Really? Thanks for telling me! I appreciate it! I wonder why that song makes a reference to a Japanese warplane when it is really about the pride of the American space program.
Don’t know why the reference to zeke 64 or to jerry and the rockettes but to me the song is about turning tragedy ( Kennedy in dallas) into triumph (Apollo 11). Remember, the end of ww2 to landing on the moon was only 24 years.
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That’s a very interesting way of looking at it and probably the most accurate and detailed! I also don’t know who he is referring to when he mentions Jerry and the Rockettes. Thanks for the input!
Assuming that’s a reference to a Japanese fighter plane, could the “Lady” be the Tokyo Rose ? She was the American girl that became a propagandist
for Japan. There is mug shot of her dated 1946 ( I know song says 64) on Wikipedia.
“Jerry” , spelling implies a male, is maybe a
transgender friend ??? Speaks to the turmoil and
confusion of the era starting in 1964.
Don’t you luv obscure ambiguous lyrics!
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I guess that’s the beauty of songs and poems — everybody has his/her own interpretation. Now, that you mentioned the Tokyo Rose I think that could very well be the “woman” that the song talks about!
That “woman” could be Iva Toguri D’Aquino, an American woman of Japanese descent who went to Japan to visit her ailing aunt just a few days before Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. She was unable to return to the US because of the war between the two countries and was later recruited as a DJ for a Japanese radio propaganda show called “‘The Zero Hour,’ which consisted of skits, news reports, and popular American music,” according to Wikipedia.
At that time “Tokyo Rose” was simply a moniker given by the American media to any Japanese women that had ever worked on a Japanese radio station that tried to spread bad news about the American casualties to the American people and soldiers to demoralize them. It wasn’t about any one particular woman as there were numerous women that had worked in many Japanese radio programs to spread propaganda across the Pacific territories and the US. However, when D’Aquino tried to return to her home in the US, after the war had ended, she was wrongly accused of being a traitor against the US and Walter Winchell (a powerful broadcasting personality) and the American media labeled her as the “Tokyo Rose” since her Japanese heritage made her an easy target for them to attack to fulfill their need for revenge.
She was sent to prison and later paroled in 1956. However, 20 years later she was pardoned by President Gerald Ford when investigative journalists revealed the fact that the witnesses that had testified against her in court revealed the fact that they were being coached for months by the FBI and U.S. occupation police on what to say on the stand and the fact that these government organizations had also threatened to put them on trial for treason as well if they didn’t cooperate.
I don’t know, but that lady that rode the Zeke 64 could be Iva Toguri D’Aquino. Maybe when she came back to the US she rode the Zeke 64. That could possibly happen because by then the US military could take possession of all Japanese military equipments, including the Japanese warplane that D’Aquino rode on! Who knows! Just my thoughts!
So in keeping with the tragedy to triumph theme, the entire first stanza deals with bad or disruptive things that happened.
Or we could be over analyzing it all 
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If you ask most song writers, that is exactly what they say! I have seen a few of them being interviewed and they usually laughed or amazed at the things that people came up with to explain the meaning of their songs. They usually said something to the effect of: “I wish the song has that deep of a meaning when I wrote it!”
