John Lennon produced my album. Let me say that again because people don't believe it. John Lennon. The Beatle. Sat in a studio with me and produced an album called The Pope Smokes Dope. The title track was a song about the Pope getting high on marijuana. God gave him the grass. He likes to smoke in mass. That's a real lyric. I wrote it. Lennon recorded it. Apple Records released it. In 1972.

Every radio station in America banned it. Every single one. You could not play The Pope Smokes Dope on the radio. Not in New York. Not in San Francisco. Not on a college station at three in the morning. The title alone was enough to get you pulled off the air. The Catholic Church went berserk. The FCC didn't know what to do with it. Distributors wouldn't carry it. Record stores put it under the counter like it was contraband. Like it was the thing the song was about.

And that was the whole point.

See, here's what people don't understand about that song. It wasn't anti-Catholic. I wasn't against the Pope. I wasn't against God. I was against the idea that some things are too sacred to laugh at. The Pope is a man in a hat. A funny hat. And the funniest thing you can say about a man in a funny hat is that he smokes dope. Not because it's true — because it's absurd. And absurdity is the sharpest tool in the box.

Lennon understood this immediately. That's why he produced it. He didn't produce it because it was a good song in the way record executives mean good. It wasn't going to sell a million copies. It wasn't going to get radio play. It was never going to be on anybody's top forty list. He produced it because it was honest. It said what it said. It didn't hedge. It didn't apologize. It just said the Pope smokes dope, God gave him the grass, and if you don't like it, there's the door.

We recorded it at the Record Plant. East Forty-Fourth Street. Same studio where Lennon did Imagine. Same console. Same room. And now there's me, a street musician from the Lower East Side, singing about the Pope getting stoned, in the room where Imagine was born. If that's not rock and roll I don't know what is.

Yoko was there too. She was always there. People didn't give Yoko enough credit for anything. She was in the studio, she had ideas, she was part of it. The Pope Smokes Dope is credited to John Lennon and Yoko Ono as producers. Both of them. And both of them thought it was the funniest, most important waste of Apple Records' money they'd ever authorized.

The album had other songs. "The Ballad of New York City" — John and Yoko Are the Aliens. "I'm a Runaway." "Hey Jude." Not the Beatles' Hey Jude — MY Hey Jude. A different song. Same title. Because I could. Nobody sued me. Nobody could. You can't copyright a name.

But the title track. The Pope Smokes Dope. That's the one. That's the one that got me on the map and off the radio at the same time. That's the one they wrote about in the papers. That's the one the bishops complained about. That's the one I sang in Washington Square Park to a crowd of three hundred people who all knew the chorus by the second time through. The Pope smokes dope. God gave him the grass. The Pope smokes dope. He likes to smoke in mass. The Pope smokes dope. He's a groovy head. The Pope smokes dope. The Pope smokes dope.

You want to know the legacy of that album? Fifty years later, marijuana is legal in half the states in America. The Catholic Church is still standing. The Pope still has the hat. And every few months somebody finds the album online and posts it with the caption "this is real" and a thousand people discover it for the first time. You can't kill a song that makes people laugh. Banning it is the best promotion you'll ever get. The Pope Smokes Dope is fifty years old and it's still getting banned from something. That's immortality.

See also: The Apple — the day Lennon walked into Washington Square Park and signed a street musician. The David Frost Show — same era, same FBI watching. Forty Pages — the FBI file they opened because of all of this. A Machine Writes Songs Now — what would Peel tell Lennon about algorithms? They Legalized It — fifty years later, legal in half the states and nobody said thank you. The Rejection Letter — the sidewalk does not have a submissions policy. The Record — a groove in plastic that outlasts the man who carved it.

David Peel