Don't Worry Kyoko

Trivia/Info

• One of the first recordings that John Flansburgh and John Linnell made together. The band first mentioned it in a 1995 TMBG Information Club newsletter:^[1]

What was the name of the first song you ever recorded?

We're not sure, but it might be a version of Yoko Ono's song "Don't Worry Kyoko, Mummy's Only Looking For A Hand In The Snow" that we recorded on Flansburgh's reel-to-reel when we were around 15. We sang with faux Rod Serling voices.

• The song was written by Yoko Ono in 1968. The full title is "Don't Worry Kyoko (Mummy's Only Looking For Her Hand In The Snow)". Ono wrote it for her daughter Kyoko during a custody battle with her ex-husband Anthony Cox. The lyrics consist solely of "Don't worry," repeated at length. The song was first released as the b-side to John Lennon's 1969 single "Cold Turkey," and later appeared on Ono and Lennon's live album Some Time in New York City.
• Flansburgh detailed the song 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.

• In a 1996 interview, Flansburgh mentioned that he unearthed this recording while compiling archival material for 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."
• Flansburgh stated in a 2020 Tumblr post that the band is unlikely to release this recording. He explained: "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."
• Flansburgh and Linnell discussed their earliest recordings, including this one, in a 2013 interview:

Flansburgh: Well 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, and 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 just did a bunch of recordings that were just, um, a lot of them were like 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. You know, it usually involved instruments. We weren't thinking specifically in terms of songwriting at that time. That kind of developed later on.

• Other early recordings by Flansburgh and Linnell included covers of The Rolling Stones' "Under My Thumb" and Soupy Sales' "That Wasn't No Girl."^[2] Flansburgh spoke about these earliest recordings in the 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."
• Flansburgh and Linnell once played a tape of their recordings over their school's cafeteria speakers.^[3] Linnell recalled in a 1995 interview:

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.

Song Themes

Children, People (Real), Relatives, TMBG Remakes, Weather

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