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"One
Toke Over The Line" |
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Banter from a 1971 concert..... |
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Michael |
“We're gonna' do one of our songs for you. Kind of a
country song". |
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Tom |
“Kind of a spiritual, actually". |
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Michael |
“Actually we wrote it for a friend of ours, Danny
Cox". |
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Tom |
"He never did it though."
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1971 --
New York radio station WNBC bans the song "One Toke Over the Line" by Brewer
& Shipley for alleged drug references. Other stations around the country
follow suit.
One of the composers of the tune, Tom Shipley, issues the following
statement: "In this
electronic age, pulling a record because of its lyrics is like the burning
of books in the Thirties."
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see Rolling Stone April 1971 article on censorship |
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"It is a little frightening
when the government is coming down on you personally," Brewer says of the
duo's fifteen minutes in the Nixon's Most Hated spotlight. "But what really put it into
perspective was that at exactly the same time Lawrence Welk performed 'One Toke Over the Line' and introduced it
as a gospel song. I guess it was the 'sweet Jesus' part. We'll never know."
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"It
was controversial. The Vice President of the United States, Spiro Agnew,
named us personally as a subversive to American youth, but at exactly
the same time Lawrence Welk performed the crazy thing and introduced it
as a gospel song. That shows how absurd it really is. Of course, we got
more publicity than we could have paid for." ~ Michaeal Brewer |
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Tom is quick and at
pains to add about the creation and content of the song in question; "We
were just kidding," he notes. "The ACLU really wanted to contest it and
go up against the government, the Nixon administration trying to clamp
down on the media. All these folkies trying to get us to go to the wall.
We were just kidding," he reiterates. |
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"We wrote that one night in
the dressing room of a coffee house. We were literally just entertaining
ourselves. The next day we got together to do some picking and said,
'What was
that we were messing with last night?' We remembered it, and
in about an hour, we'd written
'One Toke Over the Line.' Just making
ourselves laugh, really. We had no idea that it would ever even be
considered as a single, because it was just another song to us. Actually
Tom
and I
always thought that our ballads were our forte." |
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"'One
Toke' wasn't meant to make it to record, says Tom Shipley, "We were opening for
Melanie at Carnegie Hall,
and we played two encores. We really didn't have anything else to sing to
them. So we played `One Toke,' and the audience gave us a standing ovation.
The record company president was there, and he said `Record it!" |
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"When we wrote 'One Toke Over the Line,' I think we were one toke over
the line," says Shipley.
"I considered [marijuana] a sort of a sacrament..... If you listen to
the lyrics of that song, 'one toke' was just a metaphor. It's a song
about excess. Too much of anything will probably kill you."
"There are
no documented cases of anybody ever overdosing on marijuana," adds Brewer,
"but God knows, I've tried. It just can't be done."
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"The first
time I heard 'One Toke Over The Line' I didn't realize how funny it was.
I was listening to people singing such close harmony it was like
braiding hair". ~ Hoyt Axton |
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Michael Brewer says a
quarter-century later, that he and Tom Shipley never set out to create
any icon to high culture when they wrote "One Toke Over the Line."
"We
had been songwriters for so long that it was just another song for us, It
wasn't even one
of our favorites," he adds a minute later. "We always
thought our ballads were our better songs."
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"It pretty much pigeonholed us and categorized us in a way that wasn't
really valid," says Brewer.
"We've written a whole lot of songs that were not like 'One Toke."'
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"The song
came out about around the same time as Hunter Thompson's Fear And
Loathing in Las Vegas, and we always thought that if they ever make
a movie out of the book, 'One Toke' would have to be the theme song.
Well, they did and it was. ~ Michael Brewer
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"So go figure. Who would
have guessed? Much less that it would end up being a classic rock song
still played all around the world, in movies and stuff. It cracks me up.
'Cause we were
just kidding, we were just entertaining ourselves. Other
people chose to make a big deal out of it." Michael Brewer |
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Still, the two
are not complaining.
"It's
still our biggest hit, and we get nice royalty checks from it four times
a year. It's ironic , 'cause one of the checks comes in just before
April 15th. I sign it right over to the government, so my taxes are
paid by the song they tried to ban." ~ Michael Brewer |
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"We were really
happy just to get a hit, even if it wasn't necessarily the one we would
have picked," Brewer says. "And we're really glad people still like it."
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"One
Toke Over The Line" |
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