Northern Songs

Pop Goes The Trudeau: John Lennon and Yoko Ono meet with Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau in Ottawa, Dec. 1969. CP Photo/Peter Bregg.

John Lennon’s murder 25 years ago this week tore a little chunk out of the hearts of millions of people around the world. Canada, in particular, lost a friend that day, someone who had come here by accident in tense times, was treated much better than he had hoped to be, and thereafter never stopped talking about how good Canada was to him and what a fine and reasonable place it seemed to be.

Lennon felt this way because in 1969, when much of the world had soured on the Beatle and his wife, Yoko Ono, Canadians welcomed them, gave them a home for their peace campaign, opened up the airwaves for them, brought them around to meet the Prime Minister and arranged a mobile recording of the song Give Peace A Chance on 12 hours’ notice. On a Sunday. In Quebec.

They never forgot us for all of that. To this day, Yoko gets a little misty-eyed when she remembers the place and the people.

The couple had been married only a few months when their bed-in for peace arrived in Canada in late May of that year. They had not planned to be in Montreal and had no idea what to expect. They had been pilloried in England even before they left there, they had been denied entry to the United States and then mistreated and ignored in the Bahamas. If Montreal was a bust, Lennon’s credibility as an activist would have hit rock bottom.

Instead, it was magic. There was an enthusiastic crowd waiting for them at Dorval, and in that scrum were some fired-up Montrealers who wanted to do more than hang out and sniff the glory — they wanted to push this event along, to make it real, to put the word out to as much of the world as would listen. Everybody got in line. Pretty much all of the Canadian media showed up for a chat at some point and the few who weren’t charmed were at least objective. For a week, the Queen Elizabeth Hotel bit its dowager lip while the circus transcended every one of the rules posted on the door of Room 1742.

With security far short of today’s standards, hundreds of people managed to get into the room, many on official business, just as many pretending to be: kids representing non-existent high school newspapers, kids with forged credentials and no tape in their recorders, kids with peace-themed knick-knacks they wanted to present to the couple. Activists from across the country came to agree or argue. Hundreds of cameras and microphones were pointed at them. And whatever aura they had left was still strong enough to spark a love-in on Mount Royal that eventually paraded fragrantly down the mountain to the hotel and scared the dickens out of everybody there.

John Lennon performs at the Montreal "bed-in" in May, 1969. Photo Keystone Features/Getty Images.

The CBC had an unusual presence in all of this. The Way It Is, the flagship current affairs show, put a camera and two producers in the room for four days, and flew in host Patrick Watson to (briefly) share John and Yoko’s bed. CBC created some of the week’s most incandescent moments by inviting singer-comedian-activist Tom Smothers, comic Dick Gregory, acid futurist Timothy Leary and cartoonist Al Capp, whose violent debate with Lennon is a staggering slice of Canadian verité. Long before John and Yoko’s own film of the bed-in was produced, CBC had aired the most intimate, unrehearsed documentary footage of a Beatle that the world had ever seen.

Seeing that footage, it is difficult not to be impressed by this genuine and eloquent shilling for peace. No pop star had ever opened himself up to that kind of scrutiny and ridicule. It was a risk, and he won because of the tight, thoughtful sound-bites that flowed out of the hotel and landed in all corners of the globe. For that week he thought on his feet (or on his back), he argued complex lines of thought, he drew lovely little metaphors, and he talked clearly to the camera in a way that made you want to seriously consider doing what it was he said you should do. For the week of the bed-in it’s possible that the simple word “peace” was heard by more people around the world than at any point since VJ day. Even people who hated John and Yoko couldn’t talk about how much they hated them without using the word. It was diabolical.

After they left, John and Yoko felt good enough about Canada to come back in September on the flimsiest of excuses. A Toronto rock promoter named John Brower was producing a rock and roll revival, and with 48 hours to go, he was looking at an empty stadium and financial ruin. Brower joked to his partner that it would take a Beatle to save this mess. They had a laugh. And then the light went on. Brower got on the phone to London, gave the sales pitch of his life and convinced John, Yoko, Eric Clapton and others to come to Toronto so that Lennon could deliver the first public performance of Give Peace A Chance. Rock filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker shot it, and the result can be seen in the 2005 CBC documentary John and Yoko: Give Peace A Song (airing Friday, Dec. 9 on CBC Newsworld, check local listings for airtimes).

When they returned for a third time in December 1969, it was to make plans for a larger event, a peace festival that would dwarf Woodstock and bring the Beatles back to the stage for the first time in four years. Again, Canada laid out the red carpet. They met with Pierre Trudeau, rode in the back of Allan Rock’s Volkswagen, talked drugs with researchers from the LeDain Commission, were handed gobs of CBC network time and plastered first Toronto, then five other world cities, with their famous “War Is Over” poster.

The plans for the show died, but out of it all, Canada has one eternal artifact, Give Peace A Chance. It is now the world’s peace anthem, sung somewhere on the planet at least once a day and on special days, thousands of times. Canadians found the money, the people and the equipment to record the song. It was recorded by Andre Perry, an unknown Montrealer who became famous overnight because of it. And the chorus consisted, by and large, of ordinary Canadians who had never before in their lives done something so extraordinary. Every time the record is spun around the world, a little bit of Canada goes out with it.

Paul McGrath has been writing about music for 30 years. He has directed two CBC documentaries about John Lennon: John and Yoko’s Year Of Peace (2000) and John and Yoko: Give Peace A Song (2005).