With the end of this soda, the 1970s is officially over.
I can still hear the jingle in my head.
“Tab, Tab Cola, what a beautiful drink. Tab, Tab Cola, for beautiful people. Tab, you’re beautiful to me. Real cola taste, just one calorie.”
In the commercial, a beautiful bikini-clad woman walks towards camera from the water, wet from the sea but somehow holding a can of… Tab. Apparently, if you drink Tab, one calorie Tab, you will look like her or I suppose the male equivalent. “Promise, large promise,” said Samuel Johnson, “is the soul of an advertisement.” Becoming beautiful because of a soda pop is a large promise.
In my house growing up, we loved Tab. Dad especially. It was the one soda we were allowed to have, maybe because it didn’t have sugar and tasted bitter. No Coke or Pepsi for us. We were beautiful people, becoming more beautiful with each lousy-tasting can.
Occasionally we might drink a Fresca, which was, like Tab, a Cola-Cola Company product. It was another one-calorie drink, and also tasted terrible, which made it acceptable in our house. The cyclamates gave both sodas a weird aftertaste and probably grew polyps as they traveled down into our sugar-free gullets.
“Fresca” means “fresh” in Italian and Spanish. I bet the naming experts had a good chuckle over that one. If you opened a can of Fresca today that had been sitting in the sun on an AMC Gremlin dashboard since 1971, the potassium benzoate, Ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid and glycerol ester of wood rosin would have aged it like a fine wine, if they didn’t dissolve the can and the car first.
Both Tab and Fresca were truly representative of the times. The Me Decade, Tom Wolfe famously called it, but it was also a decade when Americans decided that they had missed out on all the fun hippies had in the 1960s, and decided to create their own unique and insane version of it. Even Lawrence Welk decorated his TV set like Timothy Leary had slipped the entire staff peyote. Wunnerful, wunnerful. And if you look at it now, psychedelic. They probably had a lot of Tab backstage in the fridge.
As of December, Tab is as kaput as Shake-A-Puddin’, having outlasted it by decades. Of course, Tab had the advantage of being physically addictive, having caffeine, the only reason anyone would drink it more than once. To me its demise somehow marked the true end of the 70s. As long as Tab was out there, the decade was hanging on, like Marimekko and weed still give life to the 1960s.
But the 70s will never die, even if Tab does. As long as there’s bad taste, the decade will be with us, like the smell of English Leather lingering in your dad’s closet. As long as a double knit suit hangs in a vintage clothing store, the spirit of the 70s is still strong. Until the last orange shag carpeting is ripped out, revealing a wood floor. The last Ford Pinto gets crushed. The last time “Disco Duck!” gets played on Spotify. When the last beaded macrame planter is taken off its ceiling hook.
We won’t have Tab, but we will always have the jingle. Which raises the question, what are the beautiful people supposed to drink now? I can’t imagine anybody emerging from the ocean with a can of Mello Yello. No, our country’s signature Tab beauty will now begin to fade away, like Dorian Gray once his portrait is destroyed. It was a good run.
