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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.”
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.”
