of us want to be, and you can’t fill the bed with groupies. I don’t want to be a swinger. Like I said in the song, I’ve been through it all, and nothing works better than to have somebody you love hold you.” — Lennon in the 1971 Rolling Stone interviews

“Yoko is as important to me as Paul and Dylan rolled into one. I don’t think she will get recognition until she’s dead. There’s me, and maybe I could count the people on one hand that have any conception of what she is or what her mind is like, or what her work means to this f—in’ idiotic generation. She has the hope that she might be recognized. If I can’t get recognized, and I’m doing it in a f—in’ clown’s costume, I’m doing it on the streets, you know, I don’t know what — I admire Yoko’s work.” — Lennon on the power of Ono’s work in the 1971 Rolling Stone interviews

Lennon and Ono released the album Double Fantasy together in 1980, and were promoting it at the time of his death. Three days before he was murdered, Lennon conducted a lengthy interview with Rolling Stone about the album, in which he told the magazine’s editor Jonathan Cott:

“Double Fantasy is a dialogue, and we have resurrected ourselves, in a way, as John and Yoko — not as John ex-Beatle and Yoko and the Plastic Ono Band. It’s just the two of us, and our position was that, if the record didn’t sell, it meant people didn’t want to know about John and Yoko — either they didn’t want John anymore or they didn’t want John with Yoko or maybe they just wanted Yoko, or whatever. But if they didn’t want the two of us, we weren’t interested.”

Lennon’s song “Woman,” on Double Fantasy, includes the lines:

Woman, please let me explain

I never meant to cause you sorrow or pain

So let me tell you again and again and again 

I love you (yeah, yeah) now and forever

“‘Woman’ came about because, one sunny afternoon in Bermuda, it suddenly hit me what women do for us. Not just what my Yoko does for me, although I was thinking in those personal terms . . . but any truth is universal. What dawned on me was everything I was taking for granted. Women really are the other half of the sky, as I whisper at the beginning of the song. It’s a ‘we’ or it ain’t anything. The song reminds me of a Beatles track, though I wasn’t trying to make it sound like a Beatles track. I did it as I did ‘Girl’ many years ago — it just sort of hit me like a flood, and it came out like that. ‘Woman’ is the grown-up version of ‘Girl.’” — Lennon in the 1980 Rolling Stone interview

Lennon and Ono appeared on the Jan. 22, 1981 issue of Rolling Stone. The photograph on the cover, captured by Annie Leibovitz, was taken just hours before he was killed.

Ono went on The Andrew Marr Show in 2010, on the event of both Lennon’s 70th birthday and the 30th anniversary of his death. “We were partners, and I feel that we are still partners,” she told the host about her celebration of her late husband’s 70th. “We’re together, still.” She felt that if Lennon were still alive, “I think that he would be very, very interested in playing the computer, because he always jumped on some new media, and that’s a very interesting media. We were saying ‘global village, it’s going to be a global village’ — in the ‘60s! And he would be saying, ‘I told you so, let’s go do it,’ and communicating with the whole world through the computer, I think.”