Give Peace a Chance

John Lennon and Yoko Ono were married in Gibraltar on March 20, 1969. They spent their honeymoon in a bed. Their first Bed-In for Peace occupied room 902 of the Amsterdam Hilton for a week, where they received the press in pajamas. The second was planned for New York. Lennon’s 1968 drug conviction in London made US entry impossible. Montreal was the nearest alternative. They checked into room 1742 of the Queen Elizabeth Hotel on May 26 and held court for eight days from a bed draped in white.

On June 1, André Perry, a Montreal studio owner, arrived with four microphones and a four-track tape recorder. There was no control room. Perry recorded wearing headphones from twelve feet away from the bed. The room held Tommy Smothers of the Smothers Brothers on acoustic guitar, alongside Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, Dick Gregory, Abbie Hoffman, Petula Clark, Murray the K, Derek Taylor, Rabbi Abraham Feinberg, and members of the Radha Krishna Temple. Lennon named most of them in the verses. They recorded the song around 10pm and Perry stayed until 3am to capture Yoko’s B-side, “Remember Love.”

Released on Apple Records on July 4, 1969, it was the first solo single ever issued by a member of the Beatles. The songwriting credit read Lennon-McCartney, a courtesy to Paul, who had recently helped Lennon record “The Ballad of John and Yoko” with just the two of them. It reached number 2 in the UK and number 14 on the US Billboard Hot 100. In November, Pete Seeger led half a million people in singing it at the Vietnam Moratorium March in Washington. Between choruses he called out: “Are you listening, Nixon?”