One Toke Over The Line

Although there are many songs from decades past that were blatantly about marijuana, folk rock duo Brewer & Shipley's 1970 single "One Toke Over The Line" was the first pop hit of that decade to openly use a reference to pot in a song title. But the rest of the song didn't say anything else about weed or its use at all.

A rare 45 picture sleeve

“One Toke Over the Line” was released in an ugly atmosphere of anti-war demonstrations and en masse arrests and incarcerations of casual drug users. The record would become so popular that it caught the attention of Vice President Spiro Agnew, who termed the song, along with the Byrds’ “Eight Miles High,” Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” and “Monkey Man” by the Rolling Stones “blatant drug culture propaganda”. Agnew warned of FCC sanctions against radio stations that played songs that “tend to glorify or promote the use of illegal drugs such as marijuana, LSD, speed, etc.”. Things were such in the Nixon era that threats of government crackdowns were commonplace and Spiggy had no qualms about taking any measures that could cripple the burgeoning counter-culture and its anti-Vietnam leanings.

While the reference to marijuana in the title is no secret, Tom Shipley told Discoveries magazine that the Vice President clearly misinterpreted the song’s meaning.

"We weren't telling people to get high! It was a song about moderation, maybe desperately crying for moderation in our own lives. At that time we'd been on the road too long. It was a metaphor for too many Holiday Inns, too many sleepless nights, too many easy girls and too many bad habits. Today, as a nation, we're many thousands of tokes over the line."

During this same time, in the most bizarre twist imaginable, Lawrence Welk's orchestra performed "One Toke Over The Line" on his TV show. Introducing it as a "newer" song, the announcer seems to have a bit of cottonmouth himself during his introduction. Welk himself appears at the end, calling the tune a "modern spiritual"! Could they really have been that naive? Did no one in the Welk band know what a toke was?

This is, without a doubt, the squarest, whitest music this side of Mitch Miller. The wardrobe leaves me speechless. Stuff like this is why YouTube is certainly one of the greatest inventions in the history of everything ever.

Here's the original, if you need a comparison. Honestly, I'm not so sure how different this version is. Guess I'll leave that up to you.

“One Toke Over the Line” was written backstage between sets at Kansas City’s Vanguard Coffee House. Mike Brewer explains how the song came to be.

Tom Shipley & Michael Brewer, still at it in 2012.

"We were real bored, sitting in the dressing room. We were pretty much stoned and all and Tom says, “Man, I’m one toke over the line tonight.” We were literally just making ourselves laugh, really. 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.” We had no idea that it would ever be considered as a single, because it was just another song to us."

Despite some radio stations banning the record, “One Toke...” became a Top 10 hit and the song most identified with the duo. It remains a stoner anthem to this day. But Brewer says the song was most uncharacteristic of the rest of their music.

"It pretty much pigeonholed us and categorized us in a way that wasn't really valid. We'd written a whole lot of songs that were nothing like “One Toke.” Actually, Tom and I always thought that our ballads were our forte." Yeah well, go figure.

Music from Brewer & Shipley is still in print and available at Amazon. Apparently, you can still enjoy the "Welk Experience" in Branson, Mo. Have fun & good luck with that.