Our Kind of Spirituals, No. 10: Lou Reed, “The Day John Kennedy Died”

“I dreamed I was the president / of these United States … ” he begins, and goes on to tell the story of a certain Friday afternoon in Syracuse in November 1963: they were in a restaurant with a football game playing on TV when “the screen went dead and the announcer said there’s been a tragedy …”  And there in mid-recitation the guitarist Robert Quine and the bassist Fernando Saunders, playing liquid riffs, go gracefully into a minor key.   

What a country it was, where Lou Reed would dream of being president of “these United States,” elevated diction and all.  

What a country this is, where Lou Reed and John F. Kennedy, dead a half a century apart, now rest in a kind of peace.