An excerpt from the current issue of Dirty Linen
| Brewer and Shipley
More Tokes for Older Folks
Long before the self-lacerating, angst-filled, psychiatric couch-folk
that has plagued the better part of the 90s, there were the mellow
and easy folk-rock sounds of Michael Brewer and Tom Shipley. With
the widespread success of their 1971 cannabis-inspired hit single
"One Toke Over the Line," Brewer & Shipley became
the musical equivalent of Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassidy. The toke-some
twosome traveled back and forth across the country countless times,
played hundreds of dates and lent their trademark harmonies, interweaving
melodies and ringing acoustic guitars to songs written by Bob
Dylan, Jesse Colin Young and Jackson Browne, as well as seven
albums' worth of original compositions.
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The duo called it quits in 1979, after a little over a decade.
Shipley retired from the music business and eventually became
a documentary video producer, and Brewer went on to record a solo
album, produced by Dan Fogelberg. In the summer of 1986 a Kansas
City "classic rock" station persuaded them to perform
a reunion concert to celebrate the station's first anniversary
and in September of that same year, Brewer and Shipley walked
onto a stage together for the first time in seven years and played
before a crowd of 10,000 adoring fans.
The experience proved to be such a positive one that they slowly
began to tour again and even recorded a new album (their first
CD) of all original songs, called Shanghai, in 1993. Another
new album by the pair is scheduled for release for the winter
of 1996. In the early stages it was to be called Another Hair-brained
Idea or ...From Old White Guys, but it looks like the
title has settled into the more commercially acceptable Heartland.
You can read all of Lahri Bond's story about the return of Brewer and Shipley in Dirty Linen #62