John Lennon slept here......

As you already know if you’ve visited the Riverside under our tenure as owners, it is purported that John Lennon slept at the Riverside Hotel – not exactly sure when, obviously before 1980. I was told this by the hotel’s previous owner, Abe Rodriguez, who even claimed to have a copy of the signed registration receipt. Abe mentioned that we would ultimately own that important little piece of history when we bought the hotel, but regretfully, that promise was never fulfilled. Caveat Emptor. This story was also verified as truth by some of the folks at Grand County Bank; I’m certain they wouldn’t lie to me.

Abe didn’t have a lot of details to pass along regarding Lennon’s visit, but did say that he stayed in what is known as the ‘Mil’ room, which is located at the southwest corner of the hotel. The Mil room is nice in that it is one of the larger rooms, as well as having the best views of the river, Mt. Bross, the town and the hills south of town. It is generally also the brightest room in the hotel.

When we bought the hotel and were in the process of redecorating, we thought it important to recognize the importance of this historic visit by hanging a picture of Mr. Lennon and a plaque detailing a short story of the stay in the Mil room. Julie scoured the internet for just the right Lennon picture, but nothing obvious stood out as the one we had to have; until we stumbled on a print in a dingy old shop on Chartres Street in New Orleans, of John standing in front of the Statue of Liberty waving the peace sign. You’ve probably all seen the picture, and we chose it because it seemed to sum up the John Lennon we loved and wanted to remember – still boyish and fun-loving – and it would have been taken around the time that John stayed at the hotel.

Julie was in charge of the picture, but I was in charge of the plaque. Tough to come up with an informative plaque when you have no information – I knew absolutely nothing other than ‘John Lennon stayed here’. So I did a little research and the first tie that I found to John Lennon and Colorado was that the Beatles played at Red Rocks Amphitheater on their first US tour in August of 1964. That Denver show was preceded three days earlier by a show in Los Angeles at The Hollywood Bowl. There it had to be! Here was Lennon in the Denver area, with three days unaccounted for. Surely he must have taken some tourist time to visit the majestic Rocky Mountains, Grand Lake, the National Park, the Colorado River, and naturally, The Riverside. But I needed a story for the wall, not just a string of dates where this could’ve happened; so I made one up.

Borrowing a little from Mr. Kerouac, the story went something like this. ‘On August 7th, 1964, after the conclusion of the Beatles concert at The Hollywood Bowl, John Lennon left the touring party and with two friends, drove east across the great American West, en route for the Beatles next show on August 11th at Red Rocks Amphitheater in Denver, CO. On the evening of August 10th, he pulled into Hot Sulphur Springs in search of a meal and a bed, and found the Riverside Restaurant and Hotel. He stayed in this room.’ I printed it, framed it and hung it in the room next to sink – the sink he would have washed in.

We always took visitors to the room when they toured the hotel, and watched with delight as they smiled at the thought of John Lennon one time habiting the space where they now stood. Many would get their picture taken in front of the plaque, while a few even went as far as to wash their hands in the sink. I often even offered guests the opportunity to vacuum the floor upon which he trod, or clean the windows through which he gazed, but never had takers.

Everything was going smoothly with the fabricated John Lennon legend until the arrival of Ms. Janet, one of our guests, who stayed in the John Lennon room one night while visiting the Rocky Mountains from California. Janet called immediate bullshit on the story, saying there was no way that Lennon left the group and drove across the desert with his buddies. In fact, she informed me that the first American Beatles tour was planned down to the second, and nowhere on the agenda would there have been a day away from the group for open time.

All right, so she caught me. But she was intrigued enough by the legend of his visit to do some research. Her job as a consultant in historical building and landmark preservation bent her towards a proclivity to get to the bottom of things and places. It wasn’t long after her visit that I received an email from Janet, detailing her best guess at when and why John Lennon would have visited The Riverside.

In the summer of 1974, four years after the breakup of The Beatles, John Lennon traveled to Caribou Ranch, a music studio in Nederland, CO, to record a few songs with Elton John; among them was Elton John’s cover of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. Lennon was accompanied not by Yoko, but May Pang, Yoko’s personal assistant, who at the time happened to be assisting Yoko by taking care of John’s…uh…personal needs.

After the recording session, John and May struck out on their own for a few quiet days in the Rockies. They were spotted buying a pair of cowboy boots in Boulder, and there are a few snapshots in May Pang’s book of John in a mountain meadow, and John lying in a mountain stream, but beyond that, not much else exists as a record of their Colorado visit. Being the internationally famous icon that he was, odds are he travelled the back roads, visiting quiet, out-of-the-way places, all the while keeping a low profile.

When you say things like ‘back roads’, ‘out-of-the-way places’ and ‘low profile’, what on earth would spring more quickly to mind than Hot Sulphur Springs, CO. And Lennon wouldn’t have wanted to stay at a busy summer-time hotel, one with a bunch of nosey, autograph-seeking tourists; again, what better spot for solitude in a deserted hotel than The Riverside. It makes perfect sense to me.

So did he or didn’t he stay at The Riverside? And if he did, did he play Imagine on the piano in the bar; that same bar piano that I have for sale on EBay right now? Did he eat in the restaurant, and did he really use the utensils that I sold for $600 on EBay last month? We’ll never know for sure, but I’m going with Janet’s theory and Imagine that he did.