Sergeant
Pepcid’s
Lonely Hearts Club Band
I sensed there was something wrong right after the opening of Sunday night’s The Beatles Anthology: Part One when the announcer’s voice boomed that the evening was being brought to us by something called Pepcid AC. The AC stands for Acid Controller. You take Pepcid in anticipation of getting indigestion. The other two main sponsors of our collective walk down Penny Lane were a credit card designed by Ringo, and Ford Taurus wagon.
The next two hours contained forty-seven-odd commercials, not counting promos for the local TV news team that’s On Our Side. One ad for every two-and-a-half minutes of Beatles nostalgia, a hard day’s night indeed, considering that the only thing we learned that we didn’t already know was that Ringo was miserably hung-over when they shot his solo scene in the movie of that name, walking along the canal kicking bits of debris and muttering to himself angstfully. Ringo’s commentary made it clear that he was describing one of the immortal moments in modern cinema. (Ten bucks to any aging boomer who actually makes it all the way through A Hard Day’s Night.) On Wednesday in Part Two, George reveals that he had turista during the beach scene in Help!
Grateful as I was for Ringo’s now-it-can-be-told revelations—I already knew that the Beatles started in Liverpool, did gigs in Hamburg, and came to America in 1964 and went on the Ed Sullivan Show—the fact is his new credit card is much more interesting.
About halfway through I found I had stopped paying attention to the Anthology, despite the breathless alerts that an original Beatles song, “Free as a Bird,” was upcoming: “Stay tuned for the world premiere of the new Beatles song.” Instead I was fixating on the commercials. It was the ads that fascinated, for they showed us what boomers truly care about most—ourselves.
Twenty-five years ago, when the Beatles broke up, the only acid my generation cared about came in windowpane, blotter, or Orange Sunshine. Now we have this yuppie Prufrock leaning over his wife’s shoulder as she prepares lasagna with spicy sausages, fretting that this will bring on esophageal Hiroshima. But he can rest easy—she has bought him acid controller. He can eat all the spicy sausages he wants! Now on to the day Paul and John first met…
What more is there to be said of Ringo’s credit card? For the past twenty-five years one has followed dear Ringo’s career, uttering, “Ringo, Pingo, Ringo,” then, “Say it ain’t so,” and finally, “Duude.” And yet you still can’t bring yourself to dislike him. He is what he always was—Ringo. Even the name was never quite on the level. He has become the Kato Kaelin of the Beatles. Where will he turn up next? In the Hawaiian sunshine, on a real estate infomercial? On the 900-number Psychic Hotline? I felt this vibration in me head and I knew we were gonna be really big. Stay tuned.
“We’re in our fifties now,” said the woman in the Ikea ad to her couch potato husband. “That hurts,” he replied, following up with a snappy rejoinder about the sound of one hand clapping. Zen and the art of Some Assembly Required?
Then there was Fran Dresher, nasal sex kitten of the ’90s, jimmying her thighs into Hanes’s Smooth Illusions. “It’s like liposuction without the sur-ge-ry.” Followed immediately by low-fat Tostitos Chips. Bet you can’t eat just the whole bag. Doubtless the next Beatles Anthology will be entirely brought to us by Olestra, the new fat substitute recently okayed by the FDA.
For aching boomers there was Tylenol Flu. What? They’re giving your hospitalized father Advil? But don’t you know it’s got ibuprofen! Get him out of there, man, now! Message (as Bush’s speech texts used to say): You have a cold and your parents are croaking. I was surprised not to see any Jacoby and Meyers law offices ads: Are you quite sure that Dad has made out his will?
Kodak was a major presence. The Grim Reaper is upon us! The memories must be preserved! And this time we’ve figured out how to keep them from turning green after a few decades. Notice how all those pictures of you when you were a Cub Scout now make you look like something from The X Files?
Cars had barely been equipped with seat belts when the Beatles were playing Shea Stadium. Now we must have not only dual air bags in our Volvos, but also side-impact air bags. Yes, I agree, I must have them too, even if this means karmically aligning myself with crash-test dummies. If James Dean’s silver Porsche had been equipped with air bags, he’d now be alive and endorsing nicotine patches.
“Tonight,” said the announcer between news of Ringo’s appearance tomorrow on Good Morning America and Ford Taurus “Making the Dream Come True”—what are we talking about here? a station wagon—in tones denoting The Second Coming, “you’re just minutes away from when the Beatles reunite.” Best of all, the Anthology is “coming to stores December 1. You haven’t heard everything yet!”
There was more? Mercedes, Xerox, Pizza Hut, “Home of the Stuffed Crust,” Arizona Jeans, “More attitude than latitude” (whatever that means), Motorola Pagers “You jumped fast enough to make Pavlov proud!”
Finally the great moment had arrived, after—literally—a countdown. 0:59 … 0:58 … 0:57 … Then there they were, sitting around a table, George, Ringo, Paul. Paul said, “We didn’t see how to do a reunion without John, but then we figured out a way.” He winked, and “Free as a Bird”—available December 1!—began. It was good to hear John’s voice again, but as the music played, you wondered how it all was playing with the man who wrote, “The way things are going, they’re going to crucify me.” Was he turning revolutions number nine? Had he reached, in anticipation, for the Pepcid AC?
—The Washington Post, 1995