Even the Beatles have history with People’s Park

In May 1969, John Lennon and Yoko Ono made Berkeley history while lying in bed in Montreal.

It was a violent month in Berkeley, and nascent was at the heart of the conflict. In April, local activists established an unauthorized public park on a muddy, vacant lot near Telegraph Avenue. As the Berkeley Daily Planet reported in a 2004 retrospective, hundreds of volunteers showed up to build out the park and lay down turf. 

There was only one problem: UC Berkeley owned the lot. While students and activists set up their new park, university administrators drafted up plans to convert the area into a soccer field. The university ordered students and volunteers to evacuate the park, posting “No Trespassing” signs around its perimeter.

Violence broke out the next day. As the San Francisco Chronicle noted, after an incendiary rally on the Berkeley campus, thousands of students marched to the park, where they clashed with police. Students threw rocks; police threw tear gas canisters and fired at protestors with live buckshot. While watching the protest from a roof, a young man from San Jose named James Rector was killed by a police bullet. The day would be remembered as Bloody Thursday.

In the days that followed, protesters continued to clash with police. The city ordered a curfew, and then-governor Ronald Reagan called in the National Guard, whose helicopters sprayed tear gas over Berkeley’s campus. Although the city was officially under martial law, nightly skirmishes continued, and police arrested hundreds. 

Meanwhile, John Lennon and Yoko Ono were loafing around in bed. Sort of. Less than three years after the Beatles’ final official concert (which took place in San Francisco), the newly-wed couple were orchestrating their second “Bed-In For Peace,” a highly-publicized event that was part protest, part performance art and part honeymoon, as detailed 50 years later in Time Magazine. Ono and Lennon checked into a hotel suite in Montreal, where they laid in bed for a week. 

A cast of prominent Bay Area counter-cultural figures, including Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary, popped in to visit the horizontal spouses. Ono and Lennon spoke with visiting reporters about world peace while reclining in their pajamas. During spare hours, the couple wrote “Give Peace a Chance” and recorded the track in front of a flock of photographers.

As Ono explained in an interview with Penthouse, the bed-in was a means of advertising peace, the same way that companies use TV ads to sell consumer goods.

“Many other people who are rich are using their money for something they want,” she said. “They promote soap, use advertising propaganda, what have you. We intend to do the same.”

All the while, Lennon and Ono made phone calls, preaching nonviolence to radio stations around the country. One of these radio stations was KPFA, a listener-funded Berkeley radio station.

“I do think they were very much aware of Berkeley being a crucial converging point in the anti-war movement, which helps explain their interest in any protests coming from Berkeley,” Ana Leorne, a Beatles scholar and pop culture writer based in Paris, wrote in an email to SFGATE.

Tensions were high in Berkeley when Lennon and Ono called KPFA. The national guard still occupied the city, which remained under martial law, and police continued to rack up arrests.

As Lennon and Ono spoke with a KPFA broadcaster, their words were being recorded for broadcast. The footage of the conversation appeared in the film Bed Peace, which was stitched together from footage of the bed-ins.

“John and Yoko, what would you do right now?”  the interviewer asked the couple. “You have 20,000 people or so outside sitting there.”

Lennon began by expressing his skepticism about the protest effort.  

“It’s not worth getting killed for a park,” he said, almost shouting. “It’s just as greedy as the establishment, wanting that bit of grass. There’s plenty of room! The best thing you can do to them is walk out of that whole town. Just leave the place! Let them have it.”

Ono agreed. “Just keep moving, because the whole world is yours,” she said when she took the phone. 

But towards the end of the call, Lennon’s tone shifted from cautioning to encouraging. 

“You should keep up a constant, day-to-day solid advertising campaign, as they do to us…” he said. “They’re on all the time selling their war and selling their products. We must do the same…You can make it, man! We can make it. Together! We can get it together!”

“Keep pushing man, and we’re with you,” he added. “And if we could get near you, we’d be there.”

Lennon and Ono’s message was broadcast on radios around the city. The next day, 35,000 people marched peacefully from the Berkeley campus to People’s Park. A few days later, Reagan called off the National Guard. 

The radio broadcast alone did not precipitate the conflict’s peaceful conclusion. If it played any role, it was likely minor one. But at the tensest moment in Berkeley’s history, a man who called himself “more popular than Jesus” recognized the cultural importance of People’s Park. 

As he signed off, Lennon showed his sympathy for the protesters’ cause with a one-of-a-kind offer to the KPFA broadcaster.

“Call us any time,” he said. “The line’s open for your station only, all day and night.”

SFGATE culture editor Dan Gentile contributed reporting.