John and Yoko's Montreal bed-in

Sheer audacity, for a cause: John and Yoko's Montreal bed-in

http://www.montrealgazette.com/Entertainment/John+Yoko+Montreal/1601170/story.html

By Ian McGillis, Special to The Gazette
May 15, 2009

It's so tempting to dismiss it all with a superior retrospective
shrug. A wealthy rock star and his conceptual artist wife install
themselves in a Montreal hotel room bed for a week, espousing peace
as though they have just invented the idea while a media circus
dutifully swirls around them. A hopelessly naive by-product of a
hopelessly naive time, right?

Well, yes. In some ways. Certainly, looking through a new elegantly
designed volume marking the 40th anniversary of John Lennon and Yoko
Ono's pacifist agit-prop project, responses may vary with knowledge
of context. The effect of touchingly tender portraits of the couple
with Yoko's young daughter, Kyoko, is tempered somewhat by the
thought that at this time, Lennon's first wife, Cynthia, and son,
Julian, were being left to fend for themselves, their only apparent
fault being their failure to fit into the new utopian narrative.

Reminiscences from people who were in the room ­ press, recording
engineers, DJs, hangers-on of all stripes and the late Gerry Deiter,
the photographer around whose pictures the book is built ­ spin
variations on "this encounter changed my life," yet within a couple
of years the soon to be ex-Beatle had embarked on a very different
political path, one that would have critic Lester Bangs remarking
that Lennon would "jump on any bandwagon to make himself look like a
Significant Artist."

The photographs themselves evoke an odd mix of timelessness ­ John
and Yoko could pass for nouveau-folkie hipsters of 2009 ­ and
frozen-in-its-era quaintness. Comedian Tommy Smothers and acid guru
Timothy Leary are present in many of these shots; the former, a hot
name in 1969, is all but forgotten now, while the latter, in the last
gasp of his cultural currency at the time, has been judged a false
prophet by history. For Montrealers, local period details are
understated but still there: faint glimpses of Dorchester Blvd. from
the Queen Elizabeth Hotel room's 17th floor window; an account of an
exchange, 15 months before the October Crisis, in which Lennon tells
an unnamed "séparatiste" he cannot support a cause that can't promise
non-violence.

Ultimately, while the sheer audacity of what John and Yoko did may
have been arrogant in its way, it burns through all hindsight-aided
misgivings anyway. One is certainly hard-pressed to imagine any
current celebrity of remotely equivalent stature so willingly risking
ridicule for a cause. These two had a deep understanding of the
inclusive power of simplicity, in image, words and music. It's
fitting, then, that so many of Deiter's photographs document the
writing and recording, in that hotel room, of the classic affirmative
protest song that gives the book its name: Give Peace a Chance. Sure,
those verses may be dated doggerel, but that chorus is simply
undeniable. As is Give Peace a Chance, the book.

A day before the Montreal bed-in began, John and Yoko were at the
King Edward Hotel in Toronto, where a local 14-year-old fan named
Jerry Levitan, posing improbably as a journalist, snuck into their
suite. It says something for the spirit of the times not only that he
got in at all, but that instead of being summarily dismissed, the boy
was invited back to do an interview later in the day. Two years ago,
the tape of the resulting conversation served as the basis for the
short animated film I Met The Walrus. Nominated for an Oscar and one
of the most watched clips on YouTube, the film possesses the gently
psychedelic charm of the Beatles' own Yellow Submarine. Now comes the
spinoff book.

Levitan is at his best when he sticks to the specifics of the day he
met Lennon. It is, after all, pretty remarkable that a 14-year-old
armed only with chutzpah was able to enact what was surely the dream
of millions of his contemporaries worldwide. The author's gawky tone
and the children's-book look of the illustrations are well-suited to
these passages, less so to the rest of the book, where an air of
redundancy hangs over accounts of the impact of The Beatles on Ed
Sullivan, the release of Sgt Pepper, et al.

And the book doesn't really live up to its subtitle, as Levitan
sprints through his life since that day 40 years ago. For many, the
main selling point will be the enclosed DVD, which includes a
charmingly amateur silent film and batch of photographs and, most
important, the complete 1969 interview. Lennon's low-fi voice speaks
across the decades with spectral power.

This reviewer, a lifelong Beatle nut who has only recently found
himself thinking that maybe enough is enough, would still be more
than glad to give these books as gifts: Give Peace A Chance to anyone
interested in the subject and in pop culture history; I Met The
Walrus to someone whose age and need for a worthy hero mirror the
14-year-old Levitan's.
--

Ian McGillis is a Montreal writer.
--

Give Peace a Chance: John and Yoko's Bed-In For Peace, by By Gerry
Deiter (photographer), Joan Athey (compiler) and Paul McGrath
(editor), Wiley, 120 pages, $29.95

I Met The Walrus: How One Day with John Lennon Changed My Life
Forever, by By Jerry Levitan, Collins Design, 168 pages, $32.99

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