Remembering the Radical John Lennon, by Gary Fraser

Forty years ago in March, Beatle John Lennon staged what he called a ‘Bed In’; a seven day protest in bed protesting against the Vietnam War. Gary Fraser takes us back to 1969 and examines the ‘Bed In’ and argues that Lennon was a true political radical.

‘It’s a bed in folks’, proclaimed 28 year old John Lennon as he welcomed the world’s press to the Presidential Suite of the Amsterdam Hilton in March 1969. Sitting next to him and with a smile on her face was his new wife, Yoko Ono. John and Yoko had married earlier in the week and the newly weds explained to the assembled media that the ‘Bed In’ was to be their honeymoon. The plan was to spend seven days in bed promoting peace and speaking out against the war in Vietnam. The two protagonists had a simple case to make; if everyone stayed in bed there would no more war!

Lennon’s ‘Bed In’ for peace remains one of the most instantly recognisable anti-war protests in history. Moreover, it marked the moment when he stopped being Beatle John and became John Lennon the political radical.

Looking back at the pictures of the ‘Bed In’ it is hard to believe that John was only twenty eight years old. But then again this was no ordinary twenty eight year old. Here was a young man, not yet thirty, who had been at the forefront of the cultural revolution in the sixties. By 1969, Lennon had achieved fame throughout the world, and the Beatles, the band who he was still a member of had revolutionised pop music, and with it a whole lot more.

But Lennon, always the Beatle with an edge, had by the late sixties grown weary of fame and the adulation of screaming fans. He was searching for a deeper meaning to life than the shallow excesses of fame and wealth.

A key factor in his political development was the influence of Yoko Ono. Perhaps more than anyone else it was Yoko who made John think about the relationship between art and social issues. Moreover, it was Yoko, as a performing conceptual artist in her own right (personally, I always thought she was rather annoying!) that was instrumental in organising the ‘Bed In’ for peace.

In the year of Lennon’s protest the Vietnam War was at its height. A whole generation had spoken out against the lunacy of the war. In the US student protests had divided the country. There appeared to stand side by side two America’s; the America of Uncle Sam, Apple Pie and Crew Cuts and the America of the war protestors and what was soon to be called the ‘counter-culture’.

‘Back in those days’ said singer songwriter Joan Baez, in a recent interview ‘you had to take sides. You were either with the protestors or against them’.

Lennon knew that he had to say something. In the synthetic world that is pop culture vacuous statements are readily made - for example ‘the Beatles changed the world’. In actual fact it was the times which changed the Beatles. Only two months before the ‘Bed In’ Richard Nixon had been sworn in as American president. Dissident journalists were revealing the true nature of the Vietnam War. News was just beginning to emerge of the atrocity at My Lai, where up to 500 Vietnamese villagers had been massacred by American GI’s. Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy had been murdered the previous year.

The political context which surrounded the ‘Bed In’ was volatile. And so it was that more than fifty journalists from the world’s press assembled around the bedside of the celebrity couple. The ever prurient media expected to find a sex show. After all it was only the year before that John and Yoko had appeared naked on the front cover of the album Two Virgins and proudly showed off their private parts.

But to everyone’s surprise the press discovered that Lennon only wanted to talk about peace. ‘We are selling peace like soap’ he explained to a bewildered press corps. ‘It is salesmanship that will put the message across’ he went on. ‘Whether you are protesting against the conditions you live in, the conditions you work in or the conditions of the whole world’.

Lennon, who was intensely media savvy, knew that in a media driven world where image and branding is everything he had to be creative. ‘The problem with the peace movement’ he argued is that ‘it is too serious’; ‘no one wants to read manifestos written by a lot of half witted intellectuals!’. He said something about him and Yoko being the Laurel and Hardy of the peace movement and that all of the serious people like Ghandi and Martin Luther King had ended up getting shot.

Two months after the Amsterdam ‘Bed In’ John and Yoko performed a similar event at Montreal. They originally wanted to go to New York but unsurprisingly the US government denied them a visa. In Montreal he recorded Give Peace A Chance which by the end of the year was being sung by half a million war protestors in Washington.

Following the ‘Bed Ins’, Lennon’s political activity became more focused and even class conscious. This signalled a move away from the political naivety of slogans like ‘all you need is love’ or ‘make love not war’. In 1970 he would write ‘Power to the People’ with lines like

That same year Lennon wrote the seminal ‘Working Class Hero’, a fusion of political and psychological emotions about working class life. This was perhaps the first time in a pop song that working class life had been so graphically illustrated:

In the early 1970s he remained politically active. He spoke out against British imperialism in Northern Ireland. He was associated with left wing figures like Tariq Ali and apparently contributed funds to left groups such as the Red Mole. He also supported financially and politically the upper Clyde ship builders when they occupied their workplace in the early seventies. When he and Yoko finally settled in New York, he continued to take up an array causes including vocal support for the Black Panther Party.

His later work was more about domestic life than politics. However, Lennon was, and remains in the truest sense of the word, a radical. He was someone who went against the grain. I also believe that he paid a price for being a political radical and it may have contributed to him being so tragically and senselessly gunned down in 1980.