The Peace Ballad of John & Yoko
April 2 - June 21, 2009 - Free Admission
“Henry Ford knew how to sell cars by advertising. I’m selling peace, and Yoko and I are just one big advertising campaign. It may make people laugh, but it may make them think, too. Really, we’re Mr. and Mrs. Peace,” said John Lennon during the famous 1969 Bed-in in Montreal that truly launched their peace campaign. Following their wedding at the British Consulate in Gibraltar on March 20, 1969, John Lennon and Yoko Ono flew to Paris, from where they made their way to Amsterdam to devote their honeymoon to the first Bed-in for peace, from March 25 to 31, at that city’s Hilton Hotel. Their second Bed-in, which could not be held in the United States since John Lennon was denied entry, was staged in Montreal at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel, Room 1742, from May 26 to June 2, involving LSD guru Timothy Leary, singer Petula Clark, Rabbi Abraham Feinberg and hundreds of reporters. Knowing that their honeymoon would be a magnet for paparazzi—in 1964 two businessmen had bought up Kansas City hotel sheets used by the Beatles and cut them into 160,000 pieces to sell for one dollar each—the couple decided to turn it into a public event to advance the cause of peace. The normally private, personal bed became a public stage, a podium, a forum from which, dressed in pyjamas, they explained their perspective on the Vietnam War to the world’s press. This event was in the passive resistance tradition of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, albeit reflecting the hippie sit-ins of the late 1960s. But it differed due to a conceptual dimension that, in an age where “attitudes became form,” made it into a performance questioning the notions of identity and privacy, space and time. At the Montreal Bed-in, the bedroom served in turn as a political forum, an experimental art space and a recording studio for the worldwide hit pacifist anthem “Give Peace a Chance,” recorded on June 1, 1969, with voices including those of local Hare Krishna temple members.
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