As the Vietnam War raged into 1972, John Lennon and Yoko Ono took their Bed-In for Peace to the American airwaves. Now, on what would have been Lennon’s 84th birthday, Erik Nelson’s “Daytime Revolution” documents that landmark week in February when the pair co-hosted the massively popular “Mike Douglas Show.” Given carte blanche to invite guests onto the syndicated daily program, the Lennons seized the opportunity to book major New Left and counterculture figures and avant-garde artists. Yoko also performed conceptual art and rendered some of her inimitable vocalizations.
Forty million viewers tuned in. Among them was President Richard Nixon, who was alerted that the anti-war Lennon posed a threat to his reelection. A year before, a new bloc of young Americans had gained the right to vote with the passage of the 26th Amendment, which lowered the voting age to 18. Within weeks of the Lennons’ appearances on “The Mike Douglas Show,” the White House would launch a covert war against the ex-Beatle, fearing that he was about to rally America’s youth against Tricky Dick.
The Lennons seized the opportunity to book major New Left and counterculture figures and avant-garde artists.
In “Daytime Revolution,” Nelson skillfully intercuts original footage from those pioneering February 1972 “Mike Douglas” shows with contemporary interviews with some of the surviving guests, such as consumer crusader Ralph Nader. In doing so, Nelson — a prolific documentarian who directed and/or produced 2005’s “Grizzly Man” and 2021’s “Ford at Pearl” — revives a remarkable moment in TV history, which he calls “the highwater mark of the Sixties.”
“Daytime Revolution” releases on Oct. 9, John’s birthday, and less than a month before the 2024 presidential election. It’s a quixotic, latter-day Aquarian effort to resurrect Lennon in the crusade against Trump, just as John and Yoko resisted Nixon all those years ago.
I interviewed Erik Nelson in Santa Cruz, California via Zoom. Our conversation has been edited lightly for clarity and length.
TRUTHDIG: Why does “Daytime Revolution” start with John Lennon performing “Attica State,” with lyrics such as “Rockefeller pulled the trigger,” at a prison benefit concert in 1971?
ERIK NELSON: It orients you instantly into where John and Yoko’s mindset was, which is difficult in a film like this that doesn’t have narrators. It seemed like an elegant way of getting in, and I really enjoyed the song — even with Jerry Rubin on conga drums.
TD: What are some of the other political songs Lennon created and performed mostly after the Beatles broke up?
EN: This was the highwater mark of his political [engagement], it was the “Some Time in New York City” album, which was in progress when he did “The Mike Douglas Show.” That was very much almost a newspaper of what was on his mind. He’d work with then-radical Geraldo Rivera on what became the “One to One” concerts. He’d done “Working Class Hero,” then songs with Yoko, like “Woman is the N-word of the World.” Lennon was highly political at that moment, something that didn’t escape the attention of Strom Thurmond and Richard Nixon.
TD: Who was Mike Douglas?
EN: Mike Douglas was basically the landlord of America’s living room during that era. He had the most popular talk show in the US. About one in five Americans would watch the syndicated “Mike Douglas Show.”
Douglas was a terrific personality, a charismatic, affable individual. He had no problem inviting John, Yoko, Jerry Rubin, Bobby Seale, Ralph Nader into his living room and letting them hold forth on what were radical ideas then, and impossibly radical ideas today.
TD: Did it matter that Mike was about 20 years older than 31-year-old Lennon?
EN: There was an age gap, but what we found extraordinary [in our research] was just how open-minded, comfortable and enabling Douglas was of all of his guests. They were truly his guests. He was a little nervous about Jerry Rubin, and said so on the air to break the ice. When he meets Bobby Seale, he brings up that the Black Panthers’ chairman used to be a standup comedian, which made Bobby more palatable to housewives watching the show. Mike strove to communicate, to connect.
TD: Why did Douglas bring in John and Yoko as co-hosts?
EN: It wasn’t strictly after ratings. Mike was always open to new things. His show was always open to strange people. A couple years later Frank Zappa did “The Mike Douglas Show.” Before he became Ted “Crossbow and Fascism” Nugent, he was on the show. He had Yoko on the show before when she was promoting her book “Grapefruit.” He knew who John Lennon was and that he could command an audience.
TD: Why did John and Yoko agree? Guest David Rosenboom says the Lennons were “pushing a Utopian agenda”?
EN: And Rosenboom also says, “They wanted to make the world better.” That’s why they were going on. Yoko had previously been on the show and got the right vibes. They wanted to get their vision across, and Yoko, I think, conceived of this idea where they’d present this five-episode narrative arc where they would present the very best of the counterculture and try to inject the counterculture into the culture. She succeeded beyond her wildest dreams. They got it done so much so that Nixon completely freaked out and went into overdrive on deporting Lennon.
TD: Were John and Yoko given complete freedom to select guests?
EN: Yes. They were certainly encouraged to book who they wanted. They were fine with John putting on the guests they wanted, which included Barbara Loden, Elia Kazan’s wife, who directed a feminist classic [1970’s “Wanda”]; [Dr.] Jesse Steinfeld, who was in the Nixon administration [as surgeon general, later forced out by Nixon].
“Mike was always open to new things.”
Jerry Rubin, noted Yippie, Chicago 7 defendant. Bobby Seale, chairman of the Black Panther Party [who had, like Rubin, been part of the Chicago conspiracy trial]. Ralph Nader, public enemy number one to many American manufacturers and unpopular to lots of people today. Ralph’s still out there doing it on a weekly radio show — Ralph’s not giving up the fight.
David Rosenboom was an avant-garde musician who did a biofeedback live music piece. Hillary Rosen, the 23-year-old macrobiotic chef from the Paradox Restaurant in New York, did a cooking segment with John, Yoko and Chuck Berry in aprons. And Gary Schwartz, another biofeedback health guy. Some very interesting people, all pushing the best of the counterculture forward in this very mainstream venue.
TD: Of all the guests, who do you think Lennon was the most excited to have on the show?
EN: John met Chuck Berry for the very first time in the green room a half hour before they rolled tape. Rosenboom was in the room. And John Lennon meeting Chuck Berry had the same reaction Rosenboom had when he first met John Lennon. John worshiped Chuck Berry, and they got to play together for the one and only time. It’s an epic performance.
TD: Why did you choose to include the clip with George Carlin?
EN: George Carlin was in a real transitional stage then, going from buttoned-down stand-up comic. He was definitely smoking lots of marijuana and was now turning from being a Vegas-guy-in-a-suit act to the longhaired Levi’s-jacketed guy and had gone through lots of personal growth to get there. We felt what George said on the coach when he was talking to Mike, John and Yoko about his journey and what got him to the “Hippie-Dippie Weatherman” was far more interesting, relevant and funny than his six-minute act, so that’s what we featured in the film.
TD: Which of Lennon’s post-Beatles songs does he perform on “The Mike Douglas Show”?
EN: “It’s So Hard” and “Imagine,” and a couple of songs with Yoko. All this went down around the time of Sunday, Bloody Sunday [a 1972 massacre committed by British soldiers shooting unarmed civilians in Derry], and he wrote “The Luck of the Irish,” which we’re including in the DVD supplement.
TD: “Daytime Revolution” points out that a producer of “The Mike Douglas Show” was one of the most notorious conservatives in media history? Who was he?
EN: Roger Ailes, the evil genius behind Nixon’s election in 1968 and FOX News, was in the studio. In 1968, he was working with Mike Douglas, had talk show experience and was a rabid conservative. Essentially, Ailes gave us President Richard Nixon, because Nixon used television brilliantly [in the 1968 campaign, with Ailes’ help]. He stayed on at “The Mike Douglas Show” after the campaign and was lurking in the background during the Lennons’ shows. Ailes has this idea: “Hey! Maybe John and Yoko will sing at Nixon’s convention!” He was that delusional. Fortunately for history, that didn’t happen. In 1995, Roger Ailes went off and created FOX News.
TD: “Daytime Revolution” documents an exceptional moment in the history of corporate, broadcast television. It’s similar to when Harry Belafonte sat in for Johnny Carson to guest host “The Tonight Show” and invited Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy on shortly before they were both assassinated in 1968. Like Belafonte, the Lennons appeared during a presidential election year and hosted guests who were politically — and often radically — active. Given the recent passage of the 26th Amendment, do you think inviting John and Yoko onto such a prominent mainstream platform was part of a larger trend of trying to woo young Americans away from radical revolution to affect change from within the system?
EN: Yes. At this point in time there was tremendous optimism that we could change the world. The highwater mark of the Sixties wasn’t Woodstock in August 1969, it was this week of Mike Douglas shows, with the finest minds of the counterculture having this platform. Nixon was scared of losing, which is why he broke into the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate Building. So, if Richard Nixon was nervous about winning in 1972, what do you think John and Yoko thought, with the wind at their backs, with a counterculture at its apex?
A very conscious choice we made on this film was to distill this week down to its most optimistic, hopeful, entertaining message and deliver it into theaters one month before the 2024 election. That was absolutely a planned event. In our own small way, in the 50 theaters we’re opening on Oct. 9, we are trying to recapture the flag; this happened and it could still happen again.
TD: One reason why Nixon won so decisively in 1972 is because of what he did to Lennon.
EN: I disagree. Nixon might have won 46 states [instead of 49]. Had Lennon put his full weight and power and gone out and done concerts everywhere, it would have had no more impact than if Taylor Swift did a concert tour celebrating Harris. Richard Nixon certainly saw [Lennon as a threat], and that paranoid bastard went after John Lennon as a result.
TD: That’s very well documented in the 2006 documentary “The U.S. vs. John Lennon,” which contended John planned to do a nationwide concert tour aimed at registering newly enfranchised 18-year-olds and others to vote for McGovern. We’ll never know how that would have turned out, but we do know that tour never happened because Lennon was fighting over his immigration status.
EN: I produced “The U.S. vs. John Lennon” — that’s how I first met and worked with Yoko Ono. That part of the story is not unknown to me. Yes, you’re right. Frankly, I referred to Nixon as a “paranoid bastard,” but even paranoids have real enemies. If I was Nixon I would have deported John, too! Yoko was a citizen already. From a pragmatic perspective, you’re Richard Nixon and you want to shut this down because your buddy Roger Ailes is saying, “You’ve got to watch out for this guy.” I can see where Nixon was coming from.
TD: Did you interact with Ono for “Daytime Revolution”?
EN: Yes. When Yoko and John did Mike Douglas, they signed a lease that said, in essence, we could make this movie. We could have done this without her blessings; I didn’t want to do that. I respect Yoko, and had a great experience working with her for “The U.S. vs. John Lennon,” and this was a work of conceptual art that she conceived. So, we reached out to Yoko and said we want to make this movie. I also had a conversation with Sean Lennon via Zoom, where I outlined my parameters.
“At this point in time there was tremendous optimism that we could change the world.”
I didn’t even ask Yoko to [be interviewed for] the film. I felt it was an imposition; I didn’t want to break the spell of the audience watching the film. I’m not a documentary filmmaker. I’m in the “transportation” business: I wanted to transport viewers back to 1972. Okay, Ralph Nader, David Rosenboom and Nobuko [Miyamoto, a guest who sang about the plight of Asian Americans] are [interviewed for “Daytime Revolution”]. Yoko gave notes, which I’d solicited, and the notes in essence were: Nader says, “No one can afford to be a pessimist.” She loved that and loved the optimistic message. She asked, “Can’t you cut John and me down and put more of these people into your movie?” Which is why we expanded the movie to one hour and 48 minutes. I wanted Yoko’s vision to inform this present-day incarnation of her work.
TD: The contemporary public’s viewing habits have greatly changed since 1972, but in terms of broadcast, network and corporate television per se, could contemporary counterparts to John and Yoko seize the day again on daytime TV?
EN: I think if Taylor Swift wanted to do two hours where she interviewed far out lefties and put an apron on and cooked with Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam, she’d probably get it on the air in the blink of an eye.
TD: “Daytime Revolution” premieres on what would have been John’s 84th birthday. To paraphrase the Beatles: “Will we still need him, will we still feed him, when John is 84?”
EN: I like that. I’m going to steal that immediately. Of course, we still need John Lennon, a genius, an avatar of culture. He did his level best to always tell the truth. His message still endures. We talk about the highwater mark — the John Lennon we see on these Mike Douglas shows was lightning in a bottle. John never looked better, he was never more comfortable or rocked out harder. He was totally in love with Yoko, they had all this great couple dynamic. This was a very content John Lennon, and he got to rock out with Chuck Berry, his idol! To see John so happy and at peace with himself… You’ll never see John Lennon better.
Beginning Oct. 9, “Daytime Revolution” will be released in theaters across more than 50 cities. See: https://kinolorber.com/film/daytime-revolution.
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