“Bullet” by The Misfits & Psycho-Sexual Americana
President’s bullet-ridden body in the street
Ride, Johnny, ride
Kennedy’s shattered head hits concrete
Ride, Johnny, ride
They came from New Jersey. Lodi, New Jersey to be exact.
In 1977, the Garden State may as well have been a foreign country insofar as the punk rock movement was concerned. All the cool kids were in New York City playing at CBGB. The Ramones, Television, Blondie, Talking Heads, Dead Boys. The music was fast, aggressive, and charged with a kind of chaotic fury not seen since the heyday of garage rock a decade earlier. And yet, so many of the New York bands had art school baggage, and as a result carried themselves with an aloof, ennui-riddled quality that let outsiders know that punk was not for squares.
Across the bridge and across the river, the suburban town of Lodi seemed like the last place for a punk band to form. The borough consisted of two-and-a-half square miles of charming houses and shopping centers. Once upon a time, the Lenape called it home. Then, in the 17th century, European settlers, first the Dutch of New Netherland and then the English, staked their claim on the town, christening it as New Barbadoes [1]. The township did not become Lodi until the 1820s. At that point, the former haven for fur trappers became a manufacturing hub, with grist mills, salt mills, and chemical factories. In time, Italian immigrants attracted to blue collar jobs settled in Lodi, and thus the town which had been named in honor of a city in Lombardy became an Italian outpost in what had once been Anglo-Dutch land. A joke began to circulate: Lodi was an acronym for Lots of Dumb Italians [1].
Glenn Allen Anzalone, born on June 23, 1955, at first appeared like any other kid in the neighborhood. The Anzalones of MacArthur Avenue did have one weird thing about them—they were Protestant in a majority Catholic township. The family patriarch, Richard Anzalone, made his money as a television repairman. The former Marine who saw combat in World War II and Korea married a local Italian Catholic girl named Maretta. Glenn was the couple’s third child. Young Glenn developed a passion for rock and roll early on. He liked The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. Later, he would get heavy into Blue Cheer and Black Sabbath.
At the same time, Glenn spent what little money he had on comic books. Particular favorites included Batman, Spider-Man, and Captain America. Glenn also liked the horror comics produced by E.C., such as Tales from the Crypt [2]. The kid described by others as a “tough metal shop guy” and a “wise guy” also had a deep appreciation for late-night TV. Glenn loved monster movies. Such after-dark programs represented the height of American mid-century Gothicism (what literary critic Timothy Jones has dubbed as “the carnival Gothic”), with the ghoulishly made-up hosts presenting “delight and amusement” as the sole rationale behind watching werewolves and space aliens threaten humanity on a weekly basis [3]. A few of these midnight watchers got hooked and became known as “monster kids.” Glenn was one such kid. In 1977, this monster kid had his own band.
Named after Marilyn Monroe’s final film, The Misfits included Anzalone on vocals, Jerry Caiafa on bass, Frank LiCata on guitar, and drummer Manny Martinez. This fearsome foursome combined their disparate influences (mostly glam rock in the vein of David Bowie and The New York Dolls, plus British punk bands like The Damned) and started jamming in garages around Lodi. The Misfits soon got gigs in New York following their public debut in April 1977. The suburban Jersey dudes were not hip enough for CBGB, so they played Max’s Kansas City on Park Avenue South. The Misfits tried to fit in with the burgeoning punk scene. Jerry wore black leather jackets (Glenn preferred soft brown leather), the band went on stage in make-up, and rather than let the world know that they were mostly guidos from Bergen County, the members took stage names. LiCata became Franché Coma. Initially, Caiafa wanted to be Jerry, only Jerry. However, a smarter voice inside of his head decided to go with Jerry Only instead. Anzalone took the surname Danzig after the scenic and medieval port city in northern Poland (today’s Gdańsk) [4]. It was this lineup that recorded and produced the band’s first single, “Cough/Cool.” Recorded at Rainbow Studios in Manhattan, “Cough/Cool” is a moody, keyboard-heavy dirge that debuted one month after the band’s first show. 500 copies were produced and distributed in true DIY fashion via the band’s own recording label—Blank Records [5].
The name “Blank” proved controversial. Major label Mercury Records wanted to release Cleveland art punk band Pere Ubu’s The Modern Dance on a new imprint. Mercury sought to call this imprint Blank, but an angry phone call from Danzig informed them that The Misfits already had a claim to the name. Rather than change course, Mercury offered the band thirty hours of studio time and the option to release their eventual album on Mercury’s Blank. The Misfits agreed. The band (now with a new drummer named Jim Catania, aka Mr. Jim) got free studio time for their first album, while Mercury received permanent rights to the Blank name [6].
The Blank brouhaha resulted in Static Age. Recorded at C.I. Studios in New York from January to February 1978, Static Age would not see the light of day as a complete album until February 1996. Nobody, not even Mercury, was interested in releasing Static Age. The Misfits decided that the best course of action would be to release songs from Static Age as singles or as remixed tracks on EPs distributed by Danzig’s Plan 9 Recordings. Some of these songs are Misfits classics. “We Are 138” references George Lucas’s THX 1138, while “Attitude” relishes in straightforward punk snarl and profanity.
Elsewhere on Static Age, Danzig, the poet laureate of the band, leaned into themes that would later define The Misfits as the originators of horror punk. “Hybrid Moments” is a charming ditty that includes lines like “When new creatures rape your face/ Hybrids opened up the door.” “Last Caress,” arguably the band’s most infamous track, recounts the exploits of a human monster.
I got somethin’ to say
And I killed a baby today
And it doesn’t matter much to me
As long as it’s dead
The rapist-murderer of “Last Caress” is not too dissimilar from the unnamed dispenser of cruelty in “Theme for a Jackal” (“Spit and choke on the lives you’ve taken, you can’t shake ‘em loose”). Murderers, macabre individuals, and manifold perversions—these themes predominate on Static Age. They are streetwise themes to be sure, as Static Age mostly lacks the later B-movie schlock that would come to define The Misfits during their era of devilocks and the Crimson Ghost [7]. “Teenagers From Mars” is the lone indication of where things would go after the debut album.
The January-February 1978 recording sessions in New York saw the creation and production of what would become the band’s second single. Released in June 1978, “Bullet” is a stark and highly sexualized retelling of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. It began life as a free verse poem written by Danzig in 1974 [8]. Later, as a heavy metal heartthrob, Danzig would make a stink about his love of poetry, especially Baudelaire. His songs for the band Danzig tend to be tasteful dark Romantic odes to sex and blasphemy. “Bullet” is none of these things. It is instead a dripping, gore- and cum-soaked spectacle about America’s unhealthy obsession with JFK’s murder.
Arise Jackie-O
Jonathan F. Kennedy will rise and be shot down
Dirt’s gonna be your desert
My cum will be your life source and the only way to get it
Is to suck or fuck or be poor and devoid
This sex ritual invocation ends with demands for masturbation and Gokkun. Given that Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis appears to be the song’s primary target (see, for instance, “Texas is an outrage when your husband is dead”), it is her job to commit these disgusting and heinous deeds. Shocking the hoi polloi is the point here, and Danzig’s gleeful maledictions against the Kennedy legacy are the perfect accompaniment to the song’s chainsaw guitar and driving bass line. “Bullet” is still gnarly all these decades later. It must have been an atom bomb in 1978.
Arguably, the most influential element in “Bullet” is the chorus:
Texas is an outrage when your husband is dead
Texas is an outrage when they pick up his head
Texas is the reason that the president’s dead
You gotta suck, suck, Jackie, suck
The idea that Texas had something to do with Kennedy’s assassination is not a new idea. Following that fateful day in Dallas, the Warren Commission and FBI put boots on the ground in the Lone Star State in order to suss out anti-government feeling. What the G-men found were kooks aplenty. They also found men who seemed to have a visceral hatred against Kennedy. One such man was General Edwin A. Walker, a native Texan and veteran of World War II and Korea. Walker had resigned from his Army post in 1961 after the new president ordered an investigation into his ties to the John Birch Society [9]. It was alleged by the new Democratic administration that the arch-conservative Walker had distributed Bircherite leaflets to his soldiers. For those not in the know, the John Birch Society was the bogeyman for Cold War liberals during the 1960s. Named after an Army intelligence officer murdered in China by Mao’s Red Army, the JBS was created in 1958 by businessman Robert W. Welch, Jr. The group quickly rose to prominence thanks to its large membership and its promotion of several conspiracy theories, most of which involved accusing government figures of being secret communist agents. The JBS accused Kennedy of being “soft” on communism, with some members of the group arguing that he was an outright traitor to the American nation.
The JBS had a lot of pull with Republicans and Democrats in the South prior to their intentional suppression as the “radical fringe” by William F. Buckley and the new conservative establishment at the National Review. Dallas in 1963 was seen as a JBS city. General Walker lived there at the time. Because of this, and because of the city’s historic ties to the Ku Klux Klan and its strong opposition to racial integration, a Dallas resident named Nelle Doyle hoped that her letter to White House press secretary Pierre Salinger would dissuade President Kennedy from visiting the city. “This ‘hoodlum mob,’” Doyle wrote, “is frenzied and infuriated because their attack upon Ambassador Adlai Stevenson on the 24th, backfired on them” [10]. Doyle warned Salinger that General Walker’s followers were just getting started. Texas is the reason that the president is dead.
The psycho-sexual fantasies at the heart of “Bullet” are emblematic of the whole ordeal of JFK-mania. Music journalist Zachary Lipez once connected “Bullet” to James Ellroy and his Underworld USA Trilogy [11]. He is right in that both pull back the lid on the occultic para-politics of the Cold War era. Conspiracies started even before Kennedy’s body was cold. Both Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby, the two known gunmen in Dallas on November 22nd, had shady connections to the CIA, plus the former Marine Oswald had spent time in the Soviet Union. The CIA is often named as the chief culprit behind the assassination, with theorists positing that the intelligence agency wanted Kennedy out of the way because he intended on cutting them down and halving their budget. This theory and its many permutations see Dead Jack Kennedy as a Cold War skeptic intent on ending the war in Southeast Asia and rapprochement with Castor’s Cuba. The fact that this is at odds with the historical record (Kennedy created the U.S. Army Special Forces and oversaw the deployment of some 16,000 U.S. troops in South Vietnam) does not dampen enthusiasm for the idea that the CIA took out a sitting president.
Others have argued since 1963 that organized crime killed Kennedy as payback for Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy’s crusade against the mob. Organized by New Orleans boss Carlo Marcello, and aided by the Trafficante crime family of Tampa, the mob hit on Kennedy was not just revenge for his brother’s investigations, but it was also revenge for the loss of lucrative casinos and rackets in Havana. The American mob in general wanted Kennedy dead after he and his family failed to scratch their backs after the mob went to bat for him (see: used municipal fraud and graft during the close 1960 election).
There are other theories about the assassination. The Cubans killed Kennedy. The Soviets took out their chief rival. The Birchers put a bullet in a crypto-commie. The list could go on. Both “Bullet” and Ellroy’s oeuvre suggest that the assassination was not the only conspiracy concerning Kennedy. There was a conspiracy of silence on the part of the press during Jack’s short reign. Images of smiling faces in Camelot belied the seedy underbelly of the White House. Ellroy depicts Kennedy as a coozehound in American Tabloid. The revelations of Mimi Beardsley, a teenage intern, seems to back this up, with Mimi recounting a sex-mad Kennedy and his friends ravishing her at the White House pool [12]. Besides Mimi, there was Marilyn. Marilyn Monroe and the president were more than likely lovers, and the affair may or may not have contributed to her mysterious death on August 5, 1962 [13]. There were more women, of course, just like there were more pills and more drinks.
Sex, violence, and secrets were the true currency of the Kennedy White House. Camelot was a farce created by a sympathetic media. Ellroy knows this, and The Misfits knew it in 1978. “Bullet” is salacious but true. The Grand Guignol image of Jackie slurping up her husband’s brains in “Bullet” is a metaphor of the unending American appetite for Kennedy’s exquisite corpse. The Kennedy assassination has been analyzed and over-analyzed to death. Kennedy’s naked body on the autopsy table has been examined by millions looking for new clues. Even out-of-body, the president’s ghost has lingered over the American political landscape since 1963. The haunting never goes away, and indeed it has only increased in frequency and intensity. This is because the thing that animates all Kennedy conspiracy theories—the belief that the American Empire is run by shadowy cabals of unelected bureaucrats pursuing schemes against the will of the American people—has only become more pronounced over the years.
“Bullet,” along with the entire Danzig-era Misfits discography (1977-1983), is about the horrors of mid-century Americana. More than movie mutants or pale-skinned vamps, the Zapruder film made real monster kids. Seeing the president’s head explode was bad enough, but what followed proved to be worse. The Kennedy corpse still draws flies, and probably always will. People still have to suck, suck, suck like Jackie-O because blood is the ultimate aphrodisiac. It is, to quote The Misfits, a violent world where people are “vivisected for your magazine essay.” We love a good murder, and “Bullet” is a reminder that few murders in the American canon are as beloved as the one that occurred in Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963.
[1]: James Greene, Jr., This Music Leaves Stains: The Complete History of The Misfits (Scarecrow Press: Lanham, Maryland, 2013): 7.
[2]: Greene, This Music Leaves Stains, 8.
[3]: Timothy Jones, The Gothic and the Carnivalesque in American Culture (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2015): 7.
[4]: Greene, This Music Leaves Stains, 17.
[5]: Greene, This Music Leaves Stains, 16.
[6]: Greene, This Music Leaves Stains, 18.
[7]: The black-and-white skullface image that is closely associated with the band comes from a 1946 film serial about a mastermind criminal out to steal cutting-edge technology.
[8]: Greene, This Music Leaves Stains, 21.
[9]: Rebecca Onion, “The ‘Wanted For Treason’ Flyer Distributed in Dallas Before JFK’s Visit,” Slate, Nov. 15, 2013.
[10]: UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson (D-IL) was booed, heckled, and hit by placards by JBS members while attempting to speak at the Dallas Memorial Auditorium on October 24, 1963.
[11]: Zachary Lipez, “Texas is the Reason: The Death of JFK and Danzig’s Shining Moment,” Vice, Nov. 21, 2013.
[12]: Mimi Alford, Once Upon a Secret: My Affair with President John F. Kennedy and Its Aftermath (New York: Random House, 2012): 50.
[13]: Not only did The Misfits name themselves after Monroe’s final film, but their 1981 song “Who Killed Marilyn?” name drops the Kennedys as possible culprits.
All lyrics in this essay were written by Glenn Danzig and taken from Genius.com.
— Arbogast is the author of Emperor of the Mountain and The Shanghai Horror. He is an editor at Terror House Magazine and The Bizarchives.