Song of the Day 3/5: Brewer & Shipley, “One Toke Over the Line” b/w “Oh Mommy (I Ain’t No Commie)”

This 1971 stoner classic is the answer to the trivia question, “What’s the only song covered by both the Grateful Dead and Lawrence Welk?”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVxA1MkEkyo

Folk duo Mike Brewer and Tom Shipley, both originally from the Midwest, hooked up in LA in the late ’60s but moved back to Missouri to eke out a living playing colleges and coffee houses. They were backstage one night when Shipley was given a block of hash and told to take two hits. He instead took three. When Brewer walked in, Shipley said, “Jesus, Michael, I’m one toke over the line.” Brewer said, “”I just cracked up. I thought it was hysterical. And right on the spot, we just started singing, ‘One toke over the line, sweet Jesus,’ and that was about it. 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.”

The song reached No. 10 in April 1971, the duo’s only Top 40 hit.

How “One Toke” came to the attention of Lawrence Welk may never be known, but shortly after the tune’s chart success it was sung by a couple called Gail and Dale, who perform the song as if it were, as Welk called it after the performance, a “modern spiritual.” I guess the “sweet Jesus” part confused them.

How the Grateful Dead came to the tune is much clearer. Jerry Garcia plays steel guitar on several tracks on “Tarkio,” including the B-side to “One Toke,” a sarcastic political tune of the times that finds the boys both disowning communism and denying that their long hair makes them girls.