![]() because Yoko was seeking custody of Kyoko, her 8-year-old daughter by her previous marriage to an American named Tony Cox. By that point, John and Yoko had moved from England to an apartment on Bank Street in New York’s Greenwich Village. Lennon’s response to this sort of criticism was “Imagine,” the ultimate flower-power anthem and a huge hit in the fall of 1971, along with the album of the same name. “My own column suggested mildly that John Lennon and Yoko Ono lying around in a hotel suite and renting billboards protesting the war was not the most revolutionary of actions,” Wilcock wrote in his memoir “Manhattan Memories.” Their flower-power approach earned them scorn from the increasingly radicalized writers of the underground press - including John Wilcock, who gently chided their naiveté in the March 1970 issue of Other Scenes. He and Yoko launched their highly publicized “bed-in” campaign, deploying songs like “Give Peace a Chance” to urge an end to the Vietnam War. Lennon married Ono in 1969 and left the Beatles shortly thereafter. “She was very excited about what it might lead to.”Įveryone knows what it led to. ![]() Later in 1966, he encountered her in London, where she had gone to further her career as an artist. “She was just somebody around the New York art scene,” he said. Wilcock liked her, and he published some of her work in Other Scenes, but he did not regard her as a likely future star. Wilcock remembers attending Ono’s seminal March 1966 event at the Judson Church in Washington Square, at which visitors were invited to climb into black bags that she had placed on the floor. He first met Ono in the mid ‘60s when she was an avant-garde conceptual artist in New York, and he was editing The East Village Other and then launching his own underground tabloid, Other Scenes. ![]() An Englishman who crossed the pond in the 1950s, Wilcock landed at the brand-new Village Voice in 1955 as one of the original editors and columnists. “I knew Yoko quite well,” Wilcock told the OQ. “He was right in the center of things.”īoth men are veterans of America’s underground press scene of the ‘60s and early ‘70s, during a period when John Lennon and Yoko Ono were much in the news. “I knew him back in the day,” Pyes said of Wilcock. John Wilcock and Craig Pyes have never encountered one another in Ojai, where both now make their homes. Yoko Ono and John Lennon at their home in England, December 1968. As it happens, some of those people live right here in Ojai. Still, the gist of it can be pieced together from various published sources, and by talking to people who had dealings with the Lennons in those days. Yoko Ono knows the full story, of course, but she has never been quoted about it, and she declined our request for an interview. A few of his biographers mention the Ojai episode, but only in passing. Little of it can be gleaned from the many books written about John Lennon. The actual story of the Lennons’ visit is a bit different, although no less interesting. But overall, as is so often the case, the myth has eclipsed the reality. Then they disappeared, as mysteriously as they had arrived. They hid out for months in East End seclusion, surfacing occasionally to astonish the locals by dining at the Ranch House, or by jumping onstage to play music in a Ventura bar. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, John and Yoko came here in secret to consult with the philosopher Krishnamurti. That was 43 years ago, and the Lennons’ Ojai sojourn has long since passed into local legend: While on the run from Richard Nixon, J. “Oh,” she replied, “John Lennon was there.”Īnd Yoko Ono too: She had left behind a copy of her book “Grapefruit,” with a handwritten inscription: “To dear Mae, love and peace, Yoko Ono, ’72 June, Ojai.“ Nonplussed, Jim called his mother, Mae Churchill, to find out who had left the house in such disarray. “The garbage disposal was crammed full of chopsticks.”Įven more annoyingly, Churchill’s classical guitar, a gift from his parents handcrafted by the master Spanish luthier Manuel Rodriguez, had been left out in the sun by the swimming pool with its case open. “Every ashtray in the house was crammed with a mountain of cigarette butts,” he recalled in an interview. But when he got to the house on Thacher Road, he found that someone had left a mess for him to clean up. They said yes, and in due course he arrived in Ojai, prepared to think deep thoughts. He wanted to hole up in the family’s weekend house in Ojai that summer while he finished writing his master’s thesis. ![]() In the spring of 1972, as the school year was winding down, a University of Chicago graduate student named Jim Churchill contacted his parents in Los Angeles to ask a favor. ![]()
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