JUST ONE TOKE?

They may have been hippies, but Brewer & Shipley always bathed

Lock up yer daughters: It's Brewer & Shipley

Brewer & Shipley Music Date: Saturday, October 25

An open stretch of desert highway. Two paranoid addicts. A trunk full of
narcotics. Over the static of the car radio, "One Toke Over the Line"
blares, etching into memory the opening scenes of Fear and Loathing in Las
Vegas. Its prominence in the 1998 film brought folk duo Brewer & Shipley's
1971 hit single to a new generation of pot smokers nursing Hunter S.
Thompson fixations. The song, its drug-friendly lyrics and its inclusion on
such subtle compilations as Hempilation 2: Free the Weed branded Brewer &
Shipley as raging pro-marijuana-legalization hippies. Being personally
condemned by Spiro T. Agnew as "subversives" back in '71 didn't help much
either. But hype is just hype.

"I never considered myself a hippie," comments Michael Brewer. "I was a
young, married man paying taxes, working, pursuing a career. I wore the
clothes of the time and had long hair -- back when I had hair -- but I
never lived in a commune. I actually bathed and shaved."

Tom Shipley, however, has no problem with the label. "Back in the days when
we were officially card-carrying hippies traveling cross-country and living
out of our Volkswagen," he says, "I spent a lot of time on a Hopi
reservation out in the middle of Arizona. But I did not take acid and go
running naked through any of their pueblos. And I bathed."

When they realized that the title of their first album Down in L.A.
reflected not only their geography but their attitudes, Brewer & Shipley
headed back to the heartland. Shipley describes 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. There was a significant period
of time when we were essentially homeless. Then we set ourselves down with
all these old friends to try and get a musical production company going."

And so it went. In 1970 Brewer & Shipley released Weeds, featuring
fan-favorite "Indian Summer," which Shipley cites as his favorite song to
perform, and the Native American-influenced cover "Wichi Tai To." Inspired
by the film, the single "Rise Up Easy Rider" became a regional hit,
reaching number one in the Kansas City and St. Louis markets, although
their label refused to push the song nationally. Then later that same year
came Tarkio, the album that would launch a thousand joints.

Tarkio communicated the beauty of nature and the ugliness of politics
through song. With their buttered harmonies and deceptively simple acoustic
melodies, Brewer & Shipley created an emotive, enduring record with a lot
more going for it than the opening ditty "One Toke Over the Line."

Brewer & Shipley are genuinely delighted to have simultaneously had a Top
10 hit and a condemned record, regardless of the fact that it made them
into one-hit wonders and marked men.

"It is a little frightening when the government is coming down on you
personally," Brewer says of the duo's fifteen minutes in the Nixon's Most
Hated spotlight. "But what really put it into perspective was that at
exactly the same time Lawrence Welk performed 'One Toke Over the Line' and
introduced it as a gospel song. I guess it was the 'sweet Jesus' part.
We'll never know."

"When we wrote 'One Toke Over the Line,' I think we were one toke over the
line," says Shipley. "I considered [marijuana] a sort of a sacrament.....
If you listen to the lyrics of that song, 'one toke' was just a metaphor.
It's a song about excess. Too much of anything will probably kill you."

"There are no documented cases of anybody ever overdosing on marijuana,"
adds Brewer, "but God knows, I've tried. It just can't be done."

No matter how good the album sounds when you're high -- and that's pretty
good -- it is not a collection of dope hymns. Rather, it is a socially
conscious record that reflects life for two longhaired Midwesterners on the
road in 1970.

"There was a run-in with the police everywhere," says Shipley, in reference
to the title track's pointed lyrics about not-so-PC law enforcement.
"'Tarkio Road' was more or less a metaphor for all the traveling we did
from Grinnell, Iowa to Crete, Nebraska. You walked in a place with long
hair and people would give you a hard time. The police would drive around
slowly following your car."

In 1979 Brewer & Shipley parted ways to pursue personal interests. They
reunited in 1986 before a Kansas City crowd of ten thousand, and in 1993
released Shanghai, their first album of new material in seventeen years.
Their most recent release, Heartland, pays tribute to the often overlooked
beauty of the Midwest, specifically their personal heartland, the Ozarks.

Still, no amount of evidence to the contrary will change the general
perception of Brewer & Shipley as a '70s folk version of Cheech and Chong.
The National Organization for the Reformation of Marijuana Laws (NORML)
invites Brewer & Shipley to perform at conventions, and High Times magazine
sings their praises. Fortunately for their fans, a dedicated melange of
aging hippies and inspired twentysomethings, Brewer & Shipley don't mind
being thought of as perpetual tokers, though they've moved on from such
green pastures.

"The success is that our music has influenced people's lives in a positive
way," says Brewer. "Their kids really were conceived to 'Wichi Tai To.' If
we had made more money, our ex-wives would just be richer."

"I've been famous and I've been infamous," Shipley adds, "and neither one
of them is what they are cracked up to be. What matters is that we've been
playing together 35 years -- and we're still smoking."

He means that figuratively, of course.