T he old Ontario farm John Lennon settled in is just less than an hour west of Toronto. One of the shorter ways of getting there took you, as it still can be done, some distance along Dundas Highway, a two-lane rural road going back at least several hundred years, but, more importantly for me, back to my grade one and grade two studies in a wood-framed schoolhouse that saw secondary service as a community hall.
Getting home from school—after the yellow school bus got me there—required a walk along the highway’s gravel sides. I loved it, even when the temperature tanked. Dawdling in all seasons, kicking rocks or ice clumps or throwing fall chestnuts at doors—at old Mr. Whaley’s door once, a crime I’ll never live down—I came to know stretches of the road and each unrepaired pothole.
So there I was, twenty-something years later, in 1969, on Dundas Highway again. Only this time, I was in my Jeep Cherokee, on assignment for the Toronto Telegram, which folded up in 1971, with its subscription list sold to the rival Toronto Daily Star.
The Tely was conservative and monarchist and desperate for readers. And out there, as if beamed down from Mars, was a Beatle, a real or semi-former real Beatle, tucked away in the cozy winter landscape, buzzing around on snowmobiles among the rolling hills separating century homes.
There was John Lennon.
I drove along through relatively benign weather, conflating scenes from Holiday Inn and Help!: roaring fires and lots of sparkle and silly romps in the snow with John instead of Bing Crosby. And colour. After A Hard Day’s Night, the Beatles were always in colour. Except, in my mind, John was always shown in grainy grey-and-white snaps from his Liverpool school days: the sarcastic, bitter teenager shipped from home to home, from Julia, his mom, to his aunt Mimi, furious at his father for leaving them all and blaming himself.
Beatlemania had coloured all of that in, like the colourization of an old movie. But on his own, John Lennon, stuck in the stark Canadian winter, seemed to have fallen back to earth in black and white.
The afternoon before, at the paper in Streetsville, an older editor showed me a heavily crayoned old black-and-white photo of Edwin Alonzo Boyd, the infamous but Hollywood-handsome gang leader of Canadian crime in the ’50s. Lennon had reminded him of Boyd, said the editor, who’d done some reporting on Boyd’s escapades. Both looked like hoods.
Boyd was rumoured to have holed up in an old farmhouse somewhere along the Dundas Highway. The rumour was false, because Boyd was slippery. He escaped the hanging that two of the other gang members could not; Boyd hadn’t killed anyone. He eventually changed his name, moving out west, where he died after a peaceful life.
Lennon was denied entry into the US in May 1969 due to a minor drug infraction in London, where he had copped a plea. The entourage headed to Toronto for an overnighter at the King Edward Hotel, where I first met them, and then to Montreal, starting May 26, for the famous/infamous bed-in for peace in room 1742 of the Queen Elizabeth Hotel.
In mid-September, the couple returned to Toronto, now as the Plastic Ono Band, for a hastily arranged appearance at Varsity Stadium, where they were blown off the stage by Little Richard. “I’ll show ’em what a headliner is,” Little Richard said backstage and went on to prove his point with the show.
Although staged about a month after Woodstock, the day-long Varsity Stadium concert—Chicago, Bo Diddley, and Junior Walker and the All Stars appeared too—nevertheless claimed its own measure of fame, foremost for being Lennon’s first public repudiation of the Beatles and for Ono’s performance in her signature bag.
I remember it for my disappointment in Gene Vincent, now puffy from booze. Lord. Vincent was more Elvis than Elvis at one time, whining “Be-Bop-a-Lula,” while stem-to-stern in tight black leather, shirt collar perpetually touching the back of his head. Talk about hoods. (“Be-Bop-a-Lula” brought Lennon and Paul McCartney together, when Ivan Vaughan, a friend to both Beatles, coaxed Paul to hear the Quarrymen, Lennon’s band. Paul arrived just as Lennon was singing “Be-Bop-A-Lula.” After Paul played guitar for a bit backstage, Lennon asked him on the spot to join the band; his—John’s—band, as he never let Paul forget.)
The truth is, the concert was a downer. Jim Morrison of the Doors was drunk, and not in an interesting way. Backstage, the Plastic Ono Band was surrounded by burly guys in expensive suits who would have looked in place outside an overpriced strip club. Three months later, Lennon’s arrival back in the city, even with the promise of a festival to dwarf all rock festivals—and for peace, a fine, righteous excuse for a festival—met with a measure of skepticism.
The Vietnam War banged away louder across Canadian newscasts. A mid–May 1969 student protest at Berkeley, California, had witnessed California highway patrolmen, ordered in by Governor Ronald Reagan, firing birdshots from shotguns and blinding one man in the process. I already had a good many draft-dodging friends.
Even the Cold War hadn’t vanished entirely, although it seemed suspiciously overwrought in what little memory of it I had. I slowed down as I drove by Janet F.’s old house, just south of Dundas Highway, and remembered the tour she gave us years ago down the cellar into the family bomb shelter. I remember seeing some stacked cans of pork and beans. Janet was super brainy, and her family read a lot. They knew something, we supposed. But pork and beans?
World saving was a fine idea, but not the kind of idea that would have come naturally to John Lennon: rock’s great snarky, questioning, ironic presence. Lennon-for-peace was a big deal for Rolling Stone in 1969, but not for most daily newspapers still run by hard-nosed, old-school editors sitting grumpily around the editorial desk. These guys longed for Frank Sinatra’s return the way the French had longed for de Gaulle’s. Lennon’s peace plan was, to them, more ’60s bullshit, however transcendental. And as the days went by, news out of the festival seemed increasingly nonsensical.
“What’s this about flying saucers?” said Doug Creighton, the city editor at the Tely at the time. “Are you telling me they have flying saucers?”
Me: “Yes.” (Keeping up with the story, I’d interviewed a lawyer who’d signed on to the festival—Lennon was paying the bills, so money seemed to be no hassle—who was making himself at home in a just-rented office with leased chrome-and-beige leatherette furniture and explained that it was reasonable to think that if anything might attract attention from outer space, it would be this festival, so they were preparing plans for landing facilities for interstellar craft as we spoke.)
Creighton had red hair and a ruddy face that went redder whenever he was pissed, which was much of his time at the office. He looked at me in silence but as if his head, now a brilliant, radiant crimson, was about to explode.
Me (aiming to clarify): “No. I mean, they don’t actually have them. But they’ve talked about them coming. Not John or Yoko, exactly, but others.” I start rifling through the notes. “There really are plans to provide landing-pad thingies or whatever you provide for flying saucers.”
R onnie Hawkins’s farmhouse, where John and Yoko were encamped, was up a lengthy driveway on a gradual hill from the main back road. Dirt-brown ruts were left behind by the cars heading up or down the driveway. Ronnie was an entrepreneurial show-business wizard combining a genius for survival with lots of “good ol’ boy” charm and hokum. He also knew something of rural winters, having arrived in Canada from Arkansas in the ’50s. The stretch of farm property his aunt owned outside of Fayetteville, Arkansas—I visited with him once for his quasi-autobiography, which we co-authored—could have been found next door, so alike was the countryside.
Canadian painters love those looming winter days, the foreboding ones arriving just before we’re locked into ice for a month or two. Artists have taught us how to look at their unsettled nature, near-frozen streams half-covered with blueing ice, and the yellowish, early-morning skies that herald afternoon storms. And the sudden nightfall.
All this suited Lennon, who’d been out snowmobiling and was in scuzzy Bolshevik mode post Beatles at the time: gaunt eyed, skinny as a rake, dressed as if he were about to take out the trash. This was part honeymoon, he told me.
Hawkins loved the indirect attention but kept his bullshit detector turned on. I’d heard that, for days now, the Lennon-Onos had been running up prodigious phone bills, which had Hawkins grousing. He’d been left holding the tab before—many, many tabs and many times. Hawkins knew he’d bought into too many high-priced hopes of advancement offered by his highly placed buddies.
But this was a whole different scale of things. Hawkins understood what a worldwide, career-boosting opportunity had just landed in his backyard. He’d held on for dear life on enough weird rides in his life and figured he’d grab hold of this one too and see where it’d take him or leave him.
But Ronnie was discreet. He’s off elsewhere as John Lennon and I talk, facing one another seated on the old couch. Yoko Ono is across the room with Rabbi Abraham Feinberg, their heads only inches apart, everything between them a whisper. The “Flaming Red Rabbi,” Feinberg’s nickname, which he wore like a service badge since he’d visited Hanoi, was under the scrutiny of what was then called the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Security Service, which already had a fat dossier on him and a file on Lennon. (And Elvis Presley, for that matter.)
“I don’t think we’re being naive,” I am able to hear her say. “We want to change the world. Is that naive?”
John is now off the phone from talking to another media outlet.
“I was pretty cynical as a Beatle. I was a full-time cynic, you know,” he tells me. “Now there’s some direction to things. Peace is the just thing in the future thousands of years—and not just for the next generation. Too many people have got hooked on material things. That’s why we got dropouts and hippies. I mean, what good is it if I can watch twenty TVs with twenty suits and have twenty cars? I mean, these are what other people consider success.
“Yes, the festival will be expensive,” Lennon goes, now thinking about money. “It’s cheaper than a life, though. It’s going to cost. It’s cheaper than the alternative, no peace.”
Everywhere you look, there’s a hunkered-down atmosphere to the house. A lot of watchful bodyguard-type guys were hovering around, silhouettes against the snow like a scene from The Godfather Part II outside Michael Corleone’s house. Standing. Waiting. Guarding. Already, there’s been a little rough stuff. Frank Lennon, a Toronto Star photographer not related to John, got a buzz-off, take-a-hike pushing around from Heavy Andrews, a downtown tough guy who had an office in the Le Coq d’Or, the Yonge Street tavern where Rompin’ Ronnie and the Hawks—later the Band—were practically the house band. (Yes, you always used the bilingual double definite article when talking about the Le Coq d’Or.) Heavy obviously hadn’t received the message that this country sojourn was all about media.
Waking up Americans about peace was a goal, says Lennon, meaning setting up shop not that far from the American border. People in Buffalo, New York, will hear about this. “That’s not all we’re here for, though. We’re trying to get up this peace festival we’ve been talking about. We’re taking our time about it, starting with the ‘War Is Over’ posters. It’s all about selling it. We’d like to have our peace campaign pop up on the TV like all the other ads. We want advertising to take over.
“I don’t want to be a leader in this. Yoko doesn’t either. We want everyone else to see us and get in the game. I know there are a lot of people who think we’re naive. They may be right. So let them take over.”
The living room we’re in is arranged in old Ontario country fashion—Wanda Hawkins, Ronnie’s wife, is a genius at just about everything—where living rooms are rarely used other than for weddings or funerals and where people face each other but always at a certain distance. I try to listen in on Ono and Feinberg across the room. From the beatific look on the rabbi’s handsome face as he leans closer and closer to Yoko, he would seem to have been imagining her as a Chagall, imagining an angel floating in the air above another old man’s fine, handsome head.
John was yapping away for another caller. And as I sat back watching the flow of people—promoters, gofers, flacks and hacks, and security—in and out, I noticed a strange thing. No one hesitated even for a second to approach John. Everyone increasingly kept some distance from Ono and the rabbi. It was hard for any of them to forget her and her bag on stage at Varsity Stadium. You didn’t need to know anything about Fluxus, the New York art collective where her bagism was born. The grandchild of the 1930s Dada movement, Fluxus, Ono was the mother of the movement in her studio at 112 Chambers Street and inherited little of Dada’s cosmic cheekiness. That bag had serious power.
An entire shift in dynamics could be felt, not just in the power of the personalities in the room but why they were in the room, and the shift was to Yoko and away from John. Each time she minimized her importance—people say I’m naive—the more power she seemed to accrue to herself. She told me that from her first meeting with John, in November 1966, at the Indica Gallery in London, she knew “he was so important for so many people and that wasn’t going to stop.” Nevertheless, this was her “War Is Over Campaign,” which John only took on.
Here was a woman famous for her nudity—with a plush figure of the kind favoured by men’s magazines—whose clothes seemed designed to obviate a sexual gaze. Floppy hats, bulky clothes, loose sweaters—she managed to be distinctly indistinct—like the peace festival itself, I was beginning to realize. From the Montreal bed-in on, this has been their “honeymoon,” as John called it. The accumulation of press photos and TV news clips show soft, sweet images of the adorable couple in diaphanous white with a diffuse, pale winter light flooding their hotel room.
Lennon looks groom-like: wraith-like and skinny and worried. Ono’s sexuality—the thickness of her hair, her sensual face—radiates in every instance. I was told by a producer of The Way It Is, a CBC current affairs television program that covered the Montreal bed-in, that he was forever tucking a bit of her gown over some suddenly exposed flesh.
“On or about December 1910, human character changed,” Virginia Woolf wrote famously (from the perspective of 1924). I remember this (checking it later) watching the John–Yoko dynamic, the Yoko–John dynamic. Something was beginning to change here, other than something between a married couple. For John, the festival was an extension of his practice and ego. Yoko saw it as part of her ego and practice. But more than the power shift between them, it felt as if the reasons for rock had changed. Lennon was putting rock to one use, trying to make it work as a sales job. Ono, in her soft, singsong voice, was putting it to another: to turn personality into a performance and vice versa. And more and more, rock seemed to be following her model, not his. The performance of personality would be rock’s way through the ’70s.
A nother phone call comes and goes, and John wants to make one of his own, asking me for the number of Capitol Records, his label’s—Apple Records—distributor in Canada. “This is not that weird a thing, not really,” he assured me. “Think of it as a new thing to sell, a new product, so you have to have a new way of selling it. I’ve been selling all my life. I have to know how the record’s doing,” he says. “Cold Turkey.” “I have to worry about records and things, still. For how else will I be able to make me money? Eh? How else?”
John was checking out record sales with Capitol Records. I punch buttons. I imagine that the record company guy I ask for will hang up on me because he’ll say, “This is a joke, right? John Lennon doesn’t do stuff like that, check record sales.” And that’s exactly how the call goes. Before John can come on the line, it goes click—dead. We have to call someone else I know at Capitol who does talk to John Lennon. “Cold Turkey” is selling.
Less than an hour later, I’m back on the highway, heading to the office. The story doesn’t make it to the front page, and the Tely itself doesn’t exist past 1971. The festival itself died when John and Yoko lost interest. John worried that Allen Klein would try to turn it into a Beatles reunion.
Because, with startling suddenness, the Beatles had become past tense.
Hours after John and Yoko decamped from Ronnie Hawkins’s place, they had a short, prearranged meeting with Marshall McLuhan, the communications seer. McLuhan began talking and thinking big about ideas and about television in the abstract and patterns making TV popular. John didn’t have to think in the abstract. The Beatles were their own abstract. John was in the flesh the very sort of idea McLuhan was pulling out of thin air.
“As soon as you find the pattern, you break it,” John Lennon told McLuhan. “Otherwise, it gets boring. The Beatles pattern is one that has to be scrapped. If it remains the same, it’s a monument, a museum, and one thing this age is about is no museums. The Beatles turned into a museum, so they have to be scrapped or deformed or changed.”
Adapted from One Foot on the Platform: A Rock ’n’ Roll Journey by Peter Goddard, 2025, published by House of Anansi. Reprinted with permission from the publisher.
