DAVID PEEL
LENNON HAD A FILE TOO
Lennon Had a File Too
David Peel — Street Corner Rant
Forty pages. That's what they gave me. Forty pages because I sang in the park and told people to smoke marijuana. Forty pages, a couple of pretext interviews, and a note that said I had a lackadaisical attitude.
John got hundreds.
They didn't just open a file on Lennon. They tried to throw him out of the country. A Beatle. The most famous musician on the planet. They wanted him gone. You know why? Not the drugs. Not the music. Not the hair. They wanted him gone because he might convince twenty-year-olds to vote.
- Nixon's running for re-election. The war is still on. Kids are getting drafted and coming home in bags. And here's John Lennon — at rallies, at concerts, in Washington Square Park with ME — saying the war is wrong, the government is lying, and young people should do something about it. The voting age just dropped to eighteen. Nixon's people looked at that and panicked.
Senator Strom Thurmond — Strom Thurmond, the guy who filibustered the Civil Rights Act for twenty-four hours — he wrote a letter to the Attorney General, John Mitchell, saying Lennon should be deported. Called it a "strategic counter-measure." A strategic counter-measure. Against a guitar player. That's how scared they were of a song.
The INS came after John with a 1968 marijuana conviction from London. That was the excuse. One conviction, in another country, for hash. That was supposed to be enough to kick a Beatle out of America. The real reason was sitting in an FBI file: this man is politically active and he has an audience.
I was ON the Frost Show with him. January 13, 1972. Me, John, Yoko, Jerry Rubin. The FBI watched the tape. Their report on ME says I didn't speak. But they weren't there for me. They were there because of John. I was forty pages. He was the main event.
They followed him. They tapped his phone. They had agents at his concerts. They had informants in his circle. They tracked his movements, his meetings, his statements. The United States government spent years and God knows how much money trying to silence a man who just wanted to play music and say what he thought. In a free country. In the land of the free.
John fought it. Four years. Leon Wildes, his lawyer, fought it all the way. And in 1975, a federal judge said what everybody already knew: this deportation was political. In 1976, John got his green card. He held it up outside the courthouse like it was a Grammy.
Five years later he was dead.
Here's what I think about. They spent four years trying to get rid of him and they couldn't. The United States government, with all its lawyers and agents and files, couldn't remove one man from one city. But one guy with a gun did it in five seconds. December 8th, 1980. Outside the building he lived in. The building he wouldn't leave because New York was his home and nobody — not Nixon, not the FBI, not the INS — could make him leave.
They gave me forty pages. They gave John a deportation case. And neither of us stopped playing. That's the thing about musicians. You can open a file. You can revoke a visa. You can send agents and lawyers and senators. But you can't confiscate a song. It's already out there. It's in the air. You missed it.
See also: Forty Pages — the FBI's forty-page file on a street musician. The David Frost Show — the night the FBI watched a talk show. The Pope Smokes Dope — the banned album Lennon produced. The New Yorker, 1972 — The New Yorker saw one thing that January. The FBI saw another. Yoko Was Right — she knew about the file before anyone. The Anthem — the song that opened the FBI file. • Deported • Surveilled • Redacted
David Peel
