Here's another song that I had on my becoming-infamous mixtape but I never knew anything about the song or the folks who'd recorded it. The folks were Mike Brewer and Tom Shipley and they were reportedly in a coffee shop somewhere when they got the idea for "One Toke Over the Line," which Wikipedia says came out in 1971 but then on the same page, they also say — and I quote…
On September 15, 1970, Vice President Spiro Agnew gave a televised speech condemning songs that contained references to drugs. Among the songs he mentioned were "With a Little Help from My Friends" by the Beatles, "White Rabbit" by Jefferson Airplane, and "One Toke Over the Line."
…and The Great and All-Knowing Wikipedia further states that Agnew's speech caused a lot of radio stations to stop playing that kind of song. Agnew, of course, was an outspoken defender of morals when he wasn't taking bribes.
Here are Brewer and Shipley performing the song as per their record. To further confuse its date of issue, this clip is from a 1973 episode of Midnight Special and it displays a copyright date of 1971…
Wikipedia also gives us this quote from Mike Brewer…
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.
We were just talking on this blog about Lawrence Welk and I have been informed by quite a few e-mailers that Lawrence Welk Show reruns are on one of their local stations — usually PBS stations apparently.
My pal Pat O'Neill also reminded me of that performance on Mr. Welk's program once — one of Welk's awkward attempts to be "contemporary" which I featured on this blog way back on this page in 2009. I'll save you the trouble of clicking on it by embedding it again here. Welk did not introduce it as a gospel song. At the end though, he said (as you can hear) that it was a "modern spiritual." In any case, this is how this song oughta be sung…