John Yoko

Some Time in New York City… This album was not kicked off with a good start. After John and Yoko moved to New York, they started to get involved in anti-war protests, and protests to get John Sinclair out of prison. All of these were followed with Richard Nixon's attempts to deport John Lennon, which would last for around 5 years afterwards…

As the years pass since John Lennon and Yoko Ono staged their 1969, weeklong "Bed-In for Peace" at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal, the event’s reputation has taken on an increasingly clownish aspect in memoirs and biographies written about life with the Beatles. But John & Yoko: Give Peace a Song, a documentary drawing from hundreds of hours of film footage shot in the celebrity couple’s small bedroom, proves the time was well spent in exhaustive, public exchanges between Lennon and some of the most influential people of the day. Talking with and sometimes debating the likes of Timothy Leary, Tommy Smothers (fresh from the controversial cancellation of his outspoken comedy show on CBS), Dick Gregory, and assorted revolutionaries, Lennon stayed on-message about the practicality of non-violent solutions to the era’s most serious problems. It might be easy today for some of their then-contemporaries to look back and dismiss Lennon and Ono as self-aggrandizing and politically naïve publicity hounds. But the depth, rigor, and consistency of Lennon’s thinking about peace, both as a personal choice and collective tool for social change, was quite striking as evidenced in this movie. Everything leads to the momentous, chaotic, and fun recording of "Give Peace a Chance," which–as the film demonstrates—instantly became an anti-war anthem for millions. Special features include a terrific, complete television interview with Lennon on the CBC.

–Tom Keogh