Additionally, I wasn't born when President Kennedy was assassinated, so my question is this: is there a correlation between the Beatles' popularity in the United States and the death of JFK? Could it have been that U.S. kids were thirsting for something new that could get their minds off the situation here, and the Beatles were convenient?
The record industry was going through a creative lull in 1963, both feeling the effects of the payola investigation a few years before and a certain lack of "something new" to follow up on the huge impact of Elvis, Buddy Holly, Little Richard and the like. Instead, we got Chubby Checker, the Bristol Stomp and Bobby Vinton. Not bad records, but not trend-setting.
We not only got the British Invasion in the mid-60's, but also Motown and the beginning of hard rock. Exciting music.
The effect of the Kennedy assassination was not so enduring as to change the overall mood of teens and young adults. More weighting on those turning 18 was the draft and Vietnam and those factors did influence a lot of music.
I was "on the air" at WCUY in Cleveland when Kennedy was assassinated. I was 17, member of the school political club and the debate society and a subscriber to Newsweek, Time, Tiempo (Mexico) El Universal (Mexico) and the WSJ. I was very affected by the assassination, but after it became "old news" and we went back to worrying about the Russians, Castro, the growing Viet Nam conflict and the Tammany style politics of Johnson, the event stopped being top of mind..
Of course, the "happy" and exciting music of the Beatles and all the other British Invasion artists was welcome. But it was even bigger in the UK where Kennedy had not been their leader and the threat of a Viet Nam war was not a weight on their minds.