John Lennon, Yoko Ono and the Year Canada Was Cool by Greg Marquis was about 1969 when the peace ambassador newlyweds visited Canada three times. The first visit was to Toronto and Montreal in late May and early June, when John and Yoko put on their second bed-in for peace from room 1742 at the Hôtel The Queen Elizabeth. It was from this room on June 1 that John, Yoko and an assorted cast of guests and celebrities recorded the anthem “Give Peace a Chance”. Marquis wrote about the song and the technical limitations of using the large bedroom suite as a recording studio. During this first visit John announced that he was working on putting on a Peace Festival at Mosport Park the following summer. It would include musical acts and discussions about peace. And oh yeah–it would all be free. I have been aware of this notorious nonstarter of an event for decades yet it took Marquis to explain, finally, how the whole shebang unravelled.
John and Yoko with a hastily assembled Plastic Ono Band performed at Toronto’s Varsity Stadium on September 13 as part of the Rock ‘N’ Roll Revival concert. Legendary acts from rock’s early years such as Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis had sets along with more modern acts like the Doors and John Lennon. This visit was a quick drop-in and John never had the chance to meet his idol Berry.
At the end of the year John and Yoko returned to Ontario, visiting with Ronnie Hawkins and his wife Wanda on their large property in Streetsville (now Mississauga). From there the couple continued their work on the Peace Festival, all the while ringing up an exorbitant phone bill left for Hawkins to deal with. After romping around in the snow (photos published of the famous couple on a snowmobile and Amphicat vehicle show them absolutely ecstatic, like children) they hopped on a train to meet with Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau in Ottawa on December 23.
In the new year, the Lennons lost interest in the Peace Festival. The plans didn’t suddenly collapse without their involvement, however. There was a team assigned to organize it. Yet John’s idealism can only take them so far. John wanted to offer free food and admission, yet the organizers couldn’t find anybody willing to donate enough food to feed thousands. And concert venues require insurance, security, sanitation and clean-up, not to mention the licencing to hold an event such as that in the first place. And did the planning committee expect the performers to pay their own expenses? John and Yoko soon had other things to worry about back home, such as the dissolution of the Beatles and the attendant lawsuits. Yoko was involved in a custody battle with her ex-husband over their daughter Kyoko. Thus each party had more pressing personal matters to deal with and soon gave the Peace Festival no heed or input. The organizers were left with the skeleton of a Peace Festival without the royal couple even in attendance. How could they dream of pulling it off now?
The second part of the book’s title is about Canada and its “coolness”. Marquis spent half the book talking about John and Yoko’s time in the country and the other half about Canada coming of age after Expo 67. The Toronto Peace Festival debacle saw no input from the Lennons so the latter part of the book did not include the couple at all. Marquis qualified Canada’s international reputation for cool by its openness in welcoming draft dodgers and war resisters. The new Prime Minister was a rock star with maniacal young followers. Canada also had more liberal drug laws, or the police were at least willing to look the other way. John and Yoko were able to enter the country, after all, when the US denied John entry for a past drug conviction in the UK. Nevertheless I felt the book, as short as it was, was bogged down by too much Canadian history, some of which seemed too far off-topic to be relevant to the story.
Marquis included an overabundance of endnotes. Amidst the book’s 219 pages, there were 757 of them. Almost all of them referred to newspaper and magazine articles, interview transcripts and visual media so there was no need to refer to any of them while reading. I referenced the endnotes line by line, but only after finishing each chapter.