As I expected, several readers of this blog searched newspaper archives to find out if Vice-President Spiro T. Agnew had indeed mentioned the song "One Toke Over the Line" by Brewer & Shipley in a speech on September 15, 1970. If so, we'd like to know how since the song hadn't been released then.
Well, it turns out Agnew didn't. This is from The New York Times for that date. The speech was actually the day before…
LAS VEGAS, Nev., Sept. 14 — Vice-President Agnew said tonight that American youths were being "brainwashed" into a "drug culture" by rock music, movies, books and underground newspapers. He called these part of "a depressing life style of conformity that has neither life nor style." After describing himself as a "bumpkin" earlier today in San Diego, the Vice-President came to the capital of American gambling to lecture against "creeping permissiveness" and urge the election of "square" Republicans.
Mr. Agnew said in a speech to 1,000 Republicans at the Space Center Auditorium of the Sahara Hotel that popular songs such as the Beatles' "With a Little Help From My Friends" or the Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit" were a message of drug use.
Ira B. Matetsky was one of the folks who looked up contemporary coverage of that speech. He found one report that Agnew also cited the songs "The Acid Queen," "Eight Miles High," "Couldn't Get High," "Don't Step on the Grass, Sam," and "Stoned Woman." No mention there either of the Brewer & Shipley record.
But Agnew gave lot of speeches. That was just about all he did while Veep apart from accepting bribes for past favors to contractors in his home state of Maryland when he was governor. He went around the country, often to fund-raisers, and explained how America was going to hell and the only way out of it was to elect people from his party. I'm sure glad no one does that these days.
It is very easy to believe that when "One Toke" was on the charts months later, Agnew mentioned it in some of his speeches. The quote from Brewer did not say Agnew had mentioned the song in the September 1970 speech. Ira found that the erroneous date on the Wikipedia page was only inserted a few days ago and unless further evidence is uncovered soon, he's going to have that date deleted there. Thanks also to Rob Davis, Bob Gillian and others who sent me links.
I was wondering if Mssrs. Brewer and Shipley are still performing. Their website, which hasn't been updated in a while still says, "Due to the Corona virus and concern for our fans' well being, as well as our own, we have canceled all shows for 2020." So they had bookings then and Jeffrey Morris sent me this link to a piece November of 2021 about them still performing so they went back to it.
I can't find anything online that they're out there now but the Brewer & Shipley page on Facebook was just updated the other day with a remembrance of David Crosby, which was also featured on Tom Shipley's personal website, onetoketom.com. So at least one of those guys is blogging.