We were talking here recently about the recording by Brewer & Shipley called "One Toke Over the Line" and how, amazingly, Lawrence Welk had a clean-cut, well-scrubbed couple sing it on one of his shows. No one — not the orchestra, not the other performers, not the crew, not anyone on the production staff — said, "Uh, Mr. Welk…you do know that this is not a song about Jesus, right? It's a song about marijuana."
Or maybe someone did and he didn't care. Or didn't think his audience would. Or something.
Apropos of all this, my longtime pal Joe Brancatelli sent me this note…
So this would have been 1988, the weekend my wife (who flew in from Honolulu) and me (I flew in from New York) met in San Francisco and decided to get married.
We're walking down Richmond Avenue and come across a little music club with a sign in the window: Tonight Only! Maria Muldaur and Brewer and Shipley. How could you not, right?
Brewer and Shipley is the opening act. it's years since "One Toke was a hit." Of course, and they felt compelled to explain to the audience who they were. "We were on The Ed Sullivan Show, you know," Brewer explained. "He booked us as a gospel act. We even met him backstage and he encouraged us to play our Jesus song, said he was looking forward to hearing it."
"We were puzzled," Shipley chimed in. "And nervous because we didn't want to upset him. So we found someone backstage and asked what Ed might be talking about."
You know, the guy said. Play your big hit about Jesus.
Again. We were confused.
"Then," Brewer adds, "we figured it out. We were booked as a religious act because Ed only knew the first line of our song: 'One Toke over the line, Sweet Jesus, one toke over the line…'"
The crowd roared.
You know, my first thought upon reading Joe's e-mail was along the lines of "I'm not sure I buy this." I mean, I'm sure he's accurately reporting what was said from the stage by Mr. Brewer but it's hard to believe that even if Ed thought that, he had a pretty efficient staff and network censors. It's hard to believe that someone on the crew or in the orchestra or from the network or in Ed's employ, didn't say, "Uh, Mr. Sullivan, you do know what a 'toke' is, don't you?"
That was my first thought but my second was this: You wouldn't think that could happen on The Lawrence Welk Show either but we have video proof that it did. So I'm withdrawing my skepticism on this.