What single was number one during the Cuban Missile Crisis?
Credit: Far Out / Thomas Taylor Hammond / USAF / Billboard
Could it be that it took the Cuban Missile Crisis to push the Baby Boomers toward the counterculture, finally?
Youth culture was alive and well in the States during the previous decade. Looked on enviously by the post-war kids across the Atlantic, still stuck in the drab hangover of austerity, the pop cultural glow that beamed across the Western world during the 1950s was fuelled by the US’s economic boom and a new marketable demographic with cash in their pockets: the teenager.
The decade’s teen landscape was under the Cold War’s shadow, however. Looming over the commercial terrain of rock and roll, drive-ins, and Coca-Cola was the ramping up of the Atomic Age and the anxieties of nuclear war between America and the Soviet Union, as well as a fierce McCarthyist panic of ‘reds under the bed’ and pinko communism subverting the pillars of good, honourable Christian society.
For all the rock rebellion and juvenile delinquency triggering the day’s press obsessions of youth dissent, anti-socialist sentiment was not mutually exclusive with the new youth culture.
Yet, such global loggerheads soon exhausted the world, whatever generation. The US and USSR tensions reached their most dramatic crescendo during the hair-trigger 13 days across October 1962, when the nightmare of mutual destruction had never been so close. The previous year, America had been quietly deploying missile capabilities around Italy and Turkey, well within striking distance of Moscow, and the CIA attempted to overthrow Fidel Castro’s Latin Marxist regime via the Bay of Pigs disaster.
The Soviets responded in kind. A U-2 spy plane spotted evidence of launch facilities constructed in Cuba with easy ballistic reach to Washington DC. In a dangerous domino effect, a naval “quarantine” around Cuba then raised the US nuclear alert to DEFCON 2, just one level down from nuclear attack… Eventually, President John F Kennedy and Premier Nikita Khrushchev came to an agreement: the US dismantling their missiles in key European locales while the Soviets promised likewise in Cuba, and the world breathed a sigh of relief.
So, what song was number one during the Cuban Missile Crisis?
Consensus dictates that the Cuban Missile Crisis officially began on October 16th when JFK was first shown the surveillance photos of the launch sites on Cuban territory – as the political turmoil engulfed the White House, Frankie Valli and his Four Seasons were enjoying the end of their five-week run at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 with their doo-wop-inspired ‘Sherry’ hit, initially released back in August.
Six days into the crisis, JFK left a mid-term election campaign in Chicago early under the pretence of ill health to confirm with the Security Council to go ahead with the naval blockade. The single that soundtracked such Cold War machinations? Bobby ‘Boris’ Pickett and the Crypt-Kickers’ novelty horror-pop ‘Monster Mash’ pastiche, sitting at number one for two weeks and overseeing the remainder of the crisis, aptly stayed put at the top spot across Halloween.
The Cold War wouldn’t reach such dangerous peaks again. Mutually Assured Destruction and the later détente policy would cement themselves as the understood dynamic between the two superpowers, and the 1960s generation abandoned Red Scare conservatism in favour of the countercultural radicalism that swept across the nation, and the rock and pop soundtracks that scored such new radicalism in the aftermath of the Atomic Age’s cultural grip.
