Coca-Cola commercial, early 1994: The Coctails were hired through Wieden+Kennedy to appear in a Coca-Cola commercial aimed at making Coke feel current and connected to indie culture. We thought very seriously about whether to do it because we had seen bands like the Mighty Mighty Bosstones become identified with advertising, but Coke felt different to us — we genuinely liked Coke, its history, design, and old “It’s the Real Thing” commercials. They flew us to Los Angeles, put each of us in a suite on the Sunset Strip, drove us around in a stretch limo, paid for clothes and equipment, and filmed us performing live in front of a completely cast audience. We kept trying to work the old “It’s the Real Thing” jingle into the new Coke song, which apparently drove them crazy. The original idea of simply filming this quirky indie band gradually got buried under go-go dancers, surfers and other footage until we barely appeared in the final edit. The commercial never aired, which ultimately felt like a coup: we got paid roughly $30,000 without becoming “the Coke band.” We took some of the money personally but put a substantial amount back into the band, where it effectively fronted the production of subsequent Coctails records. The records themselves made money, so the Coke money became working capital for our DIY operation. It’s a good example of the strange position we sometimes occupied: we were attractive to mainstream media and corporations precisely because we were independent and outside that world, and occasionally we could let them borrow that identity while redirecting the resources back into what we were already doing. There was always something slightly absurd and subversive about imagining somebody in the middle of America watching ordinary television and suddenly having the Coctails appear in front of them: Who the hell are these guys?