MAD MEN MUSIC: "BONNIE AND CLYDE"

This is the song that was playing during the scene in the episode "To Have and to Hold" in which Joan and her friend Kate are enjoying themselves at the Electric Circus nightclub, located in the East Village.  

Interestingly, this is the same neighborhood that Betty visited in the season opener while looking for her daughter's friend.  That visit highlighted the pathetic squalor of hippie wannabes who were really nothing more than druggies squatting in abandoned buildings in one of the city's poorest neighborhoods.  

The Electric Circus, however, was a very popular destination in 1968, with the gritty working class neighborhood adding extra spice to the experience for trendy visitors.

The people playing Bonnie and Clyde in the video are Brigitte Bardot and the songwriter, Serge Gainsbourg.

One interesting thing that I discovered while searching Electric Circus is this Village Voice article dated July 6, 1967 in which famed New York City columnist Jack Newfield reported on the club's opening night festivities. In it he writes:

By 10 p.m., the scheduled opening time, there was a line of people on St. Mark's Place a half-block long, populated by a variety of Beautiful People types who probably never had to stand on line for anything before in their lives. The cavalcade of rented limousines curled back around Third Avenue, an illusory boon to the area's wizened panhandlers. Across the street several hundred locals -- hippies and East Europeans -- stood behind police barriers. Four costumed karate experts slowly shepherded the customers -- $15 a head -- in, two by two, just like the ark. And downstairs, welterweight fighter Joe Shaw, the lonely bouncer in the almost vacant Dom, watched the exploding flashbulbs silhouette the karate choppers in their clean white robes, a symbol of faddist passions of the Electronic Age.

Inside, people danced, sweated, pushed and blinked. The few Linear Conceptualizers quit immediately. There was the Poet of Pop, Tom Wolfe, and the Fugs's Tuli Kupferberg, and novelist Mary McCarthy, and Kennedy-in-law Steve Smith, and folk-singer David Blue, and halfback George Plimpton. It looked like the cover of the next Beatles' album. The New Frontier met the Underground, while the Beautiful People kept score.

I highlighted the "two by two, just like the ark" line because I know that Matthew Weiner and his crew must have read this article while doing their own research.  I can't help but wonder if they got the idea for the title and theme of the subsequent episode, "The Flood," from this article.  One never knows where the next inspiration will come from.

There are groovy vintage photos of the Electric Circus and the people who partied there here and here.