Don't Worry Kyoko
From This Might Be A Wiki
| song name | Don't Worry Kyoko (Mummy's Only Looking for Her Hand in the Snow) |
| artist | John Flansburgh & John Linnell (possibly as The Brave New Whales[1]) |
| releases | Unreleased |
| year | Late-1970s |
| run time | ? · Know it? Add it! |
| sung by | John Flansburgh, John Linnell |
Trivia/Info
- This unreleased cover was among the earliest recordings that John Flansburgh and John Linnell made together. "Don't Worry Kyoko (Mummy's Only Looking for Her Hand in the Snow)" was written by Yoko Ono in 1968 during a custody dispute with her then-husband, Anthony Cox, over their daughter, Kyoko Ono Cox. Intended as a message of comfort for her young daughter, the song's lyrics consist solely of the phrase "don't worry," repeated at length. It was first released in 1969 as the B-side to John Lennon's single "Cold Turkey" and later appeared on Ono and Lennon's live album Live Peace in Toronto 1969 (1969), Ono's solo album Fly (1971) and their joint album Some Time in New York City (1972). John Flansburgh described the track in 2021 as "a very extreme song; it's a Yoko Ono song, so it's already kind of nuts in the first place."[2]
- Flansburgh and Linnell recorded their version as teenagers on Flansburgh's TEAC A-2300S two-track reel-to-reel tape recorder, which he had purchased at the age of 12 with money from a summer job.[3][4] They recreated the song's original arrangement with available instruments and both sang in deadpan impressions of Rod Serling, host of The Twilight Zone.[5][6] The song was recorded alongside covers of The Rolling Stones' "Under My Thumb" and Soupy Sales' "That Wasn't No Girl".[7][8] At around this time, the duo named themselves The Brave New Whales.[9] Flansburgh described the recording in a 1996 interview with Pitchfork:
We did a recording of a Yoko Ono song in my parents' house when we were teenagers called "Don't Worry Kyoko". We did a version of that and both of us were singing. There was like a Farfisa organ and a piano and all these overdubbed... We just sort of bounced the tracks back and forth, experimenting with sounds. That was the first thing we did.
- The track was likely recorded in late December 1977 or early January 1978, when Flansburgh and Linnell were 17 and 18 years old, respectively. In a 2018 interview on KURE, Flansburgh explained: "[Linnell] was a year older than me, so he actually went to UMass in Amherst and he came back for Christmas break. I had a tape recorder and was sort of learning how to play the guitar. So we did some home recording in the winter, over Christmas break." The academic calendars of their schools indicate a possible time frame for the recording: the University of Massachusetts Amherst's winter break lasted from December 21 to January 23,[10] and Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School's break ran from December 22 to January 2.[11] The band discussed this period in a 2013 interview:
Flansburgh: We did a bunch of recordings right after high school, or I guess I was still in high school and you [Linnell] had just gone to college. I had a four-track tape recorder, I was kind of teaching myself how to play the guitar — this is like in 1977. And we did a bunch of recordings that were just... a lot of them were covers. We did a version of "Don't Worry Kyoko". Oh no, now that really wasn't music at all.
Linnell: We did a lot of things which were just kind of sound experiments with John's tape recorder and various things. But, I mean, I think there was a musical element to all of them. There was just a lot of messing around with sounds, just letting the tape roll and doing some basic thing with echo. It usually involved instruments. We weren't thinking specifically in terms of songwriting at that time, that kind of developed later on.
- While this may have been the earliest noteworthy track that Flansburgh and Linnell created, it was probably not their very first recording. In a 2021 interview, Linnell recalled an earlier effort: "I think the first things we ever did together was him operating the tape recorder and I was playing the plastic chord organ." Flansburgh described their early recording experiments in the 2003 documentary Gigantic (A Tale Of Two Johns): "There was sort of an aesthetic to them. They were not band recordings, they were just kind of electronic recordings. They were very strange and kind of unlistenable in a way." Linnell added: "We really had a lot of enthusiasm for this considering it was not intended for anyone's ears. We literally didn't play this stuff for anybody, we just made it and that was enough."[12] Flansburgh once played a tape of these recordings over the speakers in their high school cafeteria.[13] In a 1995 interview, Linnell recalled:
I can barely even remember this, but [Flansburgh] worked at what was the radio station at our high school for a period of time. The radio station was just a guy in a room playing records and it lead to a loudspeaker in the cafeteria — that was it. And I think what happened was that John played music that he and I had put together over that thing, and that was one of the first things that John and I had ever done together, when we were like 16. I had forgotten all about that until just now. That was probably the first collaborative music we did together. But we also worked on the high school newspaper together and that was kinda how we got to know each other. [The recording] didn't really have a name, it was just some noisy thing that was done on tape.
- These early recordings remain unreleased, and the band have repeatedly stated that they do not intend to make them public. Flansburgh has confirmed that he is still in possession of the "Don't Worry Kyoko" recording. In a 1996 interview, he mentioned that he had unearthed it while compiling archival material for the compilation album Then: The Earlier Years: "I found a tape of John and I performing a Yoko Ono song when we were 17 years old. It's pretty amazing in a weird way... but I don't think we're ready to go public with that." In 2002, director AJ Schnack requested the track for inclusion in the documentary Gigantic (A Tale Of Two Johns), but the band declined to provide it.
- Flansburgh commented on the recording's condition in a 2020 Tumblr post: "It is hard to say if the tape has even made it through the years. It has not been stored in a completely temperature controlled environment. And although reel to reel tape is often remarkably resilient, surviving 40, 50, 60 years essentially at 100%, some 'media' is not as well made as other[s], and when I was I kid I only could afford the cheap stuff." In 2023, he added: "I am pretty sure I do have it, although it might be a smudge on the tape now. I don't suspect we will be rushing to release it too soon. It is very, um, well… it's not much more than a curiosity."[14]
Song Themes
Children, People (Real), Relatives, TMBG Remakes, Weather
Videos
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