One Hit No More, No. 51: Brewer & Shipley Walked Tarkio Road

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.”

One Hit No More, No. 25: Buffalo Springfield & Some Poor Bastard Named Dewey Martin

#Inspiration

The Hit
Not many songs express their era – even a generic version of it – but Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” still stands as a singular example. If you’ve watch five movies or documentaries about the 1960s, or the Vietnam War, you’ve heard it; hell, if you’ve seen a commercial that references the 60s, you’ve heard it. It had nothing to do with Vietnam, as it happens: Stephen Stills wrote the song after seeing the protest of a curfew on Sunset Boulevard turn into a riot outside a club called Pandora’s Box.

It’s one hell of a song, still and anxious; it puts you in the calm before the storm and holds you there for as long as it plays. The instrumentation is minimal, but brilliantly used to create that tension. Burdened as it is with standing in for an era and old daydreams about making the world beautiful, it takes listening to it with fresh ears to drown out the clichés and just hear it as a piece of music…

…with that in mind, the angst the main players in Buffalo Springfield feel about their music cracks me up a bit. Especially in context.

The Rest of the Story
“But getting back to Buffalo Springfield, I’m glad the music is getting out. Flawed as it is, it’s really genuine. There’s no posing.”
- Stephen Stills

It is impossible, maybe even ridiculous, to talk about Buffalo Springfield as a one-hit wonder – and that goes well beyond legends like Stills and Neil Young fronting the band. That said, they did not last long as a project – just two years and two albums, with a third Last Time Around coming out after the band broke up. After a short honeymoon period, permanent chaos reigned, as Wikipedia succinctly puts it, “After various drug-related arrests and line-up changes, the group broke up in 1968.”