The question “where were you when (such a thing happened)?…” has already been applied to the deaths of John Lennon, Ayrton Senna or the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York. But the first shocking fact to provoke this question was the assassination of John F. Kennedy, president of the United States, exactly 60 years ago.
The world stopped with the impact of the news because JFK was a kind of “first pop politician”.
Young (he was 43 years old when he was elected and took office, and 46 years old when he died), smiling, handsome, flirtatious, an icon of the illusions of a better future for an entire generation of Americans, Kennedy began his campaign to be re-elected in 1964.
On Friday, November 22, 1963, JFK was parading in an open car through the streets of Dallas, Texas, when his head was blown off by rifle shots. It is worth mentioning that the famous film by amateur cameraman Abraham Zapruder, which captured the shots hitting the president, was only made public some time later, not on the same day.
Officially, the perpetrator of the murder was an alleged communist named Lee Harvey Oswald, arrested hours after the crime. Authorship has been questioned by dozens of conspiracy theories for 60 years.
Oswald didn’t even say what he might know about other people possibly involved. He was also murdered two days later at the door of a police station when he was going to be transferred to another prison. Detail: his death was broadcast live on national TV throughout the United States.
Oswald’s killer was a, let’s say, late-night male show business impresario named Jack Ruby. He had a lot of trouble with the Mafia. Arrested in the act, Ruby died of cancer in prison at the age of 55, in January 1967.
If Ruby’s motivation for assassinating Kennedy’s assassin had something secret, it remained unrevealed. He justified himself only by saying that she did not want the widowed first lady Jacqueline Kennedy to suffer every time she saw Oswald on TV. Perfectly believable.
Real facts and conspiracy theories about Kennedy’s death (and life too) would take up an entire website with a lot of strain on the server. The influence of this on the popular imagination and on films (“JFK: The Question That Doesn’t Want to Shut”, by Oliver Stone), series (“Mad Men”, an episode of “Seinfeld”) and books (works by James Ellroy and Stephen King ) is also huge.
So, let’s just focus on moments in pop music that had John Kennedy as inspiration.
1- Frank Sinatra – “High Hopes” (1960)
How about having your campaign theme for president in the voice of the greatest and most famous singer of his time? And who records music less for the money than because he really believes in the candidacy? The pop myth of John Kennedy had this. The official “High Hopes” jingle was released by Frank Sinatra in 1960.
Sinatra and Kennedy became close friends during this period. It was thanks to the singer that the candidate and later president took the star Marilyn Monroe to bed, as well as other unknown actresses. Sinatra even organized the entire JFK inauguration show in January 1961.
The eternal friendship lasted until March 1962. Kennedy was going to visit California and Sinatra had a presidential suite with a helipad built in his mansion in Palm Springs to accommodate him.
However, Robert Kennedy, JFK’s brother who held the position equivalent to that of Minister of Justice in Brazil, advised the president to distance himself from Sinatra because of the singer’s connections and friendships with mobsters.
JFK ended up staying at the home of singer-actor Bing Crosby, a notorious voter of the Republican Party, a rival of the president’s Democratic Party.
Possessed with rage, Sinatra destroyed the helipad with a sledgehammer, never wanted anything to do with the Kennedys again and became a conservative Republican for the rest of his life, abandoning his long history of voting for the Democrats.
2- Marilyn Monroe – “Happy Birthday Mr. President” (1962)
President Kennedy’s 45th birthday party on May 19, 1962, was a grand gala event at Madison Square Garden in New York City. But only one attraction is remembered to this day: the performance of Marilyn Monroe, the biggest movie star at the time and Kennedy’s lover, in a tight dress singing an adapted version of “Happy Birthday”.
After Marilyn, Kennedy goes on stage clearly embarrassed by the gift he just received from the actress. Less than three months later, Marilyn died from an alleged tranquilizer overdose at the age of 36.
The video above for “Happy Birthday Mr. President” featuring Marilyn Monroe is colorized. The original broadcast was in black and white.
3- The Byrds – “He Was a Friend of Mine” (live at the Monterey Festival, 1967)
American folk-rock quintet The Byrds achieved huge success in 1965 with their first release, a shortened cover of “Mr. Tambourine Man” by Bob Dylan. For their second album “Turn! Turn! Turn!”, released in December 1965, its leader and guitarist Jim McGuinn (shortly afterwards, he would change his first name to Roger) prepared a tribute to John Kennedy.
According to McGuinn, on the night of the murder he adapted a traditional American folk song, with no known author, which was first recorded in 1939.
Byrd composed new verses that directly referenced Kennedy, such as “he was in Dallas”, “from a sixth floor window a sniper shot him” and “leader of a nation for a precious time”.
In 1967, the Byrds performed at the Monterey Pop Festival. Before “He Was a Friend of Mine”, politically engaged guitarist David Crosby gave a short speech questioning the official version that Lee Harvey Oswald was the president’s only assassin.
The Byrds were left out of the original “Monterey Pop” documentary, released months after the festival. This performance of “He Was a Friend of Mine” only officially became public in 2002, when a box set of Monterey performances was released.
4- Dion – “Abraham, Martin & John” (1968)
Accompanied by his group The Belmonts, Dion achieved considerable success in the early 1960s with his tough Italian-American doo-wop style. By 1968, Dion was already in his mature singer-songwriter incarnation.
Dion hit the nail on the head with a tribute to three great characters in American history who were shot to death: presidents Abraham Lincoln (in 1865) and John Kennedy, and black leader Martin Luther King (in April 1968).
The video above is from Dion’s performance on “The Smothers Brothers Show”. The song “Abraham, Martin and John” was also successful in 1969 in the peculiar voice of black comedian Moms Mabley.
5- The Rolling Stones – “Sympathy for the Devil” (1968)
In 1968, after a vacation in Brazil, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards composed this rock-samba. In the lyrics, Jagger decided to place Satan as the narrator, taking pride in his influence on wars and tragedies throughout history.
The line “I screamed ‘who killed Kennedy?’ ” was ready when Robert Kennedy, John’s younger brother, was also assassinated in June 1968 while campaigning to be nominated as the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate.
Jagger took the easiest way out possible and changed the verse to “I screamed ‘who killed THE Kennedys?’ “.
The video is from the TV special “Rock and Roll Circus”, recorded in 1968 and shelved until its release on videocassette in 1996.
6- The Misfits – “Bullet” (1978)
Long before being better known for the fashionable t-shirts worn by even those who have no idea that they are The Misfits, the band made sinister and powerful punk-rock between 1977 and 1983. Their second single, released in 1978, was “Bullet ”, with lyrics that refer to Kennedy’s assassination – and which don’t make much of a ceremony to make sexually suggestive references to Jacqueline Kennedy, who was next to the president in the open car.
The video above is an animation based on footage from the fateful day in Dallas.
7- Lou Reed – “The Day John Kennedy Died” (live, 2003)
Lou Reed chronicled John Kennedy and ordinary people on the day of the assassination. The original version came out in 1982, on the album “The Blue Mask”. The above version was recorded live in Los Angeles in 2003 and released on the 2004 album “Animal Serenade”.
In the lyrics, Reed mentions an American football game being shown on TV. There were those who disputed that no match took place that day. But the poet justified himself by saying that this was how he remembered November 22, 1963.
8- XTC – “The Ballad of Peter Pumpkinhead” (1992)
English alternative pop-rock group XTC put together the music video for their song “The Ballad of Peter Pumpkinhead” with references to John Kennedy and his tragic end. Even a Marilyn Monroe lookalike is present. The song is from the 1992 album “Nonsuch”.
9- Lana Del Rey – “National Anthem” (2012)
For “National Anthem”, a song from her second album “Born to Die”, American singer Lana Del Rey was also inspired by JFK for the music video. And she plays both Marilyn Monroe (with dark hair!) singing “Happy Birthday Mr. President” and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy.
10- Bob Dylan – “Murder Must Foul” (2020)
In the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, Bob Dylan – already with a Nobel Prize for Literature on his shelf – came out of the woodwork after three years and released the solemn and long (practically 17 minutes) ode to John Kennedy that also sought to reflect on the effects and reflections of the assassination on the history and society of the United States in all the years that followed.
Shortly after its isolated release, “Murder Must Foul” (an expression taken from the play “Hamlet”, by William Shakespeare) was included on the album “Rough and Rowdy Ways”.
PS: unflattering bands
JFK and his assassination inspired the names of at least two alternative rock bands – both choosing to go against the tide of respectful tribute to the president.
The most famous is Dead Kennedys, a Californian glory of American punk led by vocalist Jello Biafra. “Dead Kennedys” can refer to both the murdered John and Robert, as well as several other family members victimized by an alleged “Kennedy curse” – such as their father, Joseph Kennedy (a former Prohibition liquor dealer and former American ambassador to the United Kingdom), and JFK’s older brother, Joseph Jr., who died in World War II before he could become the politician the patriarch intended.
Another is much less known and pays homage to JFK’s assassin: The Lee Harvey Oswald Band. They are an alternative band from Chicago that only released two albums and one EP between 1989 and 1996. They made an early EP in 2016.
