Mad Men, page 11
The song would also seem thematically appropriate as a sort of anthem for Draper, given his well-established wandering eye and seeming inability ever to be satisfied with what he has, sexually or otherwise. However, despite the fact that “Satisfaction” has often been seen as an anthem about the insatiability of youthful lust (or, more idealistically, about the never-ending demand of youth that we should constantly strive to build a better world), the song is actually about advertising and consumerism, which makes it about as appropriate a musical companion to Mad Men as one could possibly imagine. Thus, the line in the song that “rhymes” with the shot of Don’s sparkling white shirt actually refers to a television commercial in which an announcer comes on to tell the singer “how white my shirts can be.” It is, in short, a reference to an ad for laundry detergent. Similarly, the line that immediately follows (accompanied by a cut to Draper lighting up still another cigarette) is a reference to cigarette branding by association with manliness (“He can’t be a man ’cause he doesn’t smoke the same cigarettes as me”). Given Draper’s extensive smoking habit—as well as his professional adventures with (and against) cigarette advertising—the reference is particularly rich.
Given these overt references to advertising, it seems fairly obvious that “Satisfaction” is, first and foremost, a commentary on consumerism—and one that is conducted from the point of view of a youthful rebellion against materialist values of the kind that are Draper’s lifeblood. Little wonder, then, that the song focuses on the inability to attain satisfaction, on the unquenchability of desire. After all, the desire upon which consumer capitalism is built is, of necessity, a desire that can never be satisfied. Consumers are urged (by people like Draper and his fellow mad men) to believe that purchasing certain products will solve all their problems, but of course this promise is and must be a false one. If purchasing any product could solve all of one’s problems, then one would need to make no further purchases after that one, bringing to a halt the cycle of consumption while at the same time bringing the capitalist system to its knees. Consumerism, by definition, must create a desire that cannot be fulfilled, so that consumers must continue to buy in an ongoing attempt to fill, through participation in the capitalist economy, a void that this economy works hard both to produce and to perpetuate.
Of course, from a Lacanian perspective, the desire that drives consumerism (unfulfillable by definition) is structurally quite similar to sexual desire, which is similarly driven by a doomed quest for fulfillment and completion, by a never-ending and hopeless search for the lost objet petit a, for the original sense of wholeness and satisfaction that fill the world of the infant. To a large extent, a recognition of this parallel has driven the entire career of Slavoj Žižek, whose combination of the seemingly incommensurate theoretical worlds of Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis is centrally informed by an understanding of the way in which a never-ending quest for romantic/sexual satisfaction so closely resembles consumerist desire.
The recognition of the connection between eroticism and consumerism is neither unique nor new to recent theorists such as Žižek. It is crucial to Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856), in which the title character so desperately (and hopelessly) seeks escape from emptiness and boredom through the twin expedients of adultery and shopping. But this parallel is also crucial to Mad Men, where it is clear that Draper’s crippled childhood endows him with a particularly strong sense of incompleteness and loss that both drives his quest for sexual fulfillment and fuels his ability to tap into and stimulate consumer desire for the products he hawks as a mad man. He, of all people, understands all too well just what it feels like to want something and to keep wanting, no matter how much you seem to get what you want.
From this point of view, “Satisfaction” lies at the very heart of Mad Men’s main narrative and thematic projects and is thus the perfect tune to accompany the series. It also raises some key issues in the interpretation of the series and especially of its treatment of the counterculture of the 1960s, especially in relation to consumer capitalism. However anti-consumerist it might be, for example, “Satisfaction” was itself a huge hit and a major consumerist success. As Thomas Frank has outlined, rock music in general was a boon to advertisers in the 1960s, and many of the hip new stars in the field established their hipness by demonstrating a familiarity with the new music (1998, 113). But then, for Frank, the counterculture as a whole was more a product of consumerist expansion than of resistance to that expansion. Four decades later, Mad Men would emerge with many of these same issues intact, and the exact status of the series as an endorsement or critique of consumerism is clearly debatable.
Given the close connection between the issues raised by “Satisfaction” and those addressed by Mad Men, perhaps it is not surprising that the series associates the Rolling Stones with marketing in other ways as well. In Episode 5.3 (“Tea Leaves”), which takes place early the following summer (1966), Don and Harry Crane try to sign the Stones to record a jingle for Heinz beans, having been asked to do so by Raymond Geiger (John Sloman), the Heinz beans rep, whose daughter is a big Stones fan. Aware of the song “Time Is on My Side,” Geiger loves the idea of having the Stones record a new jingly version called “Heinz Is on My Side.” (Unfortunately, “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” which might make a hilarious beans anthem, was not released until 1968.) Draper is repeatedly portrayed in the series as being clueless about the landscape of 1960s rock music, so it is not surprising that he has no idea that the Rolling Stones are a really big deal—probably far too big at this point to record a jingle for beans. Both Don and Harry seem to feel that the Stones are some sort of teenage bumpkins who will probably be thrilled at the chance to appear in a real TV ad. In reality, though, the two ad men (the latter of whom should really know better, being the SCDP media consultant) don’t even manage to get to meet with the Stones, who have far better things to do.
On the other hand, Draper in this episode might not be quite as out of it as he seems because he himself points out that there is a precedent, the Stones having two years earlier recorded a jingle for cereal back in Britain. And he’s right, the Stones actually did record a spot for Rice Krispies that plays on the notion that this particularly noisy cereal (advertised for years in the United States on the basis of its signature “snap, crackle, pop” sound) is so loud that some in the older generation might find it unpleasant—much in the same way that they react to the music of groups like the Stones as extremely annoying sonic pollution.
Of course, the landscape of popular music was changing rapidly in the mid-1960s, and the Rolling Stones were a huge phenomenon in 1966 (when Draper tried to sign them to hawk beans), as opposed to 1964 (when they were just releasing their first studio album and were still hungry enough to be willing to pitch cereal). In addition, neither Don nor Harry appears to have any idea what the Stones really represented to their legions of new, young countercultural fans in 1966, for whom the raw, brash, blues-inflected sound of the original bad boys of rock ’n’ roll seemed both a challenge to and a repudiation of the very establishment values that are embodied by Don and Harry as they awkwardly make their way backstage to try to sign the band. In short, signing to do a beans commercial in 1966 would have no doubt made the Stones seem like sell-outs to their fans, the result being that signing them to try to help sell such a lowly commercial product would have probably resulted in significantly reduced sales for their music, which of course was their main commercial product. Effective marketing required that the Stones not be perceived as participating in marketing.
As an interesting side note to this episode, it might be pointed out that this segment of Mad Men, which serves so well to help establish Draper’s estranged relationship with both contemporary music and the counterculture, might also be a reference to a real event in rock history. The Who, only one tier below the Beatles and the Stones in the hierarchy of British rock royalty, themselves recorded a number of commercial jingles in the mid-1960s (obviously the advertising industry was quick to realize that something potentially marketable was going on in the new world of rock music), but then attempted to distance themselves from that practice through self-parody in their 1967 album The Who Sell Out, which is filled with mock advertisements, including (oddly enough) a song entitled “Heinz Baked Beans.” It is in fact featured in the album’s title art, which shows Roger Daltrey (no Mick Jagger but a major figure in 1960s music nevertheless) sitting in a tub of Heinz baked beans while holding up a giant can of the gooey legumes. This brief parodic jingle (written and sung by John Entwhistle, it runs for exactly one minute, like many TV ads of the time) features a British mum who decides to serve Heinz baked beans for tea, thus theoretically opening up a whole new market for this quintessentially American product.
The prominent role played by the Rolling Stones in Mad Men is just one example of the way in which most of the major players who made 1960s popular music such a special phenomenon make an appearance in one way or another in the series. For example, Bob Dylan’s classic breakup anthem “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” plays over the closing scene of the first season, in which it is becoming clear that Draper’s first marriage is spiraling downward into doom. Meanwhile, the Beatles probably play an even more important symbolic role in the series than do the Stones, their music factoring in via a string of episodes that help to establish both the changing face of American culture in the 1960s and the inability of Draper (very much a man of the 1950s in many ways) to keep up with it. For example, just two weeks after the “Satisfaction” episode, in Episode 4.10 (“Hands and Knees”), Draper’s new secretary Megan Calvet wins some points with him by delivering tickets to the upcoming (and now legendary) concert of the Beatles that was held before a record crowd at New York’s Shea Stadium on August 15, 1965. Draper himself hopes to win some points with daughter Sally by taking her to the concert, though he is only half kidding when he threatens to wear earplugs through the whole thing. We don’t actually know, incidentally, if he carries through with the threat, because we never see Draper and daughter attend the actual concert, which seems to have been forgotten by the next episode. It’s one of those perplexing moments of failure to follow through that often happens in Mad Men, another of which, interesting enough, also involves Shea Stadium (then home of the New York Mets baseball team). In Episode 7.4 (“The Monolith”) Draper finds an abandoned Mets pennant in an episode set in 1969, appearing to set up the ascent to baseball legend of that year’s “Miracle Mets,” who went from ninth place (out of ten) the year before to win the National League pennant in a stunning late-season drive, then won the World Series against the heavily favored Baltimore Orioles (considered one of the greatest teams of all time) in one of the great upsets in Series history. Mike Bertha has presented a spirited argument for the metaphorical importance of this pennant as a sign of Draper’s own arc in the series, but the fact is that—while Draper does attend a Mets game with Freddie Rumsen—the Mets are largely forgotten after this episode and their stunning world championship victory is never mentioned in the series. Shea Stadium is apparently the place in Mad Men where motifs go to die.
Nearly one season later in the evolution of the series after the Beatles concert episode, a client requests music that sounds like the Beatles for use in his firm’s ads. Draper seems puzzled by the request, still having failed to grasp the marketing potential (or overall cultural import) of the rock revolution of the decade. Seeming, in fact, surprisingly out of step with the times, he consults new wife Megan (presumably because she is much younger and thus might be more in touch with contemporary music) about the phenomenon. “When did music become so important?” asks Draper, suddenly feeling old.
Trying to help out (and to remedy Don’s cluelessness), Megan responds in the very next episode (Episode 5.8, “Lady Lazarus”) by giving her husband a copy of Revolver, perhaps the greatest of Beatles albums. Revolver, incidentally, was released on August 5, 1966, so it was still new at the time of the action of this episode, as a radio broadcast embedded in the episode (one of the time markers that appear so frequently in Mad Men) identifies it as set in October 1966. Megan especially recommends the album’s acclaimed closing track “Tomorrow Never Knows,” which Draper subsequently plays, alone, after she leaves. A song filled with references to death, it seems an ominous choice, especially for someone as seemingly self-destructive as Draper. On the other hand, the song (whose lyrics were inspired by an adaptation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead co-authored by none other than drug guru Timothy Leary) is actually about the death of the ego during the experience of meditation under the influence of LSD, so that the references to death in the lyrics are metaphorical and not nearly as dark as they might first sound.
This Eastern-inspired erasure of the ego (somewhat analogous to the nihilation of the self in Sartrean existentialism) is, in fact, meant to be a positive experience. It is also a quintessentially countercultural product (in terms of the music, as well as the lyrics), and “Tomorrow Never Knows”—one of numerous Beatles songs inspired by their experiences with drugs and/or their encounter with Eastern (especially Indian) mysticism—can be taken as a rejection of precisely the same Protestant-work-ethic, materialist striving that has driven Draper throughout his adult life. This striving has gained him a certain amount of professional recognition, two beautiful wives, and a boatload of money, but it hasn’t made him happy. He is not, however, quite ready for the anti-materialist message of the Beatles song, and it is not surprising that he isn’t impressed. It could be argued that this moment sets up the ultimate end of the series, when Draper possibly finds a sort of enlightenment at a California hippie-esque New Age institute, but at this moment he simply dismisses the song and turns it off before it has played through.
In addition to the role played by popular music by major artists such as the Beatles and the Rolling Stones within episodes of Mad Men to help place them within the context of the 1960s, the show also gets considerable mileage from the well-chosen ending music that plays over the closing credits each week. Indeed, this ending music became one of the most anticipated features of the show as audiences eagerly waited to see which of their favorite songs from the 1960s might show up as a kind of coda to the action that had gone before. In this (and in many other ways), Mad Men follows in the footsteps of predecessors such as The Sopranos, though the technique is especially effective in Mad Men because the music is typically taken from the same time period as the action of the show, thus enhancing the impact of the episode that had just gone before. A good example occurs at the end of Episode 6.10 (“A Tale of Two Cities”), which is filled with psychedelic sixties imagery and even ends with the square accounts man Pete Campbell sparking up a doobie. It is thus highly appropriate that the ending music to this episode is the Big Brother and the Holding Company recording of “Piece of My Heart,” not only because of the psychedelic tenor of the entire episode, but because this song appeared in the album Cheap Thrills and was released in August of 1968, the month of the action of this episode itself. It was also the group’s last album with Janis Joplin on vocals, as she left the group almost immediately afterward, thus reinforcing the things-fall-apart tenor of the entire sixth season of Mad Men. At the time, though, Cheap Thrills was a success, launching Joplin into a short period of major stardom that made her an icon of the sixties counterculture, though she would die of a drug overdose only two years later—in October of 1970.
Joplin would thus die just a month, as it turns out, before the action of the final episode of Mad Men, though her death does not factor in the series. Still, including her in the ending music of the “A Tale of Two Cities” episode contributes to a network of images of death that gave the entire sixth season undertones so ominous that numerous fans were assuming the series would eventually conclude with Draper’s own death. Indeed, Draper himself smokes hashish at a pool party in this episode and then very nearly drowns in the pool. It would, however, be Don’s first wife, Betty, who would be done in by smoking, consigned to death by cancer at the end of Mad Men, thanks (no doubt) to the cigarettes she had puffed so assiduously throughout the series; she was thus killed by her own kind of drug overdose.
The use of music to create ominous imagery in Mad Men was also effectively employed in the final season’s Episode 7.3 (“Field Trip”), which used ending music from the other sixties icon of towering talent, soaring success, and early death: Jimi Hendrix, who died of a drug overdose the month before Joplin did the same. This episode closes with Hendrix’s raw and bluesy recording of “If 6 Was 9,” which appeared on the 1967 Jimi Hendrix Experience album Axis: Bold as Love, but is also well remembered for its appearance on the soundtrack of the 1969 countercultural film Easy Rider. Among other things, the song includes an in-your-face challenge to a “white collared conservative . . . businessman,” whose values Hendrix defiantly rejects in the song. This businessman, of course, could easily be Draper, though (given the ending of the series) the song could also be taken as an anticipation of either Draper’s own ultimate rejection of the materialist values that had driven his advertising career or of Draper’s response to Hendrix via his ultimate realization that the imagery and ideas of the counterculture could be conscripted for use in big bucks marketing campaigns.
“Field Trip,” incidentally, has some fine moments and includes major turning points in Mad Men, including Megan’s announcement to Don that their marriage is over and Don’s return to SC&P after a period of exile. This return, of course, is extremely problematic and seems to take place on terms that are designed to humiliate Draper and teach him, with his low-class background, not to be so arrogant and uppity at work. These terms, in fact, might be taken as the beginning of an arc that will lead to Draper’s sudden bolting from a business meeting, followed by his cross-country drive to California in apparent search of the kind of spiritual enlightenment that his career in capitalism can never bring him.
