Amsterdam bed-ins

 

 
As the Vietnam War raged in 1969, John Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono held two week-long Bed-ins for Peace, one at the Hilton Hotel in Amsterdam and one at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal, each of which were intended to be nonviolent protests against wars, and experimental tests of new ways to promote peace. The idea is derived from a "sit-in", in which a group of protesters remains seated in front of or within an establishment until they are evicted, arrested, or their demands are met.

The public proceedings were filmed, and later turned into a documentary Bed Peace, which was made available for free on YouTube in August 2011 by Yoko Ono, as part of her website "Imagine Peace".

Amsterdam bed-ins

Knowing their March 20, 1969, marriage would be a huge press event, Lennon and Ono decided to use the publicity to promote world peace. They spent their honeymoon in the presidential suite (Room 702) at the Amsterdam Hilton Hotel for a week between March 25 and 31, inviting the world's press into their hotel room every day between 9 a.m. and 9 p.m. After their nonconformist artistic expressions (cf. Bari: 33), such as the nude cover of the Two Virgins album, the press were expecting them to be having sex, but instead the couple were just sitting in bed, wearing pajamas—in Lennon's words "like angels"—talking about peace with signs over their bed reading "Hair Peace" and "Bed Peace". After seven days, they flew to Vienna, Austria, where they held a Bagism press conference.

During April 1969, Lennon and Ono sent acorns to the heads of state in various countries around the world in hopes that they would plant them as a symbol of peace. Their marriage ("You can get married in Gibraltar near Spain"), the first bed-in ("Talking in our beds for a week"), the Vienna press conference ("Made a lightning trip to Vienna...The newspapers said..."), and the acorns ("Fifty acorns tied in a sack") were all mentioned in the song "The Ballad of John and Yoko".

Due to the couple's very public image, the Amsterdam bed-in was greeted by fans, and received a great deal of press coverage. Following the event, when asked if he thought the bed-in had been successful, Lennon became rather frustrated. He insisted that the failure of the press to take the couple seriously was part of what he and Ono wanted: "It's part of our policy not to be taken seriously. Our opposition, whoever they may be, in all manifest forms, don't know how to handle humour. And we are humorous."However, Ono also earned controversy in the Jewish community for claiming during the press conference that Jewish women could've changed Hitler by becoming his girlfriend and sleeping with him for 10 days. It was acknowledged that some Nazis, including Nazi "First Lady" Magda Goebbels, had at one point in their lives had Jewish lovers.