Monday will be the 55the first birthday bed-in by John Lennon and Yoko Ono, which took place from March 25 to 31, 1969 at the Hilton Hotel in Amsterdam. The couple, who had just gotten married five days earlier, had decided to make their honeymoon a crusade for peace, The Ballad of John and Yoko.
Drove from Paris to Amsterdam Hilton
Talking in our beds for a week.
The news people said,
Say what you’re doing in bed,
I said we’re only trying to get us some peace…
At the time, nothing was bigger than the Beatles. The Beatles are Taylor Swift times four times four million. They had not only composed great songs, filled huge stadiums for the first time in the history of rock, and sailed from success to success, they had influenced the youth of the whole world. She was growing her hair like them. She wore flowered shirts like them. She experimented with highs like them. But above all, she believed that all she needed was love, like them. The Beatles changed the world, from the length of hair to the depth of brains.
They were the biggest influencers in popular culture. So much so that they still are. Today, the term influencer has a bad press. It is likened to the superficial side of fame. We can influence from all sides. Material side, spiritual side.
John and Yoko knew well that their marriage was going to be a media circus. They decided to be the masters of the track. They sent an invitation to reporters: “Come join John and Yoko on their honeymoon: a bed-in at the Amsterdam Hotel. »
Several media outlets believed that they would film John and Yoko having sex. Instead, they filmed them making peace. And how do we make peace? By talking about it peacefully. Not with a raised fist, but with an outstretched heart.
Their staging allowed them to have the attention of the media for a week, to hear them say and repeat: “Let’s stop the war, let’s make peace. »
If they had held a traditional press conference to convey their message, the media would have paid attention for an hour or two. At the time, there were no social networks, if you wanted to reach the public. If we wanted to feed it with our stories, our stories, everything went through the media. It was therefore necessary to imagine a story in which newspapers, radios, televisions were going to embark. Lennon was good at imagining. Ono, too. In this concept, she was the one who had a great influence on the Liverpool legend.
A man, a woman in bed is attractive. Newsrooms couldn’t resist.
THE bed-in was the longest press conference ever held by artists. For a week, eight hours a day, the press could ask the couple, in the wedding bed, all the questions they wanted. John and Yoko always responded by mentioning peace. That was their goal: that peace be with us, as publicized as the war. It worked.
So much so that John and Yoko did it again, two months later, in Montreal, the United States refusing Lennon to enter their country because of a conviction for possession of cannabis. In reality, what the FBI really accused the bespectacled Beatle of was not smoking jar, it was to smoke the peace pipe. An anti-war activist is disturbing.
If certain commentators have never taken the bed-in seriously and saw it only as the personal trip of two egos in pajamas, the authorities have never minimized the influence that John Lennon had on people’s consciences. His way of demonstrating may have been completely peaceful, but it was dangerous. It encouraged people to prefer peace to the State, which became less united.
At the end of the day, what is the bed-in Did he serve? Neither more nor less to give space to the word “peace”. The Americans withdrew from the Vietnam War four years later. Faced with popular pressure, the political cost of this conflict became too heavy. The political cost is always heavier than the human cost, than the weight of lives lost.
All the voices that helped demand peace helped achieve it. Those of John and Yoko are among them.
The refrain of the Ballad of John and Yoko is the next :
Christ! You know it ain’t easy,
You know how hard it can be.
The way things are going,
They’re gonna crucify me.
Lennon got killed. Not for his beliefs, like so many others. Because of an insane person who admired him so much that he wanted his name to be forever linked to that of his idol. We certainly won’t name it here.
The singer-songwriter of Give Peace a Chance died as one dies in war, by gunfire. Shot dead in the street. In full life.
His influence survives him.
When horror strikes, an attack occurs, a conflict breaks out, it’s with his song Conceived that we try to console ourselves, that we try to rediscover a particle of humanity.
The ballad of John and Yoko is the story of two influencers who staged their lives to make us want to be better.
Hoping that these influencers of yesterday influence the influencers of tomorrow.