In 1969, the year of Woodstock and man on the moon, Brewer and Shipley released their first album on Buddah Kama Sutra Records, the now classic folk-rock album entitled Weeds. 

Weeds was produced in San Francisco by Nick Gravenites, who had produced the demos that had helped Brewer & Shipley get their Kama Sutra record deal.  Gravenites, who had already made a name for himself as a member of the Electric Flag, was able to assemble a dynamic group of mostly heavy blues musicians.  The impressive group included guitarist Michael Bloomfield who had played with Bob Dylan & Paul Butterfield, keyboardist Mark Naftalin, bassist John Kahn, violinist Richard Greene,  and keyboardist Nicky Hopkins who had played on records with The Beatles and the Rolling Stones.

Michael Brewer: "Weeds took on a life of its own; it kind of created sort of a hybrid music between our style and the session musicians style."  Tom Shipley: "It was probably hard for them to do our stuff, but when you play out of your genre it forces you to get creative.  They'd played together for years, so we moved them toward the center, after we found out where the center was.  The sound was a synthesis of the band, the producer and us."

The countrified feel to much of the record was supplied in part by ace pedal steel guitarist Red Rhodes.  Weeds was one of the first folk-rock albums to use pedal-steel guitar, then considered strictly a country instrument.  Michael Brewer: "We were folk artists, and country fell into that category.  The Byrds had just done Sweetheart Of The Rodeo, and people were starting to get a country feel in their music.  If it weren't for country music and the blues, rock 'n' roll wouldn't exist."

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