’Queen Elisabeth Hotel’ i Montreal, Kanada. Foto: Bruno Vagnin.
Paret hade tre rum i sin svit – rumsnummer 1738, 1740 och 1742.
Yoko Ono, Kyoko med nallen och John Lennon i sängen demonstrerandes för fred på jorden.
Derek Taylor:
They had the bed-in for eight days. Hundreds of people came to the bedside. The questions were dealt with by John and Yoko in the full spirit of Apple, because they made themselves completely available to anybody on earth who wanted to come into the bedroom – provided they were not obviously carrying a blood-stained axe. People could come in and ask them questions. Maybe they came in thousands, it felt like it.
I was sort of controlling a big People Theatre. There is some footage of that time in which you see quite a packed room. Over a period of ten days you could process a great many people through a hotel suite, and they were doing broadcasts to the world on speaker-phones and hook-ups. It was before satellites. My job was to be around day and night while they were in bed. They were able to rest between visits. They were able to lie down and get new pyjamas etc. A lot of us have had dreams about running our whole life from bed, and for ten days that was what they did.
They were having also to report – I think every few days – to the consul in Montreal, because they were only there on sufferance, and were in fact deported from Canada at the end of the bed-in because their appeal against not being allowed in had failed. They’d done the whole bed-in during an appeal period. As soon as the ten days were up, they were told to clear off. In fact they were put on the first plane out to Frankfurt – which is not where we were going, we were going to London. So that, again, is something people forget! Doing a bed-in and being deported when it was over.
Under sin vistelse på hotellet gav de ett antal intervjuer, inviterade olika gäster att vara tillsammans med dem och den 1 juni spelade de in Give Peace A Chance. Paret tillsammans med Onos femåriga dotter Kyoko, fick besök av olika typer av gäster, inklusive förespråkaren, Dick Gregory för de svartas medborgarrätt i Amerika, Quebec-separatisten Jacques Larue-Langlois, Timothy Leary, Toronto-rabbin Abraham Feinberg, sångerskan Petula Clark, medlemmar av den kanadensiska delen av Radha Krishna Temple samt den amerikanska serietecknaren Al Capp.
Klicka på länken nedan, så får du ta del av cirka 3 minuters intervju med John och Yoko i sviten på hotellet i Montreal.
https://youtu.be/LvwkRihlZto?si=9giZ3pkXHGsWqegL
Denna Bed In-demonstration fick omedelbart världsomspännande mediauppmärksamhet. John och Yoko pratade med upp till 150 journalister varje dag. I USA var det omkring 350 radiostationer som rapporterade om händelsen med parets budskap om fred och protester mot kriget i Vietnam.
