Damn, this was one of my favorite songs when I was a boy.
It came out in 1963 when I was six years old.
When Kennedy got shot. When I saw my father cry for the first time sitting in the old chair grimly watching the flag draped coffin in the grim motorcade with the mournful music on the old black and white TV.
I remember where I was when I heard it. I was in a parking lot of a store. Then we were in the store. They shot the President! They shot the President! Everyone was running around this way and that, not making sense. Nothing was making sense. There was chaos everywhere you looked. The radio was turned on in the store, droning away with the brutal staccato newsmen’s voices. We went back out to our car. There was news, the same news, on every station and nothing else at all. It was in the afternoon, that’s all I know.
Everybody who was alive back then knows exactly what they were doing when they shot the President.
When democracy died. When the dream of America died with the Deep State coup. When the joke of American democracy was shown as the pathetic sham it’s always been, a think veneer for Deep State and oligarchic rule, the very story of America itself.
But this song was always nice. There was always something hauntingly beautiful about it. It’s a silly little kids song, but if it doesn’t warm your heart, then you don’t have one to heat up.
Listen and enjoy. From 1963! The concert, live from 1965. Dig those haircuts!
