A couple of months after the Coca-Cola Company changed the recipe for its product in 1985, a consumer in Marietta, Georgia, spotted a Coke delivery man stocking a supermarket with New Coke, as it was called back then. “You bastard!” she yelled, smiting him with her umbrella again and again. “You ruined it, it tastes like shit!” Pepsi, which is never far behind Coke these days, was represented on the scene by a uniformed driver of its own; when he started to laugh at the commotion the woman turned on him in her fury and screamed, “You stay out of it! This is family business. Yours is worse than shit!”
It’s not hard to imagine the great blessing a wine spiked with cocaine might be; but less than two years after Pemberton put his drink on the market, Atlanta voted to go dry. That sent the doctor back to his laboratory, where he worked feverishly to perfect a nonalcoholic version of the coca-and-kola brew by the time the ban took effect. With a few months to spare, he had it: a sugar-sweetened syrup with a small bite of phosphoric acid, to be mixed with carbonated water at fountains and sold in six-ounce doses. Atlanta’s experiment with prohibition lasted only a year and a half, and Dr. Pemberton was able to sell French Wine Coca throughout the ban anyway: with the sure touch of the American promoter, he repositioned it as a “temperance drink.” The cunning of history had done its work, however, and the greatest single product of our age was born.
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If its birth was something less than virginal–Pemberton died, just two years later, still addicted to morphine–Coke found a true apostle in the man who then took over the patent, Asa Candler. A pushing adman with a vision that went far beyond peddling nostrums to the gullible, he saw the possibilities of a brisk, refined beverage, and as a devout southern Methodist he had a passion for the stuff that was nothing short of evangelical. For decades Candler ran his sales meetings like revivals: agents delivered testimonials to the “thirst-quenching, heaven-sent drink,” compared themselves to missionaries, and at the end sang “Onward Christian Soldiers” led by their chief and his brother, a major stockholder and then preeminent among southern Methodist bishops. The wine-and-coca concoctions had always smelled of Europe, even Romanism–Pope Leo XIII was an early celebrity spokesman–but here was refreshment fit for fundamentalists, a true temperance drink. And it was 100 percent American.
Once he’d taken the cocaine out of Coca-Cola, Candler refused, even under oath, to admit it was ever there. And nearly a century later that remains the company line: no cocaine, ever. What had been so crucial to the early success of the enterprise was simply erased from its official history, like Trotsky, once the regime settled in. You could say that such a history is built on a lie, but Pendergrast has a more generous view: that it’s built on a belief, the conviction that Coca-Cola really is something like the saving potion its inventor thought it was. All great institutions assume the privilege of rewriting the past, and why not? What good would it do Catholics, for example, to be told about the festivities that certain early Christian sects enjoyed for their Eucharist? Likewise, if the millions who visit the World Museum of Coca-Cola in Atlanta stagger through the exits with Coke sloshing in their bellies and their brains fuddled by some moonshine about a folksy southern root doctor and his natural, wholesome elixir, where is the harm? Coca-Cola, no less than the Church itself, is proof that success is free to make its own rules.
It would be unbecoming for an American to survey that landscape today, but if it needs any work, Coca-Cola is hardly to blame. Coke merely gave the people what they wanted. In that sense its alliance with democracy was no pose, and its victory, like that of the economic way of life it symbolized, was never really in doubt. But if the cold war is now history, the cola war goes on. And it was this struggle–the epic siege of Coke by the forces of Pepsi–that produced the only real disaster in Coca-Cola’s hitherto charmed life.
The great divide Lanza marks is between music with specific emotional content–dreamy, spiritual, seductive, or whatever–and pure ambient sounds. He astutely locates this split in the prehistory of the genre, with the moody Ravel and Debussy on one side and the spare, oddly neutral Erik Satie on the other. The impressionists were ancestors of the string-heavy, “gush of lush” style made famous by Mantovani and his followers in the semiclassical vein, while Satie was a direct forerunner of Muzak. Perhaps as a result of his early years toiling on pianos in cabarets and bawdy houses, Satie recognized a need, as he put it, for “music that would be a part of the surrounding noises. . . . without imposing itself.” He called it “furniture music,” and when he debuted it in 1920 he was so put out by the rapt attention of his audience that he actually had to go among them to stir up talk and noise.
Are those not the words of a genuine democrat? True, democracy is usually taken to mean something like the power of the multitude to choose its own masters, not its own amusements. But ask yourself: Which power is more real? Which is likely to be surrendered first? Maybe the communists were right to despise Coca-Cola, because they saw something inside that shapely bottle that was more democratic, and more dangerous, than free elections: the ability of capitalism to deliver the goods. The statesmen who currently run the affairs of Russia and China, not to mention others in the many lands seeded by Coke after WWII, have learned that if elections are negotiable and can always be faked, the goods never can be, and now they’re doing all they can to deliver a few of their own.
