We Need Songs Like ‘Get Together’ Even When We Ignore Them
The death of Jesse Colin Young got me thinking about the complicated relationship between humankind and a song like Young’s “Get Together.”
Not to mention the final episode of Mad Men.
Young, who was 83 when he died March 14, had a lifelong music career defined for most of the world by “Get Together.”
His version of the song, which was written by Dino Valenti under the pen name Chet Powers, came out in 1967. But if you own a pair of ears, no matter how old you are, you know it: “C’mon people now / smile on your brother / Everybody get together / Try to love one another right now.”
“Get Together” was one of the leaders in a platoon of 1960s and early 1970s songs that conjured a world of peace and love.
Besides “Get Together,” we had Friend and Lover singing “Reach Out of the Darkness.” We had the O’Jays’ “Love Train” and Cat Stevens’s “Peace Train.” We had the Beatles’s “All You Need is Love.” John Lennon doubled up with “Imagine” and “Give Peace a Chance.” Ed McCurdy chimed in with “Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream.” We had Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On,” Edwin Hawkins’s “War” and Stevie Wonder’s “Someday At Christmas.” We had Jackie DeShannon’s “What The World Needs Now.” Even the Rolling Stones sang “We Love You” before they snapped back to “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” and “Dead Flowers.”
Depending on your perspective, these peace-and-love songs were either inspiring visions of a better world or flower child delusions.
It would be fair to call them Utopian Fantasies, since they envision a world where, in the words of the late philosopher Rodney King, everybody gets along.
On the other side are those who say yeah, okay, pal, but that ain’t how the world works. And oddly enough, both singers and skeptics likely agree on that downbeat assessment. Nobody thinks a peace-and-love world exists, or ever has. Nowhere in even a sliver of human history can we find a real-life rollout of Ed McCurdy’s strangest dream: that “The world had all agreed / To put an end to war.”
So what we have are the songs, which depending on our mood can feel like either welcome counterpoints to real-world news or painfully naïve sing-alongs.
The problem, as usual, is people. Some people don’t like other people, or they want what other people have, and pretty soon words or bullets are flying. Oh yeah, and the other side always started it.
Universal peace and love is one of those concepts we admire and disregard, like 55 mph speed limits or brushing after every meal.
And then there’s the Mad Men connection.
Main Mad Man Don Draper (Jon Hamm), a brilliant and tormented ad agency supernova of the 1950s and ’60s, climbs out of the pressure cooker at the dawn of the ’70s and makes his way to a spiritual retreat where the therapy includes meditation.
While he sits cross-legged on a pastoral California hillside, inspiration strikes: What if we used images of world peace and love to sell Coca-Cola?
That’s how — spoiler alert — Mad Men ends, with Don Draper creating a Coca-Cola ad in which a hillside full of shiny happy young people lip-synch “I’d Like To Teach the World To Sing.”
If this sounds familiar even to those who never watched Mad Men, it’s because in 1971 Coca-Cola created that precise campaign in real life. It remains one of the most iconic commercials ever.
The song was so catchy it was rewritten into a pop tune, substituting the line “I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony” for the original “I’d like to buy the world a Coke and keep it company.”
The pop version became a top-15 hit for the Hillside Singers and a top-10 hit and gold record for The New Seekers.
So what do we have here? Heartening proof that tens of millions of people respond favorably to a song about peace and love? Or disheartening proof that peace and love can be packaged as monetized commodities to promote a carbonated beverage?
This is probably another of those “two things can be true” situations. What’s also true is that because of the ad and the top-40 hits, “I’d Like To Teach the World To Sing” probably stands alongside “Get Together” as the most widely circulated peace-and-love song of the era.
Whether or not it was a great pop song, gotta admit it was a great ad jingle.
Peace-and-love songs faded as our mood darkened and pop music changed in the ’70s. But while they still make a lot of folks roll their eyes, we also still need them.
Truth is that most of us, in our regular ordinary lives, do practice and appreciate decency, kindness, consideration and civility. While convincing the whole world to get together and love one another is a bigger ask, it’s not a bad thing for the human species that our aspirations almost always exceed our present reach.
