By Radha Mohan Dasa
Dear all
I thought you would find this interesting.
Please find posted above copy of John Lennon’s original hand-written lyrics to ‘Give Peace a Change’ (1969), as published in yesterday’s Guardian. Someone hopes to sell the paper for £200,000 to £300,000!
If you look carefully , at the bottom of the right-hand column, it reads “Hare Krishna Hare Krishna”
(thanks Adi Guri prabhu)
Ys
Radha Mohan das
Bhaktivedanta Manor Communications Secretary
Please accept my obeisances. All glories to Srila Prabhupada!
Thank you for posting this. I had never realized that he had included Hare Krishna in his famous song. After reading your post, I found
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-NRriHlLUk
where Lenon is singing the song. Not only does he clearly say Hare Krishna in the song itself, but he also says Hare Krishna several times during the long chorus at the end, and also when the song is done. Nice to know he did this service.
Your servant, Urmila devi dasi
Here is the story:
June 1969
One day John Lennon saw Gurudas at the Apple offices.
‘Oh Gurudas! Come on in. I’m going to work for peace.’ And he told him about his and Yoko’s plans for leading a worldwide campaign to stop the Vietnam War.
A few weeks later John and Yoko crossed the Atlantic and, after being denied entry into the US, checked into the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal where they stayed in bed for a week. Their slogan was ‘make Love, not War’ and their way of promoting it was to receive the press from the double bed in their hotel bedroom, dressed in their pyjamas. This was their second ‘bed-in’ to promote world peace – the first had been in Amsterdam. Each day their room filled with friends, reporters and local celebrities. Between conversations the couple, sitting side by side in bed, openly chanted Hare Krishna in front of their guests. On the last day they invited the Montreal Hare Krishna devotees to chant with them, and to join them and their friends in recording a song for peace, written by John for the occasion. The song ended with the names of its singers.
John and Yoko, Timmy Leary, Rosemary, Tommy Smothers, Bobby Dylan, Tommy Cooper, Derek Taylor, Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg, Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna. All we are saying is, Give Peace a Chance.
Lennon had always followed his own path regardless of what people thought of him, but despite his determination not to be led, he showed appreciation for the power of Krishna’s names.
‘We get our energy from Hare Krishna – that’s where it comes from,’ Yoko told a reporter from the Montreal Star. The song was released as ‘Give Peace A Chance’, under the impromptu name of the Plastic Ono Band, and became a worldwide hit.
This is an excerpt from my unpublished book, ‘When The Sun Shines’, about Prabhupada in England, to be published in late 08 or early 09 by BBT.