Various Artists - "Buy The World A Coke"
1971
On first viewing, I think I got the ending of Mad Men wrong. I thought after Don hugged Leonard - the not-stunningly-handsome, not-cool Dad stuck in a boring office job and an afterthought with his family (an average Don with zero moxie) - he embraced the om-om-om of the counterculture as the only thing keeping him from going off on a dismal, despaired, life-ruining bender. Peggy had told him he'd never get to work on Coke, and the last we saw of her she was intensely typing. Being a sucker for an image of a hard-working writer hammering out work, I figured she was typing up the script of the Coke ad that co-opted the very new age beliefs that Don had adopted.
But upon discussion with my brother and reading Meredith Blake's (they are always great) episode recap in the Los Angeles Times, it appears that Don was simply going with the flow at Big Sur in order to cunningly find a way to work on Coke after all. That is a better explanation of the smile that appears on his face at the end of the episode: He has found a way to turn this hippie-commune nightmare; where he is abandonded by the only person who is tied to his Dick Whitman past, a person he genuinely tried to help, into an iconic ad. Always the ad man, that Draper.
During one of its revivals on TV years ago, a friend said that the "Buy The World A Coke" song is great. I disagreed, with that weary purist mentality that something appearing in a commercial is automatically not "real" and hence inferior. Then after hearing it again with fresh ears and an open mind, I agreed with him. It is a great song. Turns out it was written in part by the same guys who wrote The Hollies hit "Long Cool Woman In A Black Dress" and (even better) the "If You've Got The Time" jingle for Miller Beer.
Hats off to all the folks behind Mad Men, it was quite the run. For a few weeks a year, that Sunday-night-creep, I-don't-want-to-go-to-school feeling was banished. On a kinda-related note, I saw an Alison Brie doppelganger in south Minneapolis last week. Same walk, same legs that we see Trudy Campbell sporting as she gets on the Learjet. Yessir.