In 1972, The Mike Douglas Show was the kitschiest thing on television. Douglas was a second-tier Big Band crooner who hosted a live talk show out of Philadelphia, a low-budget affair that aired weekday afternoons from 4:30 to 6. For those of us who grew up then, it was the background entertainment your mother listened to while making dinner.

But for the week of February 14th, The Mike Douglas Show suddenly became the center of the entertainment universe. Part of Douglas’ unique schtick was to feature a different co-host each week, usually a washed-up actor or a Borscht Belt-grade comedian. But on this week, for reasons no one could quite believe or comprehend, Mike Douglas’ co-hosts were to be John Lennon and Yoko Ono.

Mike Douglas was the embodiment of everything that was conventional, comfortable, and patriotic about post-60's America. John Lennon was the most famous radical on the planet, grudgingly tolerated by the cultural cognoscenti but actively despised by the establishment. It was difficult to envision Douglas and Lennon exchanging five minutes of small talk, let along 90 minutes of bon mots for five days straight.

For an insecure, irresolute 17-year-old, the whole thing had an irresistible appeal. And spending a marijuana-infused week on the couch, soaking in the ironic pairing of square and cool, seemed infinitely more appealing than wrestling with the incomprehensible social and academic environment that was Columbia University, especially since I was already apparently flunking out.

Smoking a joint in the middle of the afternoon was nothing new for me. I’d begun smoking grass during the summer of 1967 with an older cousin. He and I would stroll down Crescent Street in East New York and smoke a reefer before returning to his house to listen to music. We’d alternate between Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Are You Experienced?, the two most mind-blowing releases in a year that was already defined for us by mind-blowing music.

I smoked pot through three years of high school that were marked by my parents’ ugly divorce and my own paralyzing social anxiety. I’d been sent to a Catholic military boarding school so their divorce could rage in my absence. But, this was all happening within the context of the Vietnam War, and I couldn’t contain my disdain for the school’s military agenda. When I began circulating a petition that called for transforming our vaunted ROTC Honor School into a co-ed non-military prep school, Brother James, the Commandant of Cadets, known among cadets as “The Rat,” coolly informed me that, if I persisted, I’d be summarily and permanently sent home.

Most afternoons, a select few of us would convene on the edge of the campus on a small beach area that peered out onto Long Island’s Great South Bay to smoke a joint or two and muse about how fucked up life and school were. Sufficiently stoned to negotiate the rest of the evening, we’d return to the residential hall where I’d kill time by playing the guitar and singing. My repertoire included Alice’s Restaurant (yes, I’d play the whole thing) and I Like Marijuana, a classic anthem by David Peel and the Lower East Side. David Peel was a New York City street musician, not a big star but to counter-culture types in high school who smoked pot — my particular demographic at the time — he was an indisputable hero. He unapologetically shouted on vinyl all those things we weren’t even able to whisper.

After two years, I’d had enough of military school and lobbied my mother to let me move back home and return to public school. I wanted to grow my hair out, wear regular clothes, and sit in class with… girls! She relented and I began my junior year at the local high school, an experiment that failed in almost every way possible. I continued to do well academically but living with my mother made me nostalgic for the relative emotional warmth of marching with rifles and undergoing locker inspections. Good grades notwithstanding, I hated everything about my life and needed to make a change.

I visited my guidance counselor one afternoon and told her that under no circumstances would I was going to return to school in the fall. When it became clear that she wasn’t going to change my mind, we put a plan together: I’d pack my schedule for my last semester of junior year, graduate a year early, and head off to college. And that’s how I found myself attending Columbia University in 1971 at 16, out of the house again but no more well-adjusted than I’d been in high school.

I turned 17 in December of 1971 and finished up my first semester with a spate of incompletes and little hope that the second semester was going to be any better. So when February rolled around, watching John Lennon on television for five days in a row — even if it was on The Mike Douglas Show — didn’t seem like an unreasonable way to spend my time.

John Lennon and Yoko Ono co-host ‘The Mike Douglas Show’ with Mike Douglas and guest Chuck Berry in February 1972. Getty Images embed.

As I watched the first show on Monday, I found myself thumbing through an issue of The Village Voice, which happened to have an article about David Peel, the same hero whose ode to smoking pot I’d sung in high school. It talked about how he and John Lennon had become running buddies after Lennon moved to New York. To me, David Peel was living the dream. Seriously, what could be cooler than singing about marijuana and running with John Lennon? As Lennon and Douglas chatted away in the background, I began to wonder if Peel was also watching. And then a wonderfully weird, possibly ganga-inspired idea came to me.

On a whim, I bounded back to my dorm room and grabbed a phone book from my closet. I navigated to the P’s and there it was: a listing for Peel, David.

I dialed the number, heard the phone ring a couple of times, and then David Peel’s unmistakable voice came across the line: “Hello?” All these years later, I can’t really explain what happened next. It wasn’t planned or thought out in any coherent way. All I can tell you for sure is simply that it happened.

“Hi. My name is George Colombo. I’m a freelance writer working on a story for New York Magazine about the counter culture in New York City,” I lied. “I was hoping that I might be able to stop by and ask you a few questions.”

I was stunned by the words that were coming out of my mouth. Surely, David could certainly see through my flimsy story.

“That’s cool, man,” he said. “Sure. So you want to come by here tomorrow night?”

I can’t tell you much about the rest of the conversation except that I could feel the pulse of my heart in my temple and wanted desperately to end the call before I was unmasked. I got his address and made arrangements to meet him there the following night.

The next day, February 15th, I watched John Lennon on The Mike Douglas Show again that afternoon—toking up, of course—and was a bit surprised that Jerry Rubin turned up as a guest. Rubin was a yippie and a member of the Chicago Seven. He was as radical as it was possible to get. If Douglas and Rubin had met under any other circumstances, they might have tried to kill one another. On television, though, the encounter seemed surreal in its apparent normalcy.

By the time I took the subway downtown that night, it was freezing cold. I wasn’t at all familiar with the East Village and remember being surprised when I stumbled across The Fillmore East on my way to David’s apartment. He opened the door and was extremely gracious as he welcomed me into an apartment that was small and disheveled. The apartment’s only heat seemed to come from the open oven in the kitchen. If David could see through my subterfuge, he was keeping it to himself.

I asked him questions about counter-culture in New York and the political movement that was emanating from the streets and then dutifully recorded his answers on the clipboard I’d brought. He wasn’t impatient but was distinctly fidgety. After a respectable amount of time chatting, I worked up the nerve to ask the question that I really wanted to ask, the one I’d been rehearsing in my mind since we’d gotten off the phone the day before: “Hey, would you like to smoke a joint?”

I pulled a joint out of my coat pocket, fired it up, and was passing it back and forth with a guy whose songs about smoking pot I’d sung almost every day in high school! Surely, I thought, this was going to be the highlight of the night. But, as it turned out, things were just getting started.

As he crushed the roach in the ashtray, David asked suddenly and without explanation, “Do you want to take a ride?” I had no idea what that meant but it didn’t matter. I was hanging out with David Peel, smoking pot with him in the Village, and all was right with the world. Whatever would keep the evening going was fine with me.

We worked our way over to the IRT and took a train uptown. I thought we were going to get off at Times Square but we continued up to 50th Street where we disembarked and walked a few blocks back downtown. David was pretty intent and there wasn’t a lot of banter going on. I kept my head down, my mouth shut, and just followed along.

Suddenly, we were standing in front of a nondescript wall that comprised the side of a building. There were no signs and no windows, only a solitary door in the middle of the wall. David pushed a doorbell, but no sound seemed to emanate. A moment later the door opened, a very big guy leaned out to survey the street, and then turned his attention to David. Wordlessly, almost imperceptibly, he motioned for David to come in. When I started following him inside, the big guy reached out and put his hand on my chest. He didn’t need to say the words, the message was perfectly clear: I wasn’t coming in.

David looked back and yelled, “It’s okay, man. He’s with me.” Big guy said nothing and his face betrayed nothing. He simply removed his hand from my chest and stepped aside to let me pass.

Silently, I followed David down a hall and into an anteroom where he planted me in a chair near a side table and then disappeared. There was a large, upholstered door that was catty corner from where we’d entered and over the next 10 minutes or so, I watched people coming and going, including, at one point, David.

Whenever the door opened, I’d hear a voice inside booming over what sounded like a public address system: “We mayka payna fazen danz…” Even though I could only hear it in disjointed snippets, the voice seemed to just keep repeating the same thing over and over again. Weirdly, the voice sounded remarkably like John Lennon … or, at least, someone who was doing a great job of imitating John Lennon. There was no music, just the voice singing/yelling the same indecipherable incantation. It was nothing I’d ever heard and I’d listened to every bit of Lennon’s music that was available including esoterica like Two Virgins.

As I sat there, trying to figure out exactly what was going on, an energetic figure bounded in from down the hall and deposited himself in a chair. I only saw the top of his head as he picked up the desk phone that was on the table and began dialing. When he looked up, though, the face was familiar and unmistakable. It was Jerry Rubin, the same guy I’d been watching on TV just a few hours earlier. I was too surprised to catch the beginning of the conversation but soon regained my composure and focused in on the end of the conversation I could hear (all the while looking away and pretending to be nonplussed). “Did you catch me this afternoon? How did I sound? Did I look alright?” It wasn’t the kind of post-game analysis I’d have expected from one of the counter-culture’s most famous proponents but I had a more pressing question: Where the hell was I?

Just then, David peeked out from behind the upholstered door and motioned for me to come inside. I found myself in a large room and in front of me was an enormous audio console facing out towards an empty recording studio. A couple of huge speakers were mounted on the ceiling, the source of the obscure mantra that was once again repeating. While I was taking all of that in, David motioned for me to be quiet and take a seat. It was only after I sat down that I was able to turn my attention towards the three figures seated at the console with their backs to me.

Neither of the two men’s faces was visible but the woman sitting on the right was turned slightly to face towards her companions on her left. The lightbulb of recognition brightened in two distinct steps:

One: “She looks Japanese.”

Two: “That’s Yoko Ono.”

I still couldn’t see the faces of the two men sitting next to her but it didn’t matter. I suddenly knew who at least one of them was. And I realized why the voice booming through the speakers sounded just like John Lennon. There must have been a tape machine somewhere but I don’t remember seeing it. The man next to Yoko reached for a bottle that was sitting in front of him on the console, took a long swig, and put it down, a gesture he repeated several times over the next half hour or so until, apparently, the contents of the bottle were gone. The now familiar incantation kept repeating. Sometimes the entire phrase several times in a row, sometimes just a word or two. “We mayka payna fazen danz, we mayka payna fazen danz…”

As I took everything in, my urgent objective was to stay as quiet and unobtrusive as possible. I kept picturing the big guy from the front door bursting into the room and shouting, “Grab that kid! He’s not from New York Magazine!”

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Suddenly, there was a break in the proceedings as the guy sitting on the far left of the console got up and left the room. When he did, David walked over and motioned for me to join him. He led me up to where Yoko was sitting and the guy next to her turned around. The fact that I knew it was going to be John Lennon didn’t mitigate the shock. My mind immediately flashed to another February night, almost exactly eight years before, when I first saw his face on my grandmother’s television set. It took all the will I could summon to keep the atoms of my body from spontaneously combusting; I half expected to float away and mix with the cigarette smoke that filled the air.

David positioned me behind John’s chair and repeated almost verbatim the fraudulent biography I’d given him on the phone the night before. John considered me for a second and said something that might have been perfectly decipherable under other circumstances—but I was not processing sensory input very well at that particular moment. He didn’t seem deliberately rude or dismissive, but it was clear that the second of his attention I’d already consumed was all I was going to get.

I turned towards Yoko who seemed to plumb the depths of my soul with the most intense gaze I’d ever experienced. She’d heard David’s introduction and simply nodded. My abiding impression was that she was beautiful in a way that transcended any image of her I’d ever seen. Like most other Beatles fans, I had always wondered what it was that John saw in her. Seeing her in person, I never wondered that again.

David led me away from her, not back to my chair in the corner of the room but instead out the big upholstered door. My time was up. As I left the room, the third figure who’d been sitting at the console was walking back in. It was Phil Spector.

David and I said our goodbyes and I promised to let him know when the article was going to hit the newsstands. He didn’t seem very concerned about that, but he had one last item to run down with me before I left. “Yoko wanted to know if you had an extra joint you could leave for her.” As it happened, I did. I reached into my coat pocket, pulled out my last joint, and handed it over.

I’ve often wondered if that joint really made its way to Yoko or if David kept it for himself. For a long time, I whimsically hoped that it wound up with Yoko. Now, I find myself thinking that I’d be just as happy — maybe even happier — if David had kept it for himself. It would be a small bit of payback for a guy who graciously orchestrated the most improbable, unbelievable night of my life.

Postscript: On June 12, 1972, John and Yoko released Sometime in New York City, John’s third solo album, produced by Phil Spector. The album’s first song was “Woman Is the Nigger of the World,” Lennon’s attempt at a feminist anthem that ended with the repeating refrain, “We make her paint her face and dance.”

☞ George Colombo is an author, entrepreneur, animal lover, and citizen activist who lives in in Williamsburg, VA.