Mike and John and Yoko make your day

June 14, 2004 10:23 AM

We'll Be Right Back For a full week in February 1972, Mike Douglas (warning: pop-up ads; page design) featured John Lennon and Yoko Ono as co-hosts of his hit afternoon talk show. The accompanying mash-up of counterculture and the mainstream must have been interesting to watch (at least to the Nixon administration). The folks at Rhino Home Video were kind enough to leave behind Stephen K. Peeples' extensive liner notes (see links 2-8 at bottom of page).
posted by LinusMines (1 comment total)

LinusMines -- I was a longtime viewer of the Mike Douglas Show at that time, and tuned in for the John Lennon week hoping for some real thrills. But Lennon, by that time, was anything but hip or revolutionary. And mainstream culture was already pretty unshockable, having long before absorbed the lessons of the counter culture, the music of Chuck Berry, and the slogans of "revolution." The only thing it couldn't absorb was Yoko Ono. She sat in the middle of everything like a piece of stinking limburger, destroying the pleasure we'd all hoped to take in John Lennon's company -- if not his hipness which was, as I said, little in evidence (everybody in America, was pretty hip by that time). Actually, the coolest guy on the set that week was probably Mike Douglas himself. A real professional.
posted by Faze at 1:52 PM on June 14, 2004