Lennons on ‘Mike Douglas’ 1972: Revolution on Daytime TV

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The film Daytime Revolution, released theatrically on October 9, 2024, is the latest but not the first time John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s wild week as co-hosts of The Mike Douglas Show in February 1972 has been documented.

On May 26, 1989, Rhino Home Video released a five-volume box set that included a 73-minute VHS video for each show aired on the top-rated syndicated afternoon variety TV series from Monday, February 14 through Friday, February 18 — five days that indeed changed the course of history.

An accompanying 48-page hardbound book written by Stephen K. Peeples (original writer/producer of The Lost Lennon Tapes radio series at Westwood One from 1998-1990) recapped the week’s events on the air as well as behind the scenes, putting the whole week into perspective.

Most of the book is published online here for the first time.

Illustrated with photos by Douglas Show staff shooter Michael Leshnov, which had never been published until 1998, Peeples’ notes detailed why and how the Lennons’ appearances came to be, and what happened during the week.

The notes also explained how these appearances triggered the FBI’s four-year (and unsuccessful) campaign to deport John using the U.S. Immigration & Naturalization Service and altered the arc of his career as a musician and anti-war activist.

Liner Notes Preview: Lennons on Douglas: A Huge ‘Get’

At the time, the colorful ex-Beatle singer/songwriter/musician and his multimedia artiste wife were the world’s most popular, outspoken liberal-left-hippie-musician rock ‘n’ roll counterculture couple.

Douglas, an ex-big band singer and host of his Emmy-winning daily talk/variety show was considered the “King of Daytime TV.” He personified Middle America’s so-called “Silent Majority” and the right-leaning conservative Establishment, and pulled 40 million viewers each week.

Already world-(in)famous for their pro-peace activism protesting America’s war in Vietnam, Lennon and Ono relocated to New York City at the end of summer 1971. They soon connected with like-minded counterculture figures there, among them Yippies and former Chicago 7/8 defendants Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, and a backup band of local musicians, Elephant’s Memory.

By December, when the Philadelphia-based Douglas talent bookers first made contact with the Lennons, John and Yoko were working on their Sometime In New York City double LP. They were shooting for a summer ’72 release, just as U.S. President Richard Nixon’s bid for re-election would enter the home stretch.

The Douglas crew, meanwhile, was looking for ways to attract more hip, young people to Mike’s generally middle- and upper-demo audience. Booking the Lennons was a huge “get.”

But John and Yoko agreed to appear for a more expansive purpose than hyping a record. Conspiring with Rubin, they saw it as an opportunity to present their new agenda of counterculture social and political activism and rock ‘n’ roll to the relatively straight conservative Americans who watched the Douglas Show every day.

‘Lennons on Douglas’ Guests & Music

Chosen by both Lennon and Douglas camps, the lineup for the week was a stunningly diverse assortment of establishment and counterculture figures – some of whom probably preferred root canal surgery without anesthesia to such mandatory social interaction.

Guests included rock ‘n’ roll pioneer and Lennon hero Chuck Berry, fast-rising reinvented hip comedian George Carlin, consumer activist Ralph Nader, gospel-soul rockers The Chambers Brothers, straight comedian Louie Nye, filmmaker Barbara Loden, Rubin, Black Panthers Party Chairman Bobby Seale, U.S. Surgeon General Jesse Steinfeld, Asian activist/folk-singing duo Yellow Pearl, Peace Corps Director Joe Blatchford, singer/actress Vivian Reed, and the Ace Trucking Company comedy troupe, plus biofeedback experts, a macrobiotic cook, a women’s rights attorney, student activists, and more.

Along with cohosting and being interviewed by Mike, the Lennons performed songs from John’s October 1971 Imagine LP (title track), and others soon to appear on Sometime In New York City (“It’s So Hard,” “Sisters Oh Sisters,” “Luck Of The Irish”). Yoko also sang a Japanese folk song.

The week’s musical highlight was on Day 3 (Wednesday) when John met and jammed with his rock ‘n’ roll idol Chuck Berry for the first and only time (“Memphis” and “Johnny B. Goode,” backed by Elephant’s Memory and Yoko). Ragged and under-rehearsed, granted, but still a monumental slab of rock history.

John and Yoko also presented music clips from their Imagine film (“Oh My Love,” “Crippled Inside,” “How”) and got Mike and the studio and viewing audience to participate in performance art stunts like “Mend Piece,” “Love Calls,” and “Unfinished Painting” (many inspired by Yoko’s book Grapefruit).

Along with highlights of each of the five shows, the accompanying book featured Peeples’ exclusive 1998 Q&A with Mike Douglas; excerpts from a rare February ’72 press conference with John, Yoko, and Rubin talking about their Douglas experience; and more quotes from exclusive interviews with Yippie Abbie Hoffman, Rubin, Seale, Leshnov, and Douglas Show music director Joe Harnell.

The book also reveals some of the backstage mayhem that the public never saw, including surreptitious pot-smoking by the co-hosts, a stoned chimpanzee guest going berserk in the audience, a testy last-minute confrontation with Seale before his appearance, and more.

Lennon collectors had suffered through watching poor-quality bootleg video copies for years as these shows attained near-mythical status. Finally, in 1997, portions of the episodes were broadcast by VH1. Bootlegs of the five-VHS box eventually appeared on DVD and Blu-Ray as well.

Minus this introduction, and the book, which follows.

Lennon’s a ‘Security Matter, New Left’

For Douglas, booking the Lennons worked; ratings spiked skyward, and it was one of the highest-rated weeks of the series’ two decades on the air.

The Lennons also succeeded in getting their message across in a way that didn’t threaten the straights.

Well, most straights.

The FBI agents who were also watching Douglas that week filed a report labeling John a “security matter, new left” and the Lennons’ friend and “political advisor” Jerry Rubin (a guest on Day 2) “an extremist.”

These Douglas shows in fact not only contributed to the U.S. Government’s just-beginning campaign to deport John, but also precipitated the beginning of the end of his political outspokenness — precisely the result desired by the Nixon Administration bureaucrats out to nail him.

Today, thanks to the Freedom of Information Act and the deeply researched books by University of California, Irvine history professor Dr. Jon Wiener, Come Together: John Lennon In His Time (1984) and Gimme Some Truth: The John Lennon FBI Files (2000), and who also graciously contributed quotes from his 1982 interview with Bobby Seale to this book, we know much about this sordid political scandal.

But back in early ’72, few had a clue.

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Original Liner Notes from 1998 ‘Lennons on Douglas’ VHS Box Set

PQ: “Apathy isn’t it. I know we can do something. Okay, so Flower Power didn’t work — so what? We start again!” — John Lennon at the Free John Sinclair concert, Ann Arbor, December 10, 1971

PQ: “I don’t even remember doing ‘The Mike Douglas Show’ that week. Too many good drugs back then! But it sure was fun to see it again on VH1!” — George Carlin, January 1998

Intro: Welcome to the Brink

Viewed solely as entertainment, the five editions of The Mike Douglas Show John Lennon and Yoko Ono cohosted with Douglas — first telecast the week beginning Monday, February 14, 1972 — are great fun to watch all these years later, whether you and/or your mind were there the first time they aired or saw them more recently on VH1.

The shows become all the more fascinating when one peers behind that little screen to see what really happened backstage on America’s favorite afternoon talk and variety program, and what wound up on the editing room floor.

Then, when you pull back for a wide-screen view of what was going on in the real world outside that TV studio, and the adverse impact that Lennon’s appearances on these shows had on him — socially, politically, and personally — the panorama gets downright spine-tingling.

To paraphrase the protesters’ mantra still echoing from the streets of Chicago during the riots at the Democratic National Convention three and a half years earlier, the whole world was watching The Mike Douglas Show that week in early ’72.

Including agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

These government gumshoes were not glued to the tube looking for cheap thrills on taxpayers’ time. The FBI was taking notes as part of their surveillance to gather evidence against Lennon. They feared he’d be able to mobilize young voters in the November ’72 elections to deny then-President Richard M. Nixon’s bid for a second term.

Sound far-fetched? Maybe not today, knowing what we’ve learned about dirty tricks and other abuses of official power in Washington since the Watergate scandal blew wide open in 1973, and Nixon was forced to resign in disgrace the following year.

But in early ’72, only the most paranoid among America’s raving left-wing lunatic fringe would believe that politicians and bureaucrats in the U.S. Senate, the Justice Department, the FBI, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and even The White House would be so afraid of a loudmouthed anti-war pop star that they’d launch a campaign to shut him up by throwing him out of the country.

Most of the sordid, scintillating, scandalous whys and wherefores have all been well-documented elsewhere, especially in Come Together: John Lennon In His Time, the acclaimed book penned by University of California at Irvine History Professor Jon Wiener in 1984, after he sued the U.S. Government under the Freedom of Information Act for the FBI’s files on Lennon.

The Ballad Of John And Yoko by the Editors of Rolling Stone, a 1982 collection of all the features on the couple published in the magazine from 1968-1980, is also a revealing read for more details on the Government’s long, grueling, but ultimately unsuccessful effort to deport Lennon.

But what was it about Lennon that inspired such fear in such high places in winter ’71-’72?

Well, in a nutshell, his reputation certainly preceded him.

Lennon (born in Liverpool October 9, 1940, to upper-working class parents Freddie and Julia Lennon) and Yoko Ono (born in Tokyo February 18, 1933, to upper-middle-class parents Eisuki Ono and his wife Isoko) were the world’s most out-front, outspoken liberal-left-hippie counterculture figures in the late ’60s-early ’70s.

Trying to turn their international media-celeb status into something positive and productive, the ex-Beatle songwriter/musician and his avant-garde artiste wife (they married on the British-governed island of Gibraltar on March 20, 1969) had become nearly as famous for advocating things like world peace, an end to the war in Vietnam, and racial and gender equality as they were for their creative pursuits.

After relocating from London to New York City in early September ’71, John and Yoko opened a new phase in their campaign for peace through peaceful social and political action — or so they hoped — by connecting with NYC-based new left activists like Youth International Party (Yippies) cofounders and former Chicago 7/8 defendants Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, and Black Panther Party Chairman Bobby Seale.

In the rare February ’72 Q&A later in this booklet (posted here), the Lennons and Rubin (whom John and Yoko were calling their “political advisor” at the time) amplified their purpose in accepting the Douglas offer, that it gave them a whole week to present their new alliance to establishment Middle America, to get their messages across in a non-threatening way.

But at the time they didn’t know those FBI agents would be tuned in a few days later when the shows started airing, taking notes, that the push to kick Lennon out was already getting underway.

Only a handful of officials from President Richard Nixon’s administration and government operatives knew the real scoop behind the snoop that would soon upend Lennon’s bid to help promote Nixon’s defeat in the November 1972 election.

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‘Mike Douglas Show’: Crossroads of Middle America

As Mike Douglas confirms in our exclusive interview (to be posted here), every national and local talk and variety program on U.S. television wanted to book John Lennon and Yoko Ono that fall and winter 1971-72.

Producers knew these two characters were ratings magnets, whether they agreed with the couple’s politics and lifestyle or not. And now that the Lennons lived in New York, they were a lot more accessible.

John and Yoko used this magnetism to their best advantage in getting their message over the airwaves. Going for maximum exposure, they guested on The Dick Cavett Show in September and The David Frost Show in January, both top-rated long-form interview programs at the time.

So what if Mike Douglas didn’t get them first? Big deal. He got them for an entire week.

The first daytime talk show to win an Emmy award (in 1967, for Outstanding Daytime Performance), The Mike Douglas Show was indeed the hottest talk/variety show on television during the 1960s and ’70s.

Ruling the airwaves weekday afternoons/early evenings, the 90-minute program was the crossroads of Middle America, with guests from entertainment, pop culture, politics, current affairs, and all walks of life.

Doing his best to stay centered amid such far-flung subjects and visitors to the set was the show’s producer, host, and namesake — the reigning “King of Daytime TV.”

Born Michael Dowd on August 11, 1925, in Chicago, Mike Douglas served in the Navy during World War II, and in 1945 turned down a Hollywood film contract to join Kay Kayser’s big band as the venerable “sweet” dance band’s featured male lead singer.

During the next five years, Douglas krooned with the Kayser orchestra on both the radio and TV incarnations of the popular Kay Kayser’s Kollege of Musical Knowledge series.

And, fronting the spinoff vocal group Michael Douglas & The Campus Kids, he was featured on half a dozen of Kayser’s biggest hits, among them “Ole Buttermilk Sky” (#1 for two weeks in fall ’46; from the movie Canyon Passage) and “The Old Lamplighter” (#3 in early ’47).

Mike went solo in 1950 when Kayser quit showbiz; one of Mike’s first solo gigs was providing the singing voice of the Prince Charming character for Disney’s animated feature Cinderella.

Douglas hosted a local Chicago show called Hi Ladies from 1953-55. He was also a regular on network programs originating in Chicago, including The Music Show (in the 1953-54 season) and Club 60 (daytimes in 1957-58).

In 1961, Mike moved to Cleveland and launched his own local talk show. After a couple of years, his production company landed a syndication deal with Group W/Westinghouse and went national. In 1965, The Mike Douglas Show moved its base of operations to Philadelphia, where it enjoyed its peak years (the Douglas Show remained on the air until 1982).

Middle-American moms were a major part of Mike’s massive audience back then, along with a few teens, college kids like this writer, and young adults who’d rush home from school or work to see their favorite rock stars perform.

Like John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Performing and cohosting all week, no less! How could daytime TV get any hipper than that?

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How the Douglas Show Bagged the Lennons

PQ: “Back then, every morning we woke up like Crazy Horse, who said, ‘Today’s a good day to die,’ which meant it could happen right now. So, it was the brink of the Apocalypse.”
— Abbie Hoffman, late 1980s

The Mike Douglas Show set was indeed the brink of the Apocalypse as the shows cohosted by John Lennon and Yoko Ono were taped in early 1972. Much preparation and pre-production aside, nobody really knew what was going to happen once the cameras started rolling.

The Douglas talent bookers had contacted the Lennons in mid-December ’71, a few days after the couple had appeared at the huge December 10 Free John Sinclair rally in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with Rubin, Seale, and other activists in this new “Rock Liberation Front” (as Rubin had dubbed it from the stage).

“When we heard that we could get [John and Yoko], there was a lot of debate as to whether it would be good for The Mike Douglas Show,” said Joe Harnell, Douglas music director and leader of the house band from 1968-73 (after which he exited for Hollywood to become a big-time composer for TV and movies).

“We’d heard [the Lennons] were difficult in many ways, heard stories about their flaming-liberal political attitudes, which, frankly, many of us believed and endorsed,” he said. “I was one of those guys who complained about Nixon, too. But I knew how to behave, that you don’t get into trouble for being crazy, which I was — you get in trouble for acting crazy, which they were.

“So, it was kind of chancy to book them because Mike’s show had an audience of really Middle American squares — well-meaning, but generally very conservative people.

“But we decided it would be great to have ’em,” Harnell said, “that it would increase our audience, and we could sell them on the notion that Middle America would know more about them and their music after a very intensive week of shows, and maybe they’d make a lot of friends that they wouldn’t ordinarily make.”

Usually accompanied by Rubin, John and Yoko and their new backup band, Elephant’s Memory (a local NYC bar outfit with whom Jerry had helped the couple connect, in fact), shuttled to Philly to tape their shows, roughly one a week over a four-to-five-week period beginning in early January.

The Douglas staffers chose roughly half the guests with Mike’s final okay, while John and Yoko chose the other half, with major input from Rubin.

As you can see by the complete talent lineup elsewhere in this booklet, the set of The Mike Douglas Show those five shows became the scene of social interaction among a stunning assortment of establishment and counterculture figures — some of whom would probably have preferred root canal surgery without anesthesia.

That might go for some of the crew, too, who were laboring behind the scenes. “It was more like us looking at our watches and saying, ‘Oh, God, we’re never gonna get outta here!’” laughed Mike Leshnov, who, as staff still photographer documented Douglas for many years, was always on the set.

“You gotta remember,” he said, “when we did two shows in a day like this, we would do the regular one for the next day at 12:30 in the afternoon. Then they’d rehearse the extra show all the way through. Lennon wasn’t there to rehearse, so it was usually just Mike and the producers. No one really knew what was going to happen when we actually started taping. Sometimes we were there until 11 at night — and I had to process all my [film] right after the show to have it ready for next day.

“The amazing thing is that while history is being made, you don’t realize it, it’s just another show,” Leshnov said. “I would have shot 100 rolls of film each show instead of four or five if I’d had any idea. But you don’t think about it when it’s happening.”

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‘And now, heeeeeeere’s Mike…with John & Yoko!’

As timing would have it, just as John and Yoko’s Douglas shows began airing the week of February 14, 1972, the February 17 issue of Rolling Stone with Stu Werbin’s huge feature about the Lennons’ first months in NYC — including inside details of their political adventures with Jerry and Abbie, et. al. — was on newsstands all over the country.

At the beginning of Day 1, after singing his standard show-opening number with Joe Harnell’s band — today, it was “Michelle” — Mike introduced the Lennons and welcomed them onto the bright Douglas set.

“This man wrote [“Michelle”],” Douglas told the audience, beaming. John diplomatically said he wrote the middle-eight, and Mike cleaned up nicely by saying, “Well, the middle-eight’s usually the best part!”

Seated, the trio’s opening banter was warm, as Mike asked the couple for a preview of the week:

John: “We’d like to talk about love, peace, communication, women’s lib, war…”

Yoko: “…racism and prison conditions…”

John: “…life in general.”

Mike: “Drugs?”

John: “Drugs, anything — whatever, that’s what’s going on now.”

Yoko: “And also to show the future direction, because the future direction is actually beautiful. Because people are getting very pessimistic these days, but actually it’s going to be very beautiful, and we want to show that to people.”

The three talked about their admiration for another of the day’s guests, Ralph Nader, because he was doing something to effect positive change.

“And we have people like Bobby Seale and Jerry Rubin,” Yoko continued, “just very interesting people on the show, and they will be showing the other side of life, which is they’re really very peaceful people, and they’re going to show that.”

“We thought we’d give them a chance to show us what they’re actually doing now and what they actually think now, not two years ago, or three years ago, but now, and what their hopes are for the future,” added John. “Because they do represent a certain part of the youth, and they are movement heroes to their own people, and I think it’s time they spoke themselves, and showed their humanity.”

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Getting to Know You: “We’re Both Bananas!”

At several other points during the week, usually in these opening segments before other guests came on, Mike engaged John and Yoko in lengthy interviews that gave viewers a chance to see the couple’s humanity, as well as their insanity.

Like in Day 1, when John and Yoko recounted how they met and became an item. Or Day 2, when John remarked, “We’re both bananas — that’s why we fell in love!” And on the same show when Mike asked Yoko about how she came to the States, and John talked about being the target of racism when he went to Japan to meet her parents.

It was especially poignant on Day 4, when Mike got John to talk again about his early childhood, and his teens, when his mother Julia, who got him started by teaching him to play banjo, got run over and killed by a drunk-driving off-duty cop when John was 16.

“And in spite of all that, I still don’t have a ‘hate-the-pigs’ attitude or ‘hate-cops’ attitude,” he told Douglas. “I think everybody’s human, you know, but it was very hard for me at that time, and I really had a chip on my shoulder. And it still comes out now and then, because it’s a strange life to lead. But in general, ah, I’ve got my own family now…I got Yoko, and she made up for all that pain.”

Mike asked John about something he’d said during his infamous “Working Class Hero”/“Lennon Remembers” interview/rant with Rolling Stone’s Jann Wenner (published December 8, 1970), about John’s Aunt Mimi, who’d actually raised him from toddlerhood:

“All the time I used to fight [with Aunt Mimi] and say, ‘Look, I’m an artist. Don’t bug me with all this math and don’t try and make me into a chemist or a vet, I can’t do it.’ I used to say, ‘Don’t you destroy my papers!’ you know. I’d come home when I was 14 and she’d rooted all me things and thrown all me poetry out. I said, ‘One day I’ll be famous, and you’re going to regret it!’

“But the best quote she ever said was, ‘The guitar’s all right for a hobby, John, but you’ll never make a living at it!’”

[Mike and the audience shared the laugh with John.]

John: “So, some fan in America had that framed on steel and sent it to her and she has it in the house I bought her, and I remind her about it all the time!”

Mike: “You’re both so different, you had such different childhoods…”

John: “It’s incredible, isn’t it?”

Yoko: “Yes!”

Mike: “What do you think has attracted you to each other?”

Yoko: “We’re very similar…”

John: “She came from a Japanese upper-middle-class family, her parents were bankers and all that jazz, very straight. They were to get her off with an ambassador when she was about 18, you know, now is the time you marry the ambassador, and we get all settled.

“I come from an upper-working-class family in Liverpool, the other end of the world. We met but our minds are so similar, our ideas are so similar. It was incredible that we could be so alike from different environments, and I don’t know what it is, but we’re very similar in our heads. And we look alike, too!”

It had been less than two years since The Beatles officially split up, and fans still held out hope the four ex-Fabs would someday share a stage again. Douglas inevitably asked Lennon if they’d ever reunite.

On Day 2, when Mike broached the Reunion Question, John’s response was pleasantly non-committal. “There’s no reason why they should never, no reason why they should,” referring to the Fabs in the third person, as he had for years. But you got the message clearly: the dream was over, so deal with it.

On Day 5, Mike talked more with John about his early musical and songwriting influences (“Originally, Paul and I wanted to be the [Gerry] Goffin-[Carole] King of England”); The Beatles making it in the States (“Then our goal to was to be as big as Elvis”); and John’s famous twenty-something remark that he wouldn’t still be singing “She Loves You” when he hit 30 (“I was 30 when I quit The Beatles…now I’m doing something different…”).

Day 5 was also when the studio audience finally got to ask the Lennons some questions, their only Q&A op all week. The mostly college-age young people asked how they could help the cause (“Making the decision to do something is a start,” Yoko said); Primal Scream Therapy (“We went through it and enjoyed it,” John said); whether they planned to tour with their new band (“We’d like to, but we have to ask for permission to work here,” John explains).

There were a few more very timely music-related questions, like what he thought about Paul McCartney’s latest solo album, Ram (“Some good parts — he’s going in the right direction,” John said diplomatically); and why the bitter references to McCartney in John’s “How Do You Sleep” from Imagine (“It was to answer to a few questions he said on Ram — except I printed my lyrics, and he didn’t!”).

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Musical Mayhem & Too Much Monkey Business

Though John and Yoko were responsible for most of the music that week, they introduced a few other musical artists, too. The Chambers Brothers (fronted by Joe, Willie, Lester, and George) guested on Day 1, performing “By the Hair of My Chinny Chin Chin” and “This Little Piece of Land” from their latest album, Oh My God.

On the second show, the Lennons introduced Yellow Pearl, a folk/protest duo of third-generation Asian-Americans (Chris and Joanna by name); John and Yoko had seen them in a TV documentary. Yellow Pearl described “We Are The Children” as “a song about our movement and our people’s plight in America.”

Multimedia pioneers, the Lennons also presented clips of songs from their Imagine film, like “Oh My Love” on Day 2, “Crippled Inside” on Day 3, “Mrs. Lennon” on Day 4, and “How” on Day 5.

But the week’s best musical moments, at least for John, were playing live with Yoko, and with Elephant’s Memory for the first time in public.

As John & Yoko & Plastic Ono Band & Elephant’s Memory, they performed “It’s So Hard” from the Lennons’ forthcoming Sometime In New York City album on Day 1 and Yoko’s “Midsummer New York” from her 1971 album Fly on Day 2. The next show, with unplugged acoustic guitar backing just from John, Yoko sang “Sisters, O Sisters.” On Day 4 John and the band performed the hit title track from his Imagine LP, and he and Yoko dueted on a likewise acoustic “Luck of the Irish” on Day 5.

Lennon was clearly beside himself on Day 3, when he met and performed with his rock ’n’ roll hero Chuck Berry for the first time, period.

“He’s the greatest rock ’n’ roll poet,” John gushed before introducing Berry. “When I hear rock, good rock, of the caliber of Chuck Berry, I just fall apart and have no other interest in life. The world could be ending if rock ’n’ roll’s playing. It’s a disease of mine.”

Backed by the Elephants and Yoko, Chuck, and John mugged through takes of “Memphis” and “Johnny B. Goode,” both Berry classics and staples in The Beatles’ pre-world-domination repertoire. Ragged, okay, but rockin’ nonetheless. Watch for Chuck’s priceless just-been-goosed expression when Yoko cuts loose on vocals behind him.

As John told a small group of reporters after taping the Douglas shows, “It was worth it just to be with Chuck Berry, man, it was just worth it!”

Mike Douglas Show bandleader Joe Harnell worked with the Lennons on preparing the musical segments that week and has a different take.

“My job was not only to take care of the music but also to produce the other musical aspects of the show, which were many,” Harnell said. “So as producer, it became my responsibility with John and Yoko to make nice and explain to them, as we were getting ready to tape a number and they were both stoned, how we were going to do it.

“Yes, they were smoking marijuana backstage,” Harnell confirmed. “Frankly, I would’ve joined them, except that my job was really to make the thing presentable to his audience, musically. That was difficult because of what I found to be a general sense of confusion and great lapses in what I would consider to be their musical skills.

“The handling of the music with that band [Elephant’s Memory] was very unprofessional, and what they played was so primitive, so sophomoric,” he said. “It was really so shallow, not artistic in any way. I was hoping to get to know yet another legendary figure, because by then John had become that already. I was just very disappointed.”

Harnell recalled more pot-related monkey business backstage with an act guesting on another Douglas show taped the same night: “There was a little German guy with a bunch of chimps and a chimp act — they rode motor scooters and one of them played the drums. And apparently, John blew a lot of marijuana smoke into the face of one of the chimps, who went bananas. Jumped off his little motor scooter, took off into the audience, and started to push people and bite ’em. Nobody got hurt, but, you know, it was, ‘STOP TAPE!’

“So, there was a lot of upset,” Harnell said. “And by the time the week was over, most of us couldn’t wait for John and Yoko to go away. And thankfully, none of this [mayhem] went out on the air.”

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Sweet & Sour Grapefruit: With Performance Art, You Get Eggroll

Now, I’ll bet you’ve seen Chuck Berry do his signature duck walk and Lennon in his famous bow-legged rock ’n’ roller stance onstage or on TV at some point.

But have you ever seen these rock legends wearing a single chef’s apron? Or try to make macrobiotic eggrolls with a groovy new-age cook (Hillary Redleaf, who chastises Harnell’s band like unruly children, saying to calm down their goofy, chaotic music so as not to mess up the mellow cooking vibe)?

Or see them try playing a primitive musical synthesizer using their brains’ alpha waves, hooked up via headbands wired to a computer and musical keyboard (run by a proto-propeller-head, David Rosenbloom)?

I think not! But you’ll view those and more unusual sights in Day 3 segments that are almost as priceless as John’s rock ’n’ roll jammin’ with Chuck.

Performance art stunts and “pieces” were also part of the programming mix that week, many of them from the pages of Yoko’s book Grapefruit. Some were sweet, some went sour.

At the beginning of Day 1, the couple brought out an empty canvas, which they and Mike signed. Other guests and studio audience members would sign it during the week, and the finished Unfinished Painting would be auctioned off and the proceeds donated to charity. The guest autographs went great, except at the end of the week Unfinished Painting was also covered with obscene epithets and drawings added by the five audiences.

While passing the Unfinished Painting out to the audience that first day, John and Yoko also urged everyone to “reach out and touch” the person next to them, just as a gesture of friendliness. That went okay; even Mike seemed to get into the spirit.

Yoko introduced her “Mend Piece” later that show, the idea being that you start with a broken teacup, and piece it back together little by little, day by day, show by show, until it’s whole again. Watch its progress as the week unfolds.

Probably the wildest non-musical segment on Day 1, though, was the series of phone calls John, Yoko, Mike, and guest Louis Nye made to perfect strangers out of the phone book.

They dialed people up, cold and unrehearsed, saying, “Hi, this is [name], and I’m here on The Mike Douglas Show and I just called to say, ‘I love you,’ and to pass on the message so the whole world will get your love.”

Joe Harnell remembers this segment well. “She’d call a guy up in Cleveland and say, ‘This is Yoko Ono, and I love you.’  And the guy would say, ‘Hey, go fuck yourself, lady!’ — and it’d be, ‘STOP TAPE!’” This went on for at least an hour, until they got enough good, clean calls to edit together to complete the segment.

“Very, very rarely did we ever have to stop tape,” Harnell laughs. “But we did a few times with John and Yoko that week.”

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The Black Panthers’ Seale of Approval

Bobby Seale, chairman of the Black Panther Party, appeared on Day 4, also bringing with him Marsha Martin, student body president of Mills College in Oakland, California and a co-organizer of the National Black Youth Conference, and Donald Williams of the Mid-Peninsula Sickle Cell Anemia Foundation. The Panthers were then working closely with both organizations.

“[John] went out for us outright — ‘Bobby, come in, we want you to do the show,’ and that kind of stuff — he really wanted to do something,” Seale recalled, talking with Come Together: John Lennon In His Time author Jon Wiener in 1982.

But benign grass-roots activities like Sickle Cell Anemia testing and free food for the poor programs got little front-page exposure. So the Black Panthers were still feared by most conservative white Middle Americans, who remembered the militant rhetoric and threatening images published in the media a few years earlier.

Yet, thanks to the Lennons and Rubin — and to Mike Douglas, who had the guts to have Seale on at a time when few others would — the Panthers were able to get their non-violent agenda of “intercommunalism,” or redistribution of wealth and resources, across to white America.

Seale sounded downright reasonable on camera. None of the stuff he talked about had anything to do with violent overthrow of the government or killing white people.

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This Revolution Was Not Televised

Viewers never saw the radical power struggle backstage before taping the Day 4 show.

“The [Black Panther] Party wanted me to go on last with John, and Mike Douglas wanted me to go on first,” Bobby Seale told Jon Wiener in 1982. “And I couldn’t get the Party to see that once I go on first, I’m still on the whole show. They just didn’t understand media prop[aganda] situations, and we had a big argument.

“And it’s such a committee [that] they go through this whole vote, and vote that I have to go on last. So, okay, whatever you say. I got tired of arguing about it. It was absurd, didn’t make any sense.

“When we got there, Mike Douglas said, ‘No, he’s going on first, where we’ve got him slotted.’ I told Yoko that I’m not going on at that time, and that’s all there is to it.

“And John and Yoko got on my side outright. They went and bawled Mike out. They threatened to leave the show right there and not be cohosts. Yoko said, ‘If you don’t let Bobby go on when he wants to…these guys are revolutionaries, you shouldn’t push them around.’ She set him back up in there. Shocked Mike Douglas. And that’s the way they put on me on last. [John and Yoko] went to bat for us.”

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Extreme Politics: Rubin’s Radical Rant

Bobby Seale wasn’t the most controversial guest for most Mike Douglas Show viewers that week — including those FBI gumshoes also glued to the tube. It was Jerry Rubin, who appeared in the last segment on Day 2, and electrified the whole studio.

John and Yoko asked their friend to explain to the folks watching just how Yippie tactics had changed for the better since 1968 and the riots at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, and the New Left’s failed campaign to keep Nixon out of the White House in the first place that November.

Rubin responded, calling for youth voter registration and non-violent protests against Nixon’s re-election in November ’72, blaming the president for a litany of social and political woes.

The exchange got pretty heated. Rubin was raving on the far left, while Mike and earlier guest U.S. Surgeon General (and flag-waving Nixon appointee) Dr. Jesse Steinfeld were over on the far right, sputtering and fuming. And John and Yoko sat there somewhere in the middle — incredible as that may seem:

Jerry: “What [Nixon’s] really done is automate the war in Vietnam so that it’s machines killing people. Create a situation where 43 people can be murdered at Attica. Create a situation where four kids can be killed at Kent State, and people are afraid to stare…”

Mike: “You really believe [Nixon] created that situation?”

Jerry: “It’s the atmosphere in the country…is one of just death…”

Mike: “From what you said he…”

Jerry: “Oh, I think his Administration did, and he’s the symbol of it, and so I’m working very hard with people all over the country to defeat Nixon.

Jerry: “I just think everybody should register to vote because that’s power, if we all vote together. And we shouldn’t vote for any candidate that doesn’t automatically withdraw everything from Vietnam.

“And we ought to go to both conventions in Miami and San Diego and non-violently make our presence felt and stand on the issues.”

John: “Non-violently…”

Jerry: “Non-violently, because if we do anything any other way, we’ll be killed. That’s the kind of country we live in.”

Mike: “In, in, in — oh, no! [studio audience also takes exception] You, you don’t really believe that…!”

Jerry: “Kent State! Kent State…!”

John: “Well, look, I mean, everybody’s entitled to an opinion…”

Many intense vibes later, Douglas asked Rubin what was good about America.

“I think the system in essence is corrupt,” Jerry observed, “but I think what’s beautiful about [America] is that the children of America want to change the country, and are going to change it. That’s what’s beautiful.”

“I thought Jerry Rubin was an idiot, the way he was ranting,” recalls Douglas photographer Mike Leshnov. “Back then, I was as conservative as Mike, and felt as uncomfortable as he did.

“You could tell by Mike’s body posture how he felt. When he would lean away from the guests, he wanted no part of them. They were only there because of John and Yoko.”

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Freeda People: F-B-Eye Sees Lennon as ‘Security Matter, New Left’

The FBI agents who were watching the Douglas shows transcribed the Rubin segment and turned in a report to Washington labeling Rubin “an extremist,” and Lennon an “SMNL,” or “Security Matter, New Left.”

The FBI then sent copies of the report to the Secret Service and other investigative agencies within the government.

The jackboot dropped on March 16, 1972, when the Lennons were ordered to get out of the country — deported — by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, citing John’s November 1968 conviction for cannabis resin possession in London.

On Lennon’s behalf, immigration rights attorney Leon Wildes immediately filed the first of what turned out to be dozens of appeals, motions, and countersuits. The more than four-year battle with the INS had an immeasurably adverse impact on John’s life, marriage, and creative spirit.

But the Dirty Tricks campaign against Lennon worked like a charm. Instead of the Douglas shows launching a new phase in spring 1972, they marked the peak and the beginning of the end of the Lennons’ political activism.

That would come with the couple’s One to One benefit concerts backed by Elephant’s Memory at Madison Square Garden on August 30. On November 7, Nixon beat Democratic challenger George McGovern in a landslide.

Yoko’s permanent residency was finally bagged on March 23, 1973. But the INS remained a Spaniard in his works for John until Wildes finally won his “green card” on July 27, 1976 — long after the last U.S. military unit retreated from Vietnam on March 29, 1973, and Nixon’s resignation in disgrace on August 8, 1974.

Years later, far too late, John learned that the arresting officer in England confessed he’d planted the cannabis in a set-up.

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‘Douglas,’ Then & Now

Already top-rated, The Mike Douglas Show experienced a sharp ratings spike for the John and Yoko week; as Mike and Douglas Executive Producer Jack Reilly recently confirmed in separate interviews, these were among the highest-rated shows of the series’ entire two-decade run.

They certainly remain among the Douglas programs best-remembered by Boomers who grew up watching it every afternoon. To Lennon collectors who have suffered through watching poor-quality bootleg videos for years, the shows have attained legendary status.

Finally, in 1997, they were licensed for broadcast by VH1 as part of the popular music channel’s series of classic rock-on-TV programs. And now, the shows are finally legitimately available, in this deluxe Rhino Home Video package.

As amazing, often amusing, and even sometimes quaint capsules of the time, these Douglas episodes paint masterpieces, speak volumes.

Our society and culture have come a long way since early ’72, when ideas like an end to the Cold War, no nukes, biofeedback, recycling, equality for women and minorities, and healthy-lifestyle cooking were considered radical, far-out lunatic fringe, drug-induced, and/or insane.

Today, even Mike Douglas says John and Yoko were way ahead of their time.

Yes, in the pure, white light of declassified documents, filtered through the ensuing decades of hindsight, these shows transcend mere entertainment.

They become truly priceless pieces of post-psychedelic pop culture, and must-see videos for fans of The Beatles, and the Lennons in particular.

And if any event defined the clash that was happening in early ’70s pop culture in America, it was John Lennon and Yoko Ono cohosting The Mike Douglas Show.

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Special thanks from the author to Mike Douglas, Yoko Ono and The John Lennon Estate, Joe Harnell, Michael Leshnov, Mark Lewisohn, Jack Reilly, Mike Reynolds, the Rhino Home Video crew, Peter Shukat, Owen Simon, and Dr. Jon Weiner Ph.D. Extra special thanks to Nadine, Scot, and Veronica Joan Peeples, for sharing their time.

Stephen K. Peeples is an award-winning multi-media writer-producer and radio/record-industry veteran raised in Miami and Los Angeles by career newspaper journalists and music lovers. Based in Santa Clarita, California, he wrapped a 46-year media career in 2021. Along the way he earned awards as the original writer/producer of “The Lost Lennon Tapes” radio series at Westwood One (1988-1990), and covered the Lennons on Douglas in LLT shows #9, 16, 76, and 84. Peeples also earned a Grammy nomination as co-producer and liner notes writer of the “Monterey International Pop Festival” box set (Rhino/MIPF, 1992). See the “About” page on his website. More original stories and exclusive interviews are posted there and on his YouTube channel.

Article: Lennons on ‘Mike Douglas’ 1972: Revolution on Daytime TV
Category: News and Reviews
Author: Stephen K. Peeples
Article Source: StephenKPeeples.com