John and Yoko's Bed-In For Peace

John and Yoko's Bed-In For Peace Rebecca Brayton: In May 1969, John Lennon and Yoko Ono took a bed in a Montréal Hotel to promote the message of peace. Gerry Deiter was the only photojournalist to document the entire event. Hi, I’m Rebecca Brayton and welcome to WatchMojo.com and today we’re finally getting a look at the photos from this iconic moment in rock history. Joan Athey: The time we are left out and put down in a major way by the whole world, now all of us are standing at the threshold of a great new era. It’s not on our hands yet but we know we will make it happen. Let’s make the best of it and have fun. I think John would have been very please to. Rebecca Brayton: So first can you tell us about the book Give Peace a Chance. Joan Athey: The book was aiming to two things and one is to establish Gerry Deiter as one of the great 60’s photographers which she was and the second is to support Yoko’s work and to rekindle the concept of Give Peace a Chance. Rebecca Brayton: Would you be able to paint us a picture of what the bed-in was like. Joan Athey: The bed-in was an inspiration that John and Yoko had. They did a dry run of it in Amsterdam following their marriage and if you look at the pictures from Amsterdam it looks kind of stiff and they’re sort of sitting around like that. But by the time the next couple of months had past, they wanted to do it in the United States but weren’t allowed to because Lennon had a marijuana possession charge against him and the government at that time made sure that it was very, very difficult for them to get anywhere near the states so they went to the Bahamas for one night. It was so hot they said, “Forget it.” They then went from the Bahamas to Toronto stayed overnight there and then came to Montreal and check in very late on the evening of May the 26th and went into room 1742. Rebecca Brayton: And who attended the bed-in. Joan Athey: Well people like you. If you were back there 40 years ago, you would have been saying, “My God, I’ve got to be there. So there were young people, older people, people who snuck in, people who tried to muse the occasion to sell their own ideas to John and he would stop them right away. Rebecca Brayton: Now these photos were taken obviously an iconic event in history, why is it just now that were seeing them? Joan Athey: They never run in Life Magazine. Gerry was assign by Life. He was only supposed to go there for a couple of hours but once he got there he realize this was an astonishing experience. When he sent the negatives and slides to Life Magazine they were returned immediately, “Sorry, we’re not going to use them. There are more important things to talk about” and he had this big transformation from being essentially a high paying fashion photographer, dating the super models. His life was forever changed and he hid the photographs away in his boat for 35 years. Be it at a small exhibition in 2004 and 2005 he died but the amazing thing about these photographs is that if they had run back in 1969, those negatives would now be buried in the basement somewhere, purchased by some corporate entity in some huge amalgamation and they would be lost. Rebecca Brayton: What is the significance and what is different about Deiter’s photos than other photos we may have seen of the event? Joan Athey: First of all, he was there the entire time. It’s a photojournalistic document. Secondly he said about to show the love between them and I was very fortunate that Yoko saw the basic collection, the people who took it down to her from the Montreal Museum of Fine Art, I have to thank Natalie Bonduille for doing that. She reported back to me that Yoko become very misty eyed and said, “Oh, you can see the love in the pictures.” John and Yoko say, we were two artists with two big egos but we’re able to put that aside and we were able to use our love to do something big, something greater than the sum of our parts.