Brewer & Shipley’s One Toke Over The Line On Lawrence Welk Show
Brewer & Shipley had a Top 10 Hit in 1970 with the song “One Toke Over The Line”. It was a song that the duo wrote while they were “partaking” backstage prior to a performance at a coffee house. Well…. back in the day some people didn’t know about such things and the song got mis-interpreted and ended up on the Lawrence Show……really
“One Toke Over The Line” was performed for the The Lawrence Welk Show, a television program known for its conservative, family-oriented format, by a duo known as “Gail and Dale.” At the conclusion of the performance of the song, Welk remarked, without any hint of humor, “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.
Watch for yourself
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