Music Review: One Toke Over the Line

One of the more joyful songs from the early '70s is One Toke Over the Line, which appears on Mike Brewer and Tom Shipley's Tarkio album. The folk rock duo never had another major hit, but it's a great one. With its catchy melody and drug references, the song became a popular anthem of the hippie culture. Vice President Spiro Agnew called the song "subversive" and it was banned by the FCC. That only made the song more popular; it was covered by everyone from The Grateful Dead to (hilariously) Lawrence Welk. "We were really bored, sitting in the dressing room," recalls Brewer. "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." The classic song became a huge hit for Brewer & Shipley, and it holds up extremely well.