Remember the story I ran earlier in the week about the origins of the Brewer and Shipley song “One Toke Over the Line”? Most stories around the song have it written in 1970 in Kansas City after the duo go a little, shall we say,…chemically altered… on some pretty strong herbal medicine. Yeah, that’s what it was… medicine. Anyway, it’s said it was first performed publicly at a concert in New York in late 1970.
But wait…one of our listeners says…not true! Jenny Obrecht says she was a freshman at Ottawa University in 1969, and Brewer and Shipley played two concerts on campus to celebrate the opening of the OU coffee house. Checking a Braves yearbook from that year, that is confirmed. The duo played at the Coffee House on September 18th and 19th of 1969. Obrecht says she distinctly remember them playing “One Toke Over the Line”, and the students went crazy, loving it. Talking with another student from that era, he says the students encouraged them to play it again.
So, the song was definitely written before 1970, and performed publicly at least once, at Ottawa University in 1969 and you can bet there were plenty of students that were probably…
