Tom Shipley of Brewer & Shipley, the duo best known for the 1971 Top 10 hit “One Toke Over the Line,” has died of unspecified causes at the age of 84.
The New York Times confirmed the news with Shipley’s son Marc, who said his father died on Aug. 24 at a hospital in Columbia, Missouri. Shipley’s duo partner Mike Brewer died in 2024.
The band’s biggest hit, which humorously chronicles a real-life incident when Shipley indulged in a bit too much marijuana, wasn’t initially intended for release.
“‘One Toke Over the Line’ was a song we wrote to amuse ourselves one night, trying to come up with something to make our friends laugh. The first time we played Carnegie Hall, we opened for Melanie and we did quite well; we got several encores and we ran out of songs,” Shipley’s partner Brewer told UCR in 2016.
“So we said, “Okay, let’s do that new song.’ The president of the record company we were with at the time came backstage and he said, ‘Oh, you gotta record that for the album.’ Which kind of surprised us, because like I said, we didn’t take it real seriously.”
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Released on the duo’s fourth album Tarkio, “One Toke Over the Line” became far and away their biggest hit. But it also put them in the government’s crosshairs.
“We made Nixon’s ‘hate list,’ which we held as a badge of honor and still do to this day, and the Vice President, Spiro Agnew, named us personally on national TV one night as “subversives to America’s youth,” Brewer recalled. “I mean, you can’t buy that kind of publicity.”
Watch Brewer and Shipley Perform ‘One Toke Over the Line’
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Gallery Credit: Ultimate Classic Rock Staff
