The Bed-Ins By Anthony Fawcett

THE MONTREAL BED-IN: A VIEW BY ANTHONY FAWCETT

From John Lennon: One Day At A Time
Published in the United States by Grove Press, Inc. in 1976
Published in Great Britain by New English Library Ltd. in 1977

One Day At A Time

"The Bed-Ins were immensely important to John, since they provided the release he needed for accumulated passions and emotionally charged political feelings that had been building up inside him for so long. It was a lonely and brave stand to take and he was prepared to put his credibility on the line. Besides Yoko, there was literally nobody else who supported his actions or stood by him. To do what John did, and to pull through all the humiliation involved, it was necessary that he have complete faith in himself. 'Yoko and I are quite willing to be the world's clowns,' he said, 'if by so doing it will do some good. I know I'm one of these "famous personalities." For reasons only known to themselves, people do print what I say. And I'm saying peace. We're not pointing a finger at anybody. There are no good guys and bad guys. The struggle is in the mind. We must bury our own monsters and stop condemning people. We are all Christ and we are all Hitler. We want Christ to win. We're trying to make Christ's message contemporary. What would he have done if he had advertisements, records, films, TV and newspapers? Christ made miracles to tell his message. Well, the miracle today is communications, so let's use it.'

The Amsterdam Bed-In was a beginning, a sort of trial run for John and Yoko to feel their way around and see how much they could accomplish with this type of hard-sell campaign. They felt the event was successful mainly because it did get their message plastered all over the front pages of the world's newspapers. For John, it was the start of a spiraling manic devotion to the peace cause, which led him into frenzied attempts at all-out media saturation.

By the time of the Montreal Bed-In two months after Amsterdam, John and Yoko were more self-assured and glowing with supercharged energy. They were ready to take on North America.

They had desperately tried to gain entry into the United States, but each time, John's visa had been denied. Rather than wait any longer, they decided on the practical strategy of staging a second Bed-In close enough to talk to the U.S. media and generate a flood of publicity...It was midnight on Monday, May 26, 1969, when John and Yoko and their entourage checked into the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal.

From their bed, John spent a lot of time on the phone talking with AM and FM radio stations all around the United States and Canada. His energy seemed unlimited, and he kept up a more or less constant conversation, one call after another, all the time promoting peace.

For a long time, John had been thinking about using his music to promote peace. On the final weekend of the Bed-In, between eight in the evening Saturday and three the next morning, John led everyone in the Montreal hotel room in singing his newly written Give Peace a Chance.

Give Peace a Chance was spontaneous and improvised. It was perhaps the most important contribution John could give to the peace movement and the phrase, 'we don't have a leader but now we have a song' was soon echoed all over America."

Excerpt from John Lennon: One Day At A Time
Copyright 1976 Anthony Fawcett

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