John, Yoko's bed-in captured in exhibit
Friday, June 12, 2009
By Michael Hill
ASSOCIATED PRESS
BETHEL, N.Y. -- John and Yoko hung out in pajamas for eight days
during their "bed-in" at a Montreal hotel in 1969. The Beatle and his
new wife read Lao Tzu, snuggled and recorded the anthem Give Peace a Chance.
But mostly they talked about peace and lorded over the chaos in a
room crammed with star-struck kids, reporters, disc jockeys, Hare
Krishnas, Timothy Leary, Tommy Smothers and hangers-on.
Gerry Deiter, a photographer on assignment for Life magazine, was
there for all of it. The pictures weren't published; the magazine
spiked the piece.
But the photos are being exposed to a wide audience in the exhibit
"Give Peace a Chance: John Lennon and Yoko Ono's Bed-In for Peace."
The exhibit is making its U.S. debut today in the Museum at Bethel
Woods, on the upstate New York site of the original Woodstock concert.
Deiter's shots in Room 1742 of the Queen Elizabeth Hotel include some
showing Lennon strumming his acoustic guitar in his white pajamas; a
shirtless, smiling Leary; and the couple being filmed eating breakfast.
The enduring moment was the recording of Give Peace a Chance, with
people in the room banging on tables, books and ashtrays.
"There were people with bells and people banging on all kinds of
stuff, and it was like a bit of a disaster," record producer Andre
Perry said. "It sounded like a brawl, a little bit."
Lennon's energetic singing and strumming (aided by co-guitarist
Smothers) made the tune, Perry said. He later added extra voices and
created a thumping beat by pounding a telephone directory.
Exhibit curator Joan Athey said Deiter noticed the intense affection
between John and Yoko, and expressed it in his pictures.
"He captured that. Even though they were constantly surrounded by
people, they were in this bubble," said Athey, author of a book about
the photos, also called Give Peace a Chance.
The exhibit runs through Sept. 7.
--------
Woodstock site shows images from Lennon's bed-in
http://www.expressnightout.com/startracker/details.php?docID=D98OL82O0
June 11, 2009
John and Yoko hung out in their pajamas for eight days during their
"bed-in" at a Montreal hotel in 1969. Reclining on a king-size bed,
the famous Beatle and his new wife read Lao Tzu, snuggled and
recorded the anthem "Give Peace a Chance."
But mostly they talked about peace and lorded over the chaos in a
room crammed tight with star-struck kids, reporters, disc jockeys,
Hare Krishnas, Timothy Leary, Tommy Smothers and hangers-on.
Photographer Gerry Deiter, on assignment for Life magazine, was there
for all of it. The pictures weren't published, because the magazine
spiked the piece.
Deiter's images now are being exposed to a wide audience 40 years
later in the exhibit, "Give Peace A Chance: John Lennon and Yoko
Ono's Bed-In For Peace." The exhibit makes its U.S. debut Friday at
The Museum at Bethel Woods, which sits at the upstate New York site
of the original Woodstock concert held later that same year.
Deiter's shots in room 1742 of the Queen Elizabeth Hotel include ones
showing Lennon strumming his acoustic guitar in his white pajamas, a
shirtless, smiling Leary, and the couple being filmed eating breakfast.
Lennon and Ono held two bed-ins in 1969, a period when Lennon was
transitioning out of the Beatles and into a role as a prominent peace
activist. The events essentially boiled down to the newlyweds
chatting up folks about peace from their hotel beds, but they allowed
the ever-clever Lennon to be an idealist, a provocateur and an avant
garde wiseguy all at the same time.
The first bed-in, immortalized in the Beatles' song "The Ballad of
John and Yoko," was held at the Amsterdam Hilton. The second was
supposed to be in New York City, but Lennon could not enter the
United States because of a marijuana conviction.
The enduring moment of the Montreal bed-in was the recording of "Give
Peace a Chance," with people in the room banging on tables, books,
tables and ashtrays. Deiter's many shots of the recording include an
image of the big poster on the wall that served as a cheat sheet with
Lennon's lyrics: "... ragism, tagism, this-ism, that-ism."
Music producer Andre Perry, called out of the blue to record the
song, recalls setting up his four-track recorder in a room with lousy
acoustics and dozens of people singing and playing percussion, some
quite badly.
"There were people with bells and people banging on all kinds of
stuff and it was like a bit of a disaster," Perry said. "It sounded
like a brawl, a little bit."
Perry said Lennon's energetic singing and strumming (aided by
co-guitarist Smothers) was enough to make the tune. The producer
later added extra voices and created a thumping beat by pounding a
telephone directory.
Deiter also caught one of the strangest cultural confrontations of
the decade when "Li'l Abner" cartoonist Al Capp stopped by,
cheerfully introduced himself as a "Neanderthal fascist" and
ridiculed the couple for several minutes.
Amid the constant hubbub, Deiter zeroed in on the couple at the
center of the madness. Included are affecting images of Lennon
sniffing a blossom and of the couple resting their heads on big white
pillows and gazing at each other.
Exhibit curator Joan Athey said Deiter noticed the intense affection
between John and Yoko and expressed it in his pictures.
"He captured that. Even though they were constantly surrounded by
people, they were in this bubble," said Athey, author of new book
about the photos, also called "Give Peace a Chance."
Athey said the weeklong assignment changed Deiter, who moved west to
British Columbia and packed away the negatives. He lived see to some
of his photos displayed in a Canadian museum before he suffered a
fatal heart attack on Dec. 9, 2005, a day after commemorating the
25th anniversary of Lennon's death.
The exhibit debuted last month in Liverpool and runs at Bethel through Sept. 7.
--
On the Net
http://www.bethelwoodscenter.org/
--------
Bethel Woods exhibit gives peace a spotlight
http://www.recordonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090611/ENTERTAIN/906110326
John, Yoko staged bed-in 40 years ago
By Sandy Tomcho
Times Herald-Record
Posted: June 11, 2009
The story of 'Give Peace A Chance'
Andre Perry produced John Lennon's 1969 song "Give Peace A Chance," a
virtual peace anthem.
Read his story behind the making of the song by clicking here. [see below[
--
BETHEL It doesn't get more peace-full than this.
Beginning Friday, the Museum at Bethel Woods Center for the Arts will
serve as the U.S. premiere site for "Give Peace A Chance: John Lennon
and Yoko Ono's Bed-In For Peace" exhibit. It commemorates the 40th
anniversary of the couple's call for world peace, seen through
stories and photographs, taken from the edge of their bed at
Montreal's Queen Elizabeth Hotel in 1969. It's also where they
recorded "Give Peace A Chance."
The exhibit coincides with the 40th anniversary of the Woodstock
Music and Art Fair, which took place on the hill behind the museum.
"It's an amazing natural segue from the bed-in to the place that's so
closely associated with the Woodstock festival," said exhibit curator
Joan Athey. "People will see powerful photographs, in a large format,
which were especially designed for Bethel Woods."
The exhibit features photos, many of which have never seen before,
snapped by photojournalist Gerry Deiter, the only journalist to
document the entire eight days. He died in 2005.
Athey, a former publicist and longtime friend of Deiter, acquired the
collection in 2007 and decided the world should see his powerful
photos, which were originally shot for Life magazine and never ran.
"One of the reasons he did these photographs was to show the love
between them. They have this transcendental quality which is
impossible to ignore," Athey said. "The fact that there are so many
that document the whole eight days, that's the precious, precious
nature of it."
The exhibit includes more than 30 large-format framed photographs, 15
text panels and additional installations from the archives of the
Queen Elizabeth Hotel.
You'll also see a passage written by Andre Perry, the man who
produced the song "Give Peace a Chance." It will be a 24-by-30 text
panel and he's also pictured in the exhibit.
"The importance of the song is that it got picked up as the name of
peace and was used in the peace movement around the world," Perry
said. "The fact that it is still very much alive is marvelous."
The exhibit has been on display in Liverpool at the Beatles Story
Museum and at the Stephen Bulger Gallery in Toronto. The exhibit will
be on display at the Bethel Woods museum through Sept. 7.
"It's a fantastic collaboration," Athey said. "I'm extremely proud of it."
--------
Andre Perry tells the story of 'Give Peace a Chance'
http://www.recordonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090610/ENTERTAIN/90610036/-1/ENTERTAIN
By Sandy Tomcho
Times Herald-Record
Posted: June 10, 2009
André Perry sat at the edge of John Lennon and Yoko Ono's bed at the
famous "Bed In" event in Montreal's Queen Elizabeth hotel in 1969.
There, he produced the song "Give Peace a Chance."
Perry describes that day, in his own words.
--
"I used to record and produce a lot of things for Capital Records in
Canada at that time, and Capitol was the distributor of Apple
Records, which was the Beatles label, as you know. So, I was called
by the A&R guy from Capitol Records, and it was somewhat of a circus.
"The room, if you ever see the room physically it's very, very
small, in essence, even though it is a suite. And it had a very, very
low ceiling, so the conditions from a recording standpoint, from an
acoustic standpoint, were horrible, obviously. There were conditions,
like we call in the trade, a standing wave it's like parallel walls
are resonating against each other, you know and microphones do pick
that stuff up.
"This all came about very fast. I think they made the decision the
day before the actual recording. I mean, they talked about it, but
they did not call anybody before the day before the recording. And
4-tracks, in those days, they were fairly large and they were
rack-mounted and they were not really that easily moveable. And my
4-track was at the National Center of the Arts in Ottawa because I
was doing a quadraphonic playback of 'Tommy,' the rock opera, with
Ballet Canadienne, so I didn't have a 4-track. So, not only did I
have the problem of not having one, I had to find one, and I ended up
renting one from RCA Victor, which was really my competition then.
They were a larger recording studio. What's funny is I didn't tell
them it was for a Lennon recording.
"Then, we showed up at the suite and when I walked in there were, I
don't know, maybe 35, 40 people in the room, and John was there. I
thought I was gonna come into a situation where he would tell me what
to do, you know, 'here's what we got, here's what we're gonna do.'
And that wasn't the case at all.
He looked at me, I looked at him, we kinda eyed each other and it was
a really very nice moment in that sense because he let me do what I
wanted to do, really. And he went on writing the lyrics. He was
writing the lyrics on these big huge boards, and he started to sing
the song and rehearse and Tommy Smothers, who was also there playing
guitar, was playing more of a folky kind of style. So, he (John) was
devoting his time mostly to how they were going to play it together.
Then we did a very rough run through, which was very quick, and
corrected a few things, and, if you've ever seen the video, it was
one-two-three-four and off we go.
So it was recorded on a 4-track recorder. Two tracks were devoted to
John and the guitars, and I also knew that I had a situation that was
less than perfect. On the other, I also knew that this was going to
be some kind of a very special moment in history, in a way. We didn't
know that it was gonna have the legs that it has now, 40 years later,
but we knew that it was gonna be fairly important. (The reason being,
all of the media and newspaper people all over the world were there
and film people and so on.)
Once we recorded it, John came to me and we looked at each other and
we obviously knew that it was unusable in the state that it was.
Apparently, he felt that there wasn't enough people in the room, so
they actually went in the hallways because there were kids and people
all over the hotel, went out and got more people into that room. So,
what you have here is almost like a brawl, really. Everybody's
banging on things, nobody really has a decent sense of rhythm. Some
of them are decent singers, some of them are bad singers.
So, finally, the end result was that the voice that you hear of John
is perfect. It's exactly what you hear. The energy that he has and
the guitar playing, that was not touched at all.
Onto 'Remember Love' ...
But I spent four hours doing the B-side of the 45, which was called
"Remember Love," with Yoko Ono, and that was really a very sweet
moment. I spent four hours with them, just the two of them and myself
recording this, and she did a beautiful, beautiful version of it. She
used to be knocked around as being not a great singer and, of course,
she didn't have the greatest voice in the world.
But never the less, that particular song was very difficult to do,
and John, well, they were laying on the floor, leaning against the
bed and I was dead in front of them, about five feet in front of them
with two microphones. And they went on doing takes on this thing and
it was very difficult because it was a hard song to sing. And then
they would stop, and they had just gotten married as you know, and
they were beautifully in love and he was very, very sweet and they
used to go in the bed and tickle and laugh and so on, and one time I
felt a little bit embarrassed. I said 'Look, do I have to leave the
room or what?' They were just relaxing and finally, four hours later,
we really got a great take.
Back to 'Give Peace a Chance' ...
Then I left, went to the studio, put the 4-track on, listened to it
and saw that it wasn't usable in that state. So, what I decided to do
is I called some people and we overdubbed some voices, but I didn't
take professional singers. It was done in the fashion of what John
would have wanted out of maybe 25 people in the room, without the
rotten apples spoiling the take. I wanted to keep it pure. Then I
created rhythm. What you hear is me thumping on a telephone directory.
So finally I mixed that version and the original version, took a
shower, went back to the hotel, late morning or early afternoon and
then everybody got out of the room and it was just the two of us. I
said look, 'You have a choice. There's two different versions.' He
said, 'It's not good, is it?' I said, 'Well, I didn't think so,
because the background was spoiled by all of that silly noise.' I
said you either leave with the original, go to England and redo it,
or else you use my version. He listened to it, he loved it, he
thanked me for it and then I left.
A week or so later when the record came out, the president of Capitol
Records called me from Toronto and said, 'Andre, you wouldn't believe
what we just got from England.' I said 'What?' He says, 'Well, not
only did they put out your original version, they're giving you
credit on the record.' That was never done before. It was like a
business card in a way. It was his way of thanking me."
.
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