John Lennon and Yoko Ono filmed the fourth of five appearances on The Mike Douglas Show on 27 January 1972.
The shows were filmed at the KYW-TV studio at 1619 Walnut Street in Philadelphia. The couple’s other appearances were filmed on 14, 18, and 20 January, and 4 February 1972, and broadcast over a week from 14 February.
This episode was broadcast on 16 February. The special guest was Chuck Berry, one of Lennon’s heroes.
It began with Douglas singing ‘I Whistle A Happy Tune’ from The King And I, after which Lennon and Ono performed ‘Sisters, O Sisters’ from the then-unreleased Some Time In New York City.
After the performance, Lennon enthused to Douglas about Berry, whom he met for the first time earlier that day. “Today he walked
in the door, and I just went, ‘Chuck Berry, my hero!’ It just came out, you know? And he just gets over and he hugs me. I was really thrilled, you know. And we were playing in the back there, playing in the dressing room.”
After a commercial break, Lennon and Ono were joined onstage by Berry and the members of Elephant’s Memory. They performed ‘Memphis, Tennessee’, which Lennon had sung with The Beatles a decade earlier. A brief discussion with Berry and Lennon followed, after which they performed ‘Johnny B Goode’.
The next guest was macrobiotic cook Hilary Redleaf, who gave a demonstration of how to cook hijiki, during which Lennon almost cut his hand with a knife.
It was followed by an interview with the United States Peace Corps and Action Corps director Joseph Blatchford, followed by David Rosenboom, an experimental musician and engineer who had developed a method to amplify and broadcast alpha brain signals. Lennon and Ono were wired up, and the sounds from their craniums was mixed with Rosenboom’s keyboard playing.