Gerry Deiter photographer
Like so many who streamed through the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in that week in
May 1969, I was there by chance. Life magazine was working quickly to
cover this unexpected event, and while normally I did a lot of fashion
photography, this was a sudden assignment anyone would have been a fool to
pass up. A few hours, I thought. I had no idea I would be there for a week.
I stayed for two reasons: because John and Yoko wanted me to; and because it
seemed to me they were doing the right thing at precisely the right time. It
was only two years after the “summer of love”, when hope was never higher,
when an entire generation of young Americans, Canadians and Europeans
believed they held the world’s future in their hands. It was a time of
idealism, of optimism, of pacifism. Yet the Vietnam War was at its peak;
there were more than half a million US soldiers in combat. Global opposition
to the war was coalescing.
John Lennon understood that his voice would count. But make no mistake about
it, even though he was a Beatle, immensely wealthy and influential, he was
still risking everything. He was viewed by much of the world with as much
suspicion, confusion and ambivalence as the war itself . . . a man with a
“strange” oriental wife whose art, although innovative and original, was
universally misunderstood and largely ignored by the art world. And they
were going to try to convince people that the war really was over; all you
had to do was believe it. A simple message. So they took to a bed in a
Montreal hotel in a very public manner, inviting the world to join them.
The images remain crystal clear in my memory: a huge buffet in the dining
room, with pitchers of orange juice and bottles of champagne cooling in
silver buckets; in the master bedroom one wall was covered with posters
drawn in a primitive, yet childishly charming style, combining peace slogans
with self-portraits of John and Yoko. Flowers bloomed in every corner of the
crowded room, at the centre of which was a king-size bed and a small bedside
table, also covered with flowers and bearing a small Buddha. It looked like
a devotional shrine.
And then the central image: John Lennon Ono and Yoko Ono Lennon, both with
flowing dark hair set against white linen sheets. He wore his trademark
granny glasses and a full beard that made him look like a holy man; her
raven tresses fanned out around her head on the pillow, and her dark eyes
flashed warmly in greeting.
Having been present at the birth of Give Peace a Chance, I never
stopped feeling a profound responsibility to spread that simple message.
Perhaps as we raise our voices together, we’ll be able to hear an echo of
John’s voice singing, “Give peace a chance.” That voice still animates my
days and flows through my dreams at night.
Alison Gordon TV producer
I recall the whole experience in a golden glow, not so much for the ineffable
shimmering of the experience, but because John and Yoko had taped clear
yellow gels over all the windows, so the light came through warm as honey.
They knew how to dress a set.
And a set it undeniably was. Despite the chaos everywhere else, the bed —
their stage — seemed somehow removed from it all. It was quite
extraordinary: despite the yappy disc jockeys broadcasting “LIVE! From the
Bed-In for Peace!”; despite the self-important people coming and going like
ants with urgent requests; despite the room-service deliveries and
starstruck fans always hovering; despite the occasional incursions of Hare
Krishna devotees with chanting and drums; despite all of that, the bed and
the two small people dressed in white nightclothes curled up together on it
seemed to be in a bubble of calm, well, of peace, actually, throughout those
strange few days. It was as if there was an invisible box around them, and
they were insulated within it.
I was there for four or five days and I don’t recall speaking directly to
either John or Yoko. I was part of a CBC television crew filming a
documentary for the weekly current affairs magazine The Way It Is.
The idea for the programme came as a response to the US Government’s refusal
to let the couple into the country because of Lennon’s record of cannabis
use. Some of the younger producers on the programme hit on the idea of
bringing the country to them, instead. Working with Lennon’s people, we
invited a cross-section of Americans to Montreal to be filmed with John and
Yoko.
Among those we brought in were Tom Smothers, whose TV variety show had just
been cancelled by CBS for political reasons; Dick Gregory, the outspoken
black comedian; and Nat Hentoff, the left-wing jazz critic and columnist for
New York’s Village Voice.
It being the Sixties, my recall of the details of several days I spent there
tends to be a bit spotty. (I do remember being dazzled by a sterling silver
cigarette case with professionally rolled joints as smooth as cigarettes,
wrapped in pastel-coloured papers, the contents of which made climbing the
hill back to the hotel seem to be a feat worthy of Sir Edmund Hillary, but
that’s neither here nor there, and irrelevant to John and Yoko. In their
bedroom the drug of choice seemed to be Pouilly-Fouissé.) Which is to say
that I don’t quite recall the circumstances surrounding the recording of Give
Peace a Chance. However it came about, there were a bunch of us — 30 or
40, maybe, including some of the visiting celebrities — sitting on the floor
in the bedroom, on the walls of which John had taped big boards with lyrics
scrawled on them: all those crazy off-kilter rhyming couplets in lists —
“evolution, revolution; masturbation, flagellation; bagism, shagism;
ministers, sinisters; bishops, fishops; rabbis, popeyes, bye-byes”.
As much fun as it was to sing along with the chorus — hey, how much cooler
could cool get? — I can’t imagine that any of us thought we were involved in
music history. I didn’t even think it would ever be produced and aired. It
was too clumsy, too unmusical. But I was wrong, about the lasting impact of
the song and about the quality of the performance.
I now see the whole experience as a kind of pop-culture Stockholm syndrome, in
the most benign possible way. The gaggle of strangers had been through a lot
of weird stuff in the days that led up to the recording; trapped in a room
with the film crews, the interviews, the lights, the delegations bearing
gifts and babies to be kissed.
You can hear all of that in the recording. Whenever I hear it, there are a
couple of things I wonder about: how can it be that no one among the leaders
of the world has yet given peace a chance, and how come I never got any
royalties?
André Perry music producer
The phone rang shortly after midnight. Pierre Dubord, an executive for Capitol
Records, distributors of the Beatles’ Apple Records label, announced that
John Lennon wanted to make a recording the next day in his suite. Would I do
it? I said: “Of course,” my mind rushing to co-ordinate the details.
When I arrived John and I discussed the recording procedure. I looked at the
low ceiling and sheetrock walls sceptically, thinking that these must be the
worst conditions for making a recording. I did the best set-up I could in
the circumstances. We recorded it only twice, everyone in the room singing
and banging on telephone books, ashtrays, whatever.
The sun was rising when I left John and Yoko. I went directly to my studio to
mix the recording. I still hadn’t slept a wink by the time I returned. John
thanked me and graciously gave me a signed Hair Peace poster. More
importantly, he ordered a special label for the international release of the
single, bearing prominently my name and the address of my studio, a gesture
of appreciation that won international attention for the young
engineer/producer that I was. It was quite a boost to my career.
Yoko Ono
From the very first moment John and I saw each other, we knew something was
about to happen — something big. We just didn’t know how big. John said
about our meeting: “It was bigger than both of us.” That was the
feeling we had. When John and I sang Give Peace a Chance, we had no
idea the song would become an anthem not only for our time but for
generations to come.
It went around the world, and made other songwriters realise that you can
convey political messages with songs. Millions of people got together and
sung the song in different parts of the world at different times. The song
connected us and made us realise that we were a power strong enough to GIVE
PEACE A CHANCE — change the world. Little did we know that that’s when we,
John and I, really made our beds for life.
I still remember the beautiful full moon that John and I kept looking at from
the bed, after everybody went home. Did anybody think that a man and a
woman, a man from Liverpool, and a woman from Tokyo, would do something
crazy like that together to change the world? Maybe it was written already
on a stone on the moon or something. At the time, we were laughed at and put
down, in a major way, by the whole world. Now all of us are standing at the
threshold of a beautiful new age that we worked hard for. It’s not in our
hands yet, but we know we will make it happen. Let’s make the best of it and
have fun. I think John would have been very pleased too.
IMAGINE PEACE WAR IS OVER, if you want it.
I love you!
Edited extract from Give Peace a Chance: John & Yoko’s Bed-in for Peace,
compiled by Joan Athey, photographs by Gerry Deiter, published by Wiley at
£14.99. To order it for £13.49 inc p&p, call 0845 2712134 or
visit timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst
