President Richard Nixon worries about just such a plan. Nixon, who is universally reviled by the Yippies, is up for reelection in 1972 and fears that John Lennon (whom he opened an FBI inquiry on back in 1969) and his friends will wield their considerable influence with the youth culture against him. The president feels especially vulnerable on that front, since he’s recently signed into law the Twenty-Sixth Amendment, which lowered the voting age from twenty-one to eighteen, granting teenagers the right to vote for the first time.

*  *  *

On John’s thirty-first birthday, October 9, 1971, Yoko achieves a personal victory—the art show that Allen Klein had promised. Her first major exhibit, This Is Not Here, is mounted at Syracuse’s Everson Museum of Art.

Ostensibly it’s a solo show, though the catalog features numerous collaborative pieces, including Baby Grand Guitar—an oversize instrument of her own creation plus the neck of a second guitar displayed with Yoko’s invitation to “imagine the body.”

“She thinks up beautiful pure concept things, and I come up with a gimmicky reaction,” John tells the New York Times in answer to the interviewer’s question “Is Syracuse ready for Yoko Ono and John Lennon?”

Not entirely. “There was going to be a secret Beatles reunion concert, with everyone except Paul in the theater at the Everson,” David Ross, then assistant to the museum’s director, remembers. “One of my jobs was to get equipment ready, and have it ready, secretly.”

On opening day, six thousand guests tour the exhibit, spreading rumors of the chance to see all four Beatles together again (and Yoko in “a black velvet hotpants suit”).

The only other Beatle to attend, however—as was often the case—is Ringo.

He’s not the only celebrity friend, though: in addition to Ringo and his wife, Maureen, there’s Phil Spector, Klaus Voormann, Eric Clapton, and poet Allen Ginsberg on hand.

When the increasing size and frenzy of the crowd makes officials in the upstate city of 197,000 begin to fear a riot, John and Yoko move his birthday party over to the Hotel Syracuse, where the famous friends give a raucous semiprivate performance of more than twenty songs—including “Give Peace a Chance” and for George, in absentia, his “My Sweet Lord”—“commonly recognized,” according to The Guardian, as “the single of the year.”

*  *  *

John and Yoko have already been in New York for a few weeks when John’s second solo album, Imagine, goes on sale in the United States, on September 9 (October 8 in the UK). It’s both a critical and commercial success, and it becomes the most celebrated album and single of John’s solo career, reaching number 1 on the UK album charts and number 3 as a US single.