Mike Brewer and Tom Shipley began their careers as solo folk artists on the coffee house circuit in the early 1960s.  Both native mid-westerns (Oklahoman and Ohioan respectively), they first met in 1964 at the Blind Owl coffee house in Kent, Ohio.  It would be three more years before they would team up, and during those three years the two crossed paths at clubs on the folk circuit, and each tried their hand in other musical collaborations that didn’t pan out.

In 1965 Michael Brewer migrated to Los Angeles following the emerging west coast music scene. Around this time, Tom Shipley arrived in L.A. and looked up his acquaintance from the folk circuit.  Tom rented a house around the corner from Michael’s house, and soon they began writing songs together. Brewer eventually accepted a job as a staff songwriter at Good Sam Records, a publishing offshoot of the newly formed A&M Records. When Shipley was subsequently hired as staff writer for A&M in 1967, their partnership began as a songwriting collaboration.

A&M Records soon recognized that Michael & Tom’s demo recordings exhibited a unique sound and style of their own, so they green lighted them to record an album, Down In L.A.  A&M brought in the best musicians in the L.A. to play on the album.  But even with a soon to be released debut album and mutual friends who were starting to make it big in bands, such as The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, and The Association, Michael and Tom so disliked their life in L.A. that they decided to move back to the Midwest as soon as the record was recorded.

Tom described their decision to settle in Missouri as one of fortunate circumstance:

There was a music scene built up in Kansas City, and Michael and I used to come during Christmas and it was great. There would be clouds in the sky — you don’t see clouds in LA, just the haze. We really didn’t care for L.A. very much. We had just had enough, and figured there had to be a better way to make music, without living there.  So we left California, and ended up coming back to the heartland. We ended up in Kansas City and started a management/production company with some friends.

After settling in Kansas City, they released four albums in the space of four years: Weeds, Tarkio, Shake Off The Demon, and Rural Space. It was on the third album Tarkio (from a regular gig they played in Tarkio, Missouri) that they released the song One Toke Over the Line, which they wrote as a joke while preparing backstage for a performance.

The incident that sparked this song happened at the Vanguard in Kansas City, Missouri. The band was playing the show because, in seeking to escape the LA music scene, they started a tour of their Midwest homelands. Shipley reports that he was given a block of hash and told to take two hits. He ignored the advice and instead took three. Shipley recounts in The Vinyl Dialogues:

I go out of the dressing room -- I’m also a banjo player, but I didn’t have one, so I was playing my guitar -- and Michael (Brewer) came in and I said, ‘Jesus, Michael, I’m one toke over the line.’ And to be perfect honest, I don’t remember if Michael was with me when I took that hit or not. I remember it as ‘not’; I think Michael remembers it as ‘yes.’ And he started to sing to what I was playing, and I chimed in and boom, we had the line.

Brewer also remembers the occasion:

I just cracked up,” he said. “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; then we went onstage.

It took Brewer & Shipley on quite a roller coaster ride that year.  Just as it was peaking on the charts, the Vice President of the United States, Spiro Agnew labeled Brewer & Shipley subversive to America’s youth and then strong-armed the FCC to pull “One Toke Over The Line” from the airwaves.  They made President Nixon’s infamous “Enemies List,” a badge of honor which they continue to wear proudly today.

In the early 70’s not everyone knew what the word “toke” meant and additionally many misinterpreted their iconic song because of the “sweet Jesus” lyrics. This probably accounted for several country artists recording “One Toke” in 1972 and was definitely responsible for “One Toke Over The Line” being covered on the Lawrence Welk Show by the wholesome-looking couple Gail Farrell and Dick Dale (not the surf guitar legend), who clearly had NO clue what a toke was.

At the conclusion of the performance of the song, Welk remarked, without any hint of irony, “There you’ve heard a modern spiritual by Gail and Dale.” This caused Michael Brewer to comment:

“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.”

Because of their broad appeal, they became a favored support act for major tours, and shared the stage with a diverse list of artists, including: Elton John, The Eagles, Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, Bonnie Raitt, Electric Light Orchestra, Blood Sweat & Tears, James Taylor, Stephen Stills, The Beach Boys, Loggins & Messina, Linda Ronstadt, John Sebastian, and The Ozark Mountain Daredevils among others.

As of late 2019 they were still performing. At present, Michael Brewer lives outside of Branson, Missouri. Tom Shipley lives in Rolla, Missouri, where he is part of the staff of Missouri University of Science & Technology. He is semi-retired as manager of video productions and continues to work on special video productions for the university. Michael Brewer was inducted into the Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame on December 1, 2018. He joins contemporaries such as, Hoyt Axton, Leon Russell, Jimmy Webb, B.J. Thomas, Tom Paxton, J.J. Cale, Elvin Bishop, and Vince Gill. The Hall also has some legendary members like Hank Williams, Woody Guthrie, Merle Haggard, Patti Page, Gene Autry, Bob Wills & The Texas Playboys.

Hits: 107

This is REQUIRED listening for any father, particularly new fathers.

The song’s lyrics began as a poem written by Harry’s wife, Sandra “Sandy” Gaston; the poem itself was inspired by the awkward relationship between her first husband, James Cashmore, and his father, John, a politician who served as Brooklyn Borough President. She was also inspired by a country music song she had heard on the radio:

Whenever I was on a long drive I would listen to country music, because words would keep me awake more than just music. And I heard a song… I can remember the story, but I don’t remember who sang it or what the title was, but an old couple were sitting at their breakfast table and looking out the window, and they saw the rusted swing and the sandbox, and they were reminiscing about the good old days when all the children were around and then the grandchildren, and how it passed, and now it’s all gone.

The other part of the idea – this is always a problem, because Harry introduced the song at all his concerts and said, ‘This is a song my wife wrote to zap me because I wasn’t home when our son Josh was born.’ I was always kind of amused by that because of the fact that we learn life’s lessons too late. We don’t learn lessons before the fact. We don’t have a child born and then have all this wisdom. So I always thought it was interesting the way he told the story. But I learned the story because my [first] husband was going to New York to be a lawyer, and I had a teaching job in New York. While we were apartment hunting, we were living with his parents in Brooklyn. His father was the borough president of Brooklyn at the time, which I think was a much more important job than it is today. But every day when he got home from work, he would start talking to his son about, ‘It’d be great if you’d go down to the club on Tuesday night, I’d like to introduce you to some of the people I know,’ and so forth. And he started trying to engineer a career for him which leads to politics. They did not have any relationship or communication because they had been so busy until his son went off to college and was gone. I don’t remember exactly how, but he started talking to me. My father-in-law would say me, even though we were all in the same room, ‘Tell Jimmy I would like to see him down at the clubhouse on Tuesday.’ It was really very strange.

So this is the way the evenings went. The conversation was going through me. So I realized what had happened. You know, relationships and characters and personalities and all those things are formed by two, so I realized that that hadn’t happened. And it was very jerky at that stage. So I observed something that gave me the idea for the song.”

It took the birth of his son for Harry Chapin to decide to turn the poem his wife wrote into a song. Sandy Chapin explained in an interview: “Harry and I would exchange writing of all kinds. We were always working on each other’s writing. Some of my writing at a certain period were 20-page papers for a doctoral program at Columbia. So it wasn’t always that poetic. But we both looked at each other’s stuff. And then one time he came home and he said, ‘What have you been doing?’ I showed him ‘Cat’s In The Cradle,’ and he said, ‘Well, that’s interesting.’ You know, sometimes he’d pick up something and put music to it. And that didn’t really grab him at all. And then after Josh was born, it did. He picked it up and he wrote music to it.”

Harry also said the song was about his own relationship with his son, Josh, admitting, “Frankly, this song scares me to death.”

Hits: 56

James Taylor is not singing about himself in this song, but about the child who was named in his honor. Taylor wrote the song in 1969, when he drove on his way to Richmond, Virginia to see his older brother, the late Alex Taylor. James had recently returned to America after recording his first album in England, and he was shocked to learn that Alex had become a father for the first time in his absence.

Alex and his wife, Brent Taylor, had given birth to their first child, a baby son, which Brent wanted to name Richmond, after the city in which he was born. However, Alex wanted to name the child James, after his younger brother. So after a few arguments, the couple named the boy James Richmond Taylor. James was elated to discover that he had a new baby nephew, also named James. So the title can be a little confusing, since both the singer and his nephew are named James. The singer is James Vernon Taylor, while his nephew is James Richmond Taylor.

There are some ways this song associates with its writer. As a young child, James Taylor, along with his siblings, often sang each other to sleep at night. The story goes that James couldn’t stand it when his mother sang, because she only sang opera. And because James’ mother was a lyric soprano, she never sang lullabies. James’ father never sang lullabies either, because he didn’t exactly have the knack for music. So when he was a little boy, the young James Taylor was often put in the position of having to sing himself to sleep each night, hence the line, “Singin’ works just fine for me.”

Speaking with Rolling Stone in 2015, Taylor said this was his best song. “It starts as a lullaby, then the second half of the song – ‘the turnpike from Stockbridge to Boston’ – talks about what music means to me. It gets pretty spiritual by the end.”

Taylor spent considerable effort on the lyrics, whose verses he later said used the most intricate rhyming pattern of his career. One of the most famous parts of the lyric is:

Now the First of December was covered with snow
And so was the Turnpike from Stockbridge to Boston
Lord, the Berkshires seemed dream-like on account of that frostin’ With ten miles behind me and ten thousand more to go

Hits: 78