by Ken McNab
At the time, Leary was running against Republican candidate – and future president – Ronald Reagan for the governership of California under the simplistic slogan of ‘Come Together, Join The Party’. Without making any promises, Lennon loosely agreed to Leary’s request to write a song framed around the campaign catchwords. But his interest in the subject matter, like his friendship with Leary, quickly waned, even if he did file away the notion of yet another song based on the concept of ‘one world’.
For now, Lennon continued to preach peace to the masses while using the language of confrontation. He described the police and politicians as ‘pigs’, mirroring the rhetoric of the campuses, especially that of Berkeley in California where thousands of students had clashed with baton-wielding cops. Though some accused him of selling out by pushing peace and a non-violent solution, he knew he would face more pointed accusations of hypocrisy were he to suddenly advocate a violent overthrow of the American way of life.
Nevertheless, as he rallied his followers, his name began to be whispered ever more loudly in the upper echelons of American power. Inside the White House and behind closed doors at the FBI, Lennon was giving cause for concern. It was time to reopen and update the FBI file started in January by a Nixon administration mired in paranoia, the one marked ‘John Lennon, musician’.
McCartney, meanwhile, remained in Corfu with Linda and stepdaughter Heather. Starr was taking to the life of an English playboy in New York with gusto before heading to the West Indies. Harrison and Pattie were bound for Sardinia, but before he left, he met Glyn Johns at Olympic to listen to his first proper pass at resurrecting an album from the mess that the ‘Get Back’ tapes had become.
The track listing read: ‘One After 909’, ‘I’m Ready’, ‘Save The Last Dance For Me’, ‘Don’t Let Me Down’, ‘Dig A Pony’, ‘I’ve Got A Feeling’, ‘Get Back’, ‘For You Blue’, ‘Teddy Boy’, ‘Two Of Us’, ‘Maggie Mae’, ‘Dig It’, ‘Let It Be’, ‘The Long And Winding Road’ and a reprise of ‘Get Back’. It was a rustic and homespun confection which, looking back, was similar to Dylan and the Band’s The Basement Tapes (recorded between June and October 1967, but not officially released until 1975) and as far from the glossy production values of Sgt. Pepper and the White Album as you could get. It stuck rigidly to McCartney’s initial vision of a stripped-down, live-in-the-studio album. The Beatles, naked. Or, as Lennon would later put it, the band ‘with their trousers down’.
Harrison didn’t have the authority on his own to sanction the compilation as the group’s next album. He had long been overcome with indifference to ‘Get Back’, which he considered little more than a McCartney vanity project. The fact that Johns had only included one Harrison song – ‘For You Blue’ – hardly helped.
So, with no Beatles sessions pencilled in, ‘Get Back’ was gently returned to its dusty shelf in the Apple basement. And Glyn Johns, for the time being at least, quietly removed himself from the play.
© Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy
Room 1742 of Montreal’s Queen Elizabeth Hotel was turned into an ad hoc studio for the impromptu recording of John Lennon’s anthemic ‘Give Peace A Chance’ with a peculiar cast of backing singers.
JUNE 1969
In the early evening of 1 June 1969, Andre Perry entered the ground-floor lift at Montreal’s Queen Elizabeth Hotel and pressed the button to take him to the seventeenth floor. Lugging a 4-track tape recorder and a bag containing four microphones and two speakers, he stepped out of the lift when he reached the appointed level and walked along the corridor towards room 1742. No one barred his way or asked any questions as he arrived at the door, which already lay open. Seconds later he was face to face with John Lennon and Yoko Ono in a room swarming with people that included scandal-hungry journalists, celebrity liggers, prurient hangers-on and mantra-chanting devotees from the Canadian chapter of the Radha Krishna Temple. ‘It was a circus, complete chaos,’ recalled Perry, then Montreal’s most in-demand record producer and a man with impeccable music credentials.
It had been a trying day for the Lennons. There had been the usual conveyor belt of interviews as the Montreal bed-in headed into day seven. The chilled-out ambience had turned toxic with the arrival of Al Capp, the American right-wing cartoonist and self-confessed ‘Neanderthal fascist’. Capp, Richard Nixon’s favourite satirist, lobbed racist insults at Yoko in the hope that Lennon would explode. Capp’s shameful xenophobia was undoubtedly the lowest point of the Montreal bed-in.
But the highest point – and the most memorable – would take place just a few hours later with Perry’s arrival.
His involvement had stemmed from calls made the previous day by flustered Capitol Records executives keen to make sure their VIP’s every request was met. His task was simple – to turn ‘Give Peace A Chance’ from a simplistic, improvised singalong into a proper record. For two people who had never met, Lennon and Perry soon found themselves striking up an easy accord.
Perry told me: ‘I guess he felt very comfortable with me. He just let me set up and said, “That looks fine.” He was more concerned with working on the lyrics and trying to get the people who were in the room to participate really. We did a soundcheck and then we did two takes.’
The lyrics were pinned up on huge signs on the walls, like hippie graffiti. By now, around fifty people were shoehorned into the room, a supporting cast that became a backing chorus. Among them was American comedian Tommy Smothers, who would play acoustic guitar alongside Lennon, Timothy Leary and his wife Rosemary, civil rights activist Dick Gregory, poet Allen Ginsberg, local rabbi Abraham Feinberg, British DJ Roger Scott, who was working at local radio station CFOX, English singer Petula Clark and Apple press officer Derek Taylor, who would be comically name-checked in the song’s lyrics alongside ‘Bobby’ Dylan and Norman Mailer.
Perry faced significant technical challenges to get the sound right. ‘When I walked in there were two things that I knew,’ he recalled. ‘I knew that it wasn’t going to sound right because the room was very small and also the ceiling was very low. The ceiling was about eight feet maximum. And it was made of sheet-rock and that would create a parallel wall, what we call standing waves where, if people slap their hands, you would hear this brrrrr-like reverberation. So I knew for a fact this was going to be ridiculous.’
He wasn’t the only one slightly out of his comfort zone. Petula Clark, best known for her 1964 hit ‘Downtown’, had been a popular British singer for years but was far removed from Lennon’s bohemian social orbit. Yet she found herself accidentally press-ganged into singing along to the chorus on ‘Give Peace A Chance’.
Earlier that night she had got caught up in an Anglo-French controversy during a gig at the city’s Place des Arts. She had been asked to do a show singing songs in French and English. But 1969 was a politically charged year. The ‘Free Quebec’ independence movement was at its peak and Petula’s attempt to bridge the divide was met with jeers on both sides. The audience reaction left her dismayed and later she went seeking solace from a most unexpected source – John Lennon.
She recalled: ‘I sang in French and the English-speaking audience were unhappy and quite vocal, and the French were particularly vocal when I sang in English. It was like open war. I was very hurt and I couldn’t understand it at all. I really didn’t know what to do and I needed to talk to somebody who I had no connection with, and John was in town with Yoko doing a bed-in for peace. So after the show one night I went over the hotel – no security, of course, I just walked in – and said I wanted to see John Lennon.
‘So up I went, and there they were sitting in bed, and he was adorable. He could see I had a problem and he put his arms around me. I told him what it was all about and, well, he gave me some advice that I can’t repeat. Anyway, he said it didn’t matter, let them get over it, and he told me to go and have a glass of wine in the living room, and there were a lot of people in there. It was just chilling out, nothing weird. There were no drugs. Nothing like that. Just a nic
e, chilled-out atmosphere. There was some music being piped in, a very simple little song, and we started singing along with it, and it was “Give Peace A Chance”. We were all being filmed and recorded, so I’m on “Give Peace A Chance”.’
Clark was certainly on the record in spirit but whether she – and others in the room – was truly on it vocally may be open to conjecture. After the song was recorded, Perry took the tape away to his own studio for a playback and was left aghast by what he heard. Lennon’s vocal track, with its busker-like spontaneity, and the acoustic guitars measured up fine, but the muffled background voices virtually made the track unusable.
‘It sounded horrific,’ he said. ‘Lennon’s voice was great and the energy was great and the guitars were great so I knew we had captured something. But the overall singing was not good. So being a producer I called some people, and asked them if they wanted to come down to the studio and overdub some things on a John Lennon record.
‘They thought I was crazy, but they all showed up about ten o’ clock in the morning. I didn’t want to do a slick rendition that sounded like back-up singers in a studio doing harmony. What I wanted to reproduce was what I think Lennon was hearing in his head and the sound he heard in the room. It was supposed to be raw and unvarnished. It was supposed to sound like an amateur group and not finessed or anything. We did several overdubs and then my friends went away. I am also a drummer so I looked out a rubber garbage can and I did the old Beatles thunk, you know, to get the rhythm on this rubber can and slowly I built it up and put some tape echo on it.’
Having been up all night trying to salvage the recording, Perry took a shower before heading back across town to let Lennon hear the finished product.
‘He looked at me and said, “It’s no good, is it?” I said, “To tell you the truth, as far as the people in the room are concerned, no. But as far as your voice was concerned, it was good.” So I told him I had kept some of the background to preserve the feeling of the room itself but that I had overdubbed stuff. So I gave him a choice – “Either you take what I recorded or you take the original back to Abbey Road and you do what you want with it.” So he listened to what I had done and he just smiled and said, “That’s fantastic.”
‘The funny thing is that in later years people said they could hear themselves singing and saying ‘that was me banging the door’. But I would say only about thirty-four per cent of the original recording is what you hear on the record. The rest of it was overdubs in my studio. I wanted to give him some kind of option. You see, the point of the matter, it’s not that we wanted to cheat or anything, it was a question of, like, not usable, the condition was absolutely terrible. What we did was take the original stuff that was there, and just added a few voices in a cleaner recording environment.’
Lennon’s appreciation was genuine. When the record came out as a single a month later he insisted that Perry receive a special credit, and printed the name and address of his studio almost like a business card, giving him some unexpected, but welcome, exposure.
Fifty years after the experience, the Canadian admits he still finds it all quite surreal but says he was never daunted by the opportunity to record a Beatle. ‘I wasn’t a pop guy, I was a jazz musician. Obviously I knew who he was, I wasn’t naïve, but I wasn’t necessarily overwhelmed. I went round there to do a professional job. On reflection I think that’s why he liked me. I wasn’t overwhelmed by his fame or celebrity. I knew what I was doing. And I think he sensed it. He was a very intelligent guy but also the feeling I had from him was that he was very positive, very perceptive.’
Derek Taylor estimated that during the seven days of the Montreal bed-in, the Lennons conducted more than three hundred radio interviews and countless dialogues with print journalists. Among the many topics floated was the idea of a meeting between John and Pierre Trudeau, Canada’s youthful prime minister, whose liberal attitude had drawn favourable comparisons with John F. Kennedy. The couple’s astonishing media onslaught elevated their celebrity to new levels. But the uncomplicated access to room 1742 also made them easy marks for street-smart hustlers looking for a piece of the action.
For all his hard-edged misanthropy, Lennon was often effortlessly reeled in by fast-talking grifters like Allen Klein and Magic Alex Mardas. Happily, Allan Rock didn’t fall into this category, although he nevertheless possessed a certain amount of callow chutzpah to bluff his way into the Lennons’ inner sanctum on the same day as ‘Give Peace A Chance’ was recorded.
Rock was a geeky, bespectacled twenty-one-year-old and the leader of the students’ union at Ottawa University in the country’s capital, some one hundred and twenty-five miles from Montreal. He drove down to Montreal in his Volkswagen Beetle (it had to be, didn’t it), bolstered by the firm belief that he could convince Lennon to speak at a seminar for world peace that his university was hosting the next day.
On the surface, it touched all the right buttons for Lennon – guaranteed media exposure, one-to-one communication with a like-minded youthful audience and the chance to again ramp up the message. Plus, with the bed-in now in its fifth day, the Lennons were starting to suffer from cabin fever. So Rock’s invitation, although a little vague, was an opportunity at least to enjoy a little timeout. His very surname was enough to get Lennon’s attention, too.
The young Canadian was staggered when the couple agreed to pack up their entourage, including a two-man film crew from Apple Films, and take a train east the next day. With his university sidekick, Hugh Segal, in tow, Rock picked the Lennons up at Ottawa’s station to ferry them to the city’s seat of learning. First, though, Lennon insisted on a whistle-stop tour of the country’s capital, which was also home to Trudeau. Rock, who was already nurturing early ambitions of a political career, couldn’t believe his luck. So much so that he thought nothing of driving past the prime minister’s official residence in the city’s New Edinburgh neighbourhood in the naïve hope that he could simply turn up with a Beatle in tow to talk about world peace.
In a memoir printed years later by Ottawa’s Globe and Mail, Rock, who would go on to serve as Canada’s federal health minister and for a time his country’s ambassador to the United Nations, recalled the surreal events when he became a Beatle’s unofficial Canadian tour guide for a day, including the moment when ‘Get Back’ came on the car’s radio.
‘I spent the day with Lennon, watching as he managed the incessant demands of mega fame, a star-struck twenty-one-year-old making dinner plans with an almost mythical figure who for five years had held my generation transfixed. He was calm at the centre of a constant, frantic happening, ignoring the kooks and crazies drawn by his raucous road show, and polite and patient with those of us trying to plan some sense into his schedule. In early evening, he told me that he wanted to see something of the city. He and Yoko Ono sat in the rear of my Volkswagen as I drove them around the capital, with John at one point singing along to The Beatles’ “Get Back” on the radio. (“Turn it up!” he yelled from the back.) Disappointed that the prime minister had not joined us at the “Peace Conference”, Lennon agreed when I suggested we visit 24 Sussex to see if Trudeau was home. In his absence, Lennon left a hand-written note, which led to a return visit in December of that year, when the two met on Parliament Hill.’
The ‘peace’ panel at Ottawa University, however, largely fell flat. Lennon was already tiring by the time he arrived and he was seriously irked as photographers took pictures of Yoko’s daughter, Kyoko. Inside the hall, he offered only a few ambivalent soundbites. ‘You’ve got to make people aware that there is an alternative, that war and violence aren’t inevitable,’ he declared wearily.
By now, the Lennons were seriously up against the Canadian immigration clock. Their temporary visa was due to expire on 5 June and the couple had no desire to outstay their welcome, despite the warmth directed at them by most Canadians during their stay. As far as Lennon was concerned, it was another peace box ticked. He said, ‘Canada was great. I felt we really made a conn
ection with the country’s youth and it was such a positive vibe.’
That view was echoed by Anthony Fawcett, the art world specialist, who had become their personal assistant. He said, ‘At times like this, I felt his peace campaign was working. The personal contacts and exchanges were worth so much more than any photo in a newspaper. More important, he was getting his message over to the kids who needed his advice and who really believed in him.’
There was still time for the Lennons to play the ordinary tourist before heading home. On 4 June, again with a film crew in tandem, they headed up to Niagara Falls to see the famous landmark in all its tumbling glory from the Canadian side. On the other side of the falls was America, its borders shut to the Beatle. It was, for now, as close as Lennon was going to get to the land of the free before heading back across the Atlantic.
In the can, at the very least, was a quirky new song that, unknown to him then, would become his breakout from the Beatle bubble and one of two recordings that would perhaps define his legacy as much as those songs he wrote with McCartney. Crucially, he felt vindicated about the choices he and Yoko had made to stand bravely alone in the face of all the cynics. Now the real test would be to see if he could carry forward the message that had become a mantra born in Montreal and prove it wasn’t just simplistic and gullible sloganeering. And that meant testing it closer to home by rebuilding bridges with the other Beatles and, specifically, McCartney.
The thought occupied his mind as they flew back to Britain via Frankfurt and his new multi-roomed home in Ascot on 5 June. Was there still time for them to also give peace a chance? Or, when it came to his musical career, did those same words have a hollow meaning? More and more, Lennon was trapped between the world of The Beatles and the one he wanted to live in with Yoko.
