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| Just picture "Brewer & Shipley." |
The Hit
I first heard Brewer & Shipley’s “One Toke Over the Line” when Benicio del Toro bellowed it out through a manic smile at the beginning of Terry Gilliam’s take on Hunter S. Thompson's Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas. I’ve rarely heard it since. I found it a little surprising a song that didn’t reach the era of legalized marijuana with a little more popular “oomph.”
I did, however, just read that Brewer & Shipley played the song at the Denver County Fair “Pot Pavillion,” on April 20 and with their set timed to kick off at 4:20 p.m. According to the date of the source, that would have been some time in the early 2010s, so maybe it could be I'm moving in the wrong circles.
As for the song itself, it’s got country elements, certainly, but the piano in the score and the chorus structure comes from the late-60s/early-70s folk-rock music movement - much like the men who wrote it, Mike Brewer and Tom Shipley. It’s not innocent of the association with pot - the inclusion and reference are both conscious and deliberate - but Brewer & Shipley didn’t write the song as any kind of grand statement. By all accounts, they wrote it either preparing for or winding down from a performance and didn’t think it would go much further than an inside joke. They happened to have it on hand one night while opening for Melanie at Carnegie Hall, so they played it during the encore and, as they say, the crowd went wild. When they walked off stage that Neil Bogart, the head of the Kama Sutra label they’d just signed to, told them to record it immediately. Which they did.
It wasn’t long before Brewer & Shipley had their one and only hit; Vice President Spiro Agnew calling them “subversives to American youth” by name came shortly thereafter, and they wound up on President Dick Nixon’s enemies list to top it all off. And that’s not even close to the weirdest thing that happened with “One Toke Over the Line.” That came when a duo named “Gail and Dale” performed a cover of it on the Lawrence Welk Show and Welk signed it off by calling it “a modern spiritual.”
The Rest of the Story
“We like each other as people first of all. We came from the same background, had the same interests and the same focus. We really enjoy writing together. We have never ever had a contract between us of any kind. That’s why we named the company Good Karma Productions. We still believe that a man is always as good as his word and a handshake should do it.”
Brewer and Shipley came to the music business separately but by the same path: the nationwide coffeehouse circuit that folk bands and artists worked to land gigs and attention. While neither hailed from Los Angeles - they’re both “native Midwesterners” - they both wound up there around the Summer of Love (1968). Shipley performed as a soloist, but Brewer started with a partner, a guy named Tom Mastin. “Brewer and Mastin” got as far as a recording contract with Columbia - they even opened with The Byrds during the “Eight Miles High” period - but their partnership fell apart when Mastin asked Brewer to bring his amp to a show, but never showed up himself. He was spotted shortly thereafter in San Francisco, living with a woman he’d just met. As Brewer recalls, “Anyway, Tom was just a tormented soul. He was one of those kinda guys that when things started going right for him, he had to do something that would mess it up.”
Brewer and Shipley lived in the heart of the folk-rock scene as it was blowing up. They lived next door to Buffalo Springfield (covered in this post) and remembered “packing ‘em in at the Whiskey-A-Go-Go” with them, and open mic nights at a venue called The Troubadour, where future stars like Linda Ronstadt and Jackson Browne paid their dollar for a turn to sing just like anyone else. The industry had landed in Hollywood to stalk the scene with more money to throw around than any awareness of what they were throwing it at.
Amidst all that, Brewer found steady work as a staff writer and A&M Publishing and he got them to bring in Shipley as well. They both racked up song credits, together and separetely, during that time writing for artists as diverse as Glen Yarbrough (“Comes and Goes”), HP Lovecraft (“Keeper of the Keys”), The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band (“Truly Right”), The Poor (“Time and Changes,” which I can't find), and Noel Harrison (“Sign of the Queen”). They both connected and wrote with other acts of the time and place, The Association, in particular. At one point, Brewer almost signed on as the lead vocalist (“I would have been the guy singing ‘Cherish.’”) and, one night, Shipley was working on “Windy” with Ruthann Friedman - he even sang harmony on a demo - but he begged off the night they finished when he got engrossed in a song-writing session with Brewer.
They’d been writing songs together for a while during their time at A&M and kicking the demos up the chain. When they got the green light to record, they did so under their surnames in true singer-songwriter fashion. A&M originally assigned them to a producer named Alan Stanton, but they throw him over (“He was producing us, but it was different worlds”) and produce their own music the way they wanted. A rumor circulated for some time that their first two albums, Down in L.A. and Weeds, were nothing more than those demos, but they called in real industry professionals like Leon Russell (keys) and Jimmy Messina (bass) work the recording sessions. As Brewer recalls in a Classic Bands interview:
“Q - What I was trying to get at is, the album is not made up of actual demos you recorded, is it?
A - No. We went back in and re-recorded everything.
Q - So, that was wrong. You didn't get mad and move to a commercial farm outside of Kansas City and switch to Kama Sutra Records?
A - (laughs) I just love the press, don't you? It never ceases to crack me up how inaccurate they are. But, it's in print and if somebody didn't know any better, you take it as gospel.”
The part about moving the Kansas City and switching to the Kama Sutra label (originally the bubblegum pop outlet, but they signed Brewer & Shipley in an attempt to pivot) tells the rest of their story. As it happens, the song, “Dreamin’ in the Shade (Down in L.A.),” was directly and deeply autobiographical. Neither of them liked Los Angeles and they didn’t like the industry much more, so they returned to the Midwest in 1969, Kansas City, Missouri, in particular (and they’re both still in Missouri). That made them dead to the industry, as Brewer noted: “Well, basically we got out of our deal with A&M because in those days the business couldn't relate to you if you didn't live in L.A., San Francisco, Nashville or New York. The fact that we'd gone back to the Heartland meant to them that we had quit the business.”
“One Toke Over the Line” came during their Kama Sutra period, showing up on Brewer & Shipley’s third album, Tarkio Road, the name for which came from a place they played regularly, Tarkio, Missouri. All the real noise, as well as the trouble with the Nixon administration, came after they left L.A. Brewer & Shipley recorded a couple albums after - Shake Off the Demon (1971) and Rural Space (1972) - plus two more…more produced ‘n’ polished albums in 1997 (Heartland) and 2014 (Shanghai). And that brings things full circle to the quote at the top of this section. Brewer & Shipley managed their careers from start to finish and even found their one great commercial success on their own. I don’t know if it’s more fitting or less that it came out of fuck-around.
About the Sampler
“One Toke Over the Line” made the cut, of course, but I tried to select some of the songs that resonated as well - e.g., “Dreamin’ in the Shade (Down in L.A.)” and “Green Bamboo,” which they wrote about escaping to the quiet of the hills above L.A. one night when the city felt too chaotic. I threw their version of “Truly Right” in there, 1) because I like it, and 2) to contrast it with The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s version. (While I'm on it, here's their take on "Keeper of the Keys.")
I pulled the rest of the 15-song sampler from their first set of albums - e.g., the stuff from the 70s, and not the later, slicker material. The L.A. folk-rock sound definitely carried over into Weeds, as you’ll hear on tracks like “Boomerang,” “Too Soon Tomorrow,” and “Indian Summer” (that's a recent live performance, btw), but it falls off tone-by-tone with each successive album - e.g., I hear it on “Oh Mommy” (a fun little political tune) from Tarkio Road (if with a twang), but not so much on the title track and “Don’t Want to Die in Georgia,” both of which have a “rootsier” (e.g., more blues/country notes) tone. Rural Space started and ended as my of their favorite albums (crap, did I forget to mention they see themselves as “an album band”?), even if I just realized I stiffed it when cutting down for the sampler, but “Blue Highway” and “Where Do We Go from Here” give a fair taste of what you get from there (bonus: give “Sleeping on the Way” and “Black Sky” a listen; they both sound like something you’d get from mid-70s acts like Kansas). Finally, from 1971’s Shake off the Demon, I included “Message from the Mission (Hold On),” “Working on the Well,” and “Back to the Farm,” where, again, you'll found some more "roots" sound, and maybe a little more "rock" than "folk" (especially on "Working on the Well").
Folk-rock never really excited me as a genre, but I do hear the quality in Brewer & Shipley’s work…or maybe it’s because something in their integrity makes me want to hear it. I’m a sucker for people who make their own way and keep their word without having to think about it much. And who wouldn’t want to have dinner with people who made Nixon’s enemies list?
I first heard Brewer & Shipley’s “One Toke Over the Line” when Benicio del Toro bellowed it out through a manic smile at the beginning of Terry Gilliam’s take on Hunter S. Thompson's Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas. I’ve rarely heard it since. I found it a little surprising a song that didn’t reach the era of legalized marijuana with a little more popular “oomph.”
I did, however, just read that Brewer & Shipley played the song at the Denver County Fair “Pot Pavillion,” on April 20 and with their set timed to kick off at 4:20 p.m. According to the date of the source, that would have been some time in the early 2010s, so maybe it could be I'm moving in the wrong circles.
As for the song itself, it’s got country elements, certainly, but the piano in the score and the chorus structure comes from the late-60s/early-70s folk-rock music movement - much like the men who wrote it, Mike Brewer and Tom Shipley. It’s not innocent of the association with pot - the inclusion and reference are both conscious and deliberate - but Brewer & Shipley didn’t write the song as any kind of grand statement. By all accounts, they wrote it either preparing for or winding down from a performance and didn’t think it would go much further than an inside joke. They happened to have it on hand one night while opening for Melanie at Carnegie Hall, so they played it during the encore and, as they say, the crowd went wild. When they walked off stage that Neil Bogart, the head of the Kama Sutra label they’d just signed to, told them to record it immediately. Which they did.
It wasn’t long before Brewer & Shipley had their one and only hit; Vice President Spiro Agnew calling them “subversives to American youth” by name came shortly thereafter, and they wound up on President Dick Nixon’s enemies list to top it all off. And that’s not even close to the weirdest thing that happened with “One Toke Over the Line.” That came when a duo named “Gail and Dale” performed a cover of it on the Lawrence Welk Show and Welk signed it off by calling it “a modern spiritual.”
The Rest of the Story
“We like each other as people first of all. We came from the same background, had the same interests and the same focus. We really enjoy writing together. We have never ever had a contract between us of any kind. That’s why we named the company Good Karma Productions. We still believe that a man is always as good as his word and a handshake should do it.”
Brewer and Shipley came to the music business separately but by the same path: the nationwide coffeehouse circuit that folk bands and artists worked to land gigs and attention. While neither hailed from Los Angeles - they’re both “native Midwesterners” - they both wound up there around the Summer of Love (1968). Shipley performed as a soloist, but Brewer started with a partner, a guy named Tom Mastin. “Brewer and Mastin” got as far as a recording contract with Columbia - they even opened with The Byrds during the “Eight Miles High” period - but their partnership fell apart when Mastin asked Brewer to bring his amp to a show, but never showed up himself. He was spotted shortly thereafter in San Francisco, living with a woman he’d just met. As Brewer recalls, “Anyway, Tom was just a tormented soul. He was one of those kinda guys that when things started going right for him, he had to do something that would mess it up.”
Brewer and Shipley lived in the heart of the folk-rock scene as it was blowing up. They lived next door to Buffalo Springfield (covered in this post) and remembered “packing ‘em in at the Whiskey-A-Go-Go” with them, and open mic nights at a venue called The Troubadour, where future stars like Linda Ronstadt and Jackson Browne paid their dollar for a turn to sing just like anyone else. The industry had landed in Hollywood to stalk the scene with more money to throw around than any awareness of what they were throwing it at.
Amidst all that, Brewer found steady work as a staff writer and A&M Publishing and he got them to bring in Shipley as well. They both racked up song credits, together and separetely, during that time writing for artists as diverse as Glen Yarbrough (“Comes and Goes”), HP Lovecraft (“Keeper of the Keys”), The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band (“Truly Right”), The Poor (“Time and Changes,” which I can't find), and Noel Harrison (“Sign of the Queen”). They both connected and wrote with other acts of the time and place, The Association, in particular. At one point, Brewer almost signed on as the lead vocalist (“I would have been the guy singing ‘Cherish.’”) and, one night, Shipley was working on “Windy” with Ruthann Friedman - he even sang harmony on a demo - but he begged off the night they finished when he got engrossed in a song-writing session with Brewer.
They’d been writing songs together for a while during their time at A&M and kicking the demos up the chain. When they got the green light to record, they did so under their surnames in true singer-songwriter fashion. A&M originally assigned them to a producer named Alan Stanton, but they throw him over (“He was producing us, but it was different worlds”) and produce their own music the way they wanted. A rumor circulated for some time that their first two albums, Down in L.A. and Weeds, were nothing more than those demos, but they called in real industry professionals like Leon Russell (keys) and Jimmy Messina (bass) work the recording sessions. As Brewer recalls in a Classic Bands interview:
“Q - What I was trying to get at is, the album is not made up of actual demos you recorded, is it?
A - No. We went back in and re-recorded everything.
Q - So, that was wrong. You didn't get mad and move to a commercial farm outside of Kansas City and switch to Kama Sutra Records?
A - (laughs) I just love the press, don't you? It never ceases to crack me up how inaccurate they are. But, it's in print and if somebody didn't know any better, you take it as gospel.”
The part about moving the Kansas City and switching to the Kama Sutra label (originally the bubblegum pop outlet, but they signed Brewer & Shipley in an attempt to pivot) tells the rest of their story. As it happens, the song, “Dreamin’ in the Shade (Down in L.A.),” was directly and deeply autobiographical. Neither of them liked Los Angeles and they didn’t like the industry much more, so they returned to the Midwest in 1969, Kansas City, Missouri, in particular (and they’re both still in Missouri). That made them dead to the industry, as Brewer noted: “Well, basically we got out of our deal with A&M because in those days the business couldn't relate to you if you didn't live in L.A., San Francisco, Nashville or New York. The fact that we'd gone back to the Heartland meant to them that we had quit the business.”
“One Toke Over the Line” came during their Kama Sutra period, showing up on Brewer & Shipley’s third album, Tarkio Road, the name for which came from a place they played regularly, Tarkio, Missouri. All the real noise, as well as the trouble with the Nixon administration, came after they left L.A. Brewer & Shipley recorded a couple albums after - Shake Off the Demon (1971) and Rural Space (1972) - plus two more…more produced ‘n’ polished albums in 1997 (Heartland) and 2014 (Shanghai). And that brings things full circle to the quote at the top of this section. Brewer & Shipley managed their careers from start to finish and even found their one great commercial success on their own. I don’t know if it’s more fitting or less that it came out of fuck-around.
About the Sampler
“One Toke Over the Line” made the cut, of course, but I tried to select some of the songs that resonated as well - e.g., “Dreamin’ in the Shade (Down in L.A.)” and “Green Bamboo,” which they wrote about escaping to the quiet of the hills above L.A. one night when the city felt too chaotic. I threw their version of “Truly Right” in there, 1) because I like it, and 2) to contrast it with The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s version. (While I'm on it, here's their take on "Keeper of the Keys.")
I pulled the rest of the 15-song sampler from their first set of albums - e.g., the stuff from the 70s, and not the later, slicker material. The L.A. folk-rock sound definitely carried over into Weeds, as you’ll hear on tracks like “Boomerang,” “Too Soon Tomorrow,” and “Indian Summer” (that's a recent live performance, btw), but it falls off tone-by-tone with each successive album - e.g., I hear it on “Oh Mommy” (a fun little political tune) from Tarkio Road (if with a twang), but not so much on the title track and “Don’t Want to Die in Georgia,” both of which have a “rootsier” (e.g., more blues/country notes) tone. Rural Space started and ended as my of their favorite albums (crap, did I forget to mention they see themselves as “an album band”?), even if I just realized I stiffed it when cutting down for the sampler, but “Blue Highway” and “Where Do We Go from Here” give a fair taste of what you get from there (bonus: give “Sleeping on the Way” and “Black Sky” a listen; they both sound like something you’d get from mid-70s acts like Kansas). Finally, from 1971’s Shake off the Demon, I included “Message from the Mission (Hold On),” “Working on the Well,” and “Back to the Farm,” where, again, you'll found some more "roots" sound, and maybe a little more "rock" than "folk" (especially on "Working on the Well").
Folk-rock never really excited me as a genre, but I do hear the quality in Brewer & Shipley’s work…or maybe it’s because something in their integrity makes me want to hear it. I’m a sucker for people who make their own way and keep their word without having to think about it much. And who wouldn’t want to have dinner with people who made Nixon’s enemies list?
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