John and Yoko's Bed-In at the Queen Elizabeth, Montreal

John and Yoko's Montreal bed-in took place in Room 1742 of the Queen Elizabeth hotel, now Fairmont The Queen Elizabeth, at 900 René-Lévesque Boulevard West. The couple stayed from 26 May to 2 June 1969 and recorded Give Peace a Chance in the room on 1 June. The hotel now offers it as the John Lennon and Yoko Ono Suite.

Why Montreal and not New York

The plan was to follow Amsterdam with a bed-in in New York. Lennon couldn't get into the United States because of his 1968 cannabis conviction, so the couple flew to the Bahamas on 24 May 1969. One hot night there was enough. They went to Toronto next, stayed at the King Edward Hotel, and got ten-day visitor status from Canadian immigration. They picked Montreal over Toronto because it was closer to the New York press.

They arrived on 26 May. They took four rooms next to each other, 1738, 1740, 1742 and 1744. The bed-in happened in 1742.

Recording Give Peace a Chance in Room 1742

During the week, reporters kept asking Lennon what staying in bed was supposed to achieve, and he kept answering with a version of the phrase that became the song's title. His press officer, Derek Taylor, found a local engineer, André Perry. On 1 June Perry came up to the room with four microphones and a four-track tape recorder.

The room was crowded. Tommy Smothers played acoustic guitar alongside Lennon. Timothy Leary, Rosemary Woodruff Leary, Dick Gregory, Allen Ginsberg, Murray the K, Petula Clark and a rabbi, Abraham Feinberg, were among the people present. The cartoonist Al Capp also visited. He was hostile to the couple and was the only guest who didn't sing. After the others left, Perry also recorded Lennon and Ono performing Ono's Remember Love.

The tape was noisy. The next day Perry recorded backing voices in his own studio, including the Quebec pop singer Robert Charlebois. He later said nothing was added in England. The single came out on 4 July 1969 in the UK, credited to the Plastic Ono Band, with Remember Love on the B-side. It reached No. 2 in Britain and No. 14 on the Billboard Hot 100.

The hotel and the suite now

The Queen Elizabeth opened on 15 April 1958. Canadian National Railway built it, and it is connected to Central Station and the underground city. It took the Fairmont name in 2001. The hotel closed on 17 June 2016 for a CA$140 million renovation and reopened on 10 July 2017.

Fairmont now rents the room as the John Lennon and Yoko Ono Suite, with a living room laid out to evoke the bed-in and memorabilia to look through. For the 50th anniversary in 2019, the hotel put on a photo exhibition, guided tours of Room 1742 and a concert for peace.

The first bed-in was held two months earlier, at the Hilton in Amsterdam.