Brewer & Shipley’s “One Toke Over The Line” is about more than just a puff and a pass. The 1970 song has a higher meaning, one that discreetly warns of excess against a buoyant country-rock arrangement.
Videos by American Songwriter
It was a song that, while born out of boredom, quickly became the duo’s defining track, one that offers a valuable lesson one toke at a time.
Behind the Song
“One Toke Over The Line” came to be in Kansas City, Missouri where the duo —made up of singer-songwriters Mike Brewer and Tom Shipley—had settled, becoming a house act at the local Vanguard Coffee House.
“We played there a lot,” Brewer explained, recalling the fated night that would lead to the song. “We were real bored, sitting in the dressing room. We were pretty much stoned and all and Tom says, ‘Man, I’m one toke over the line tonight.’”
To understand the meaning of “One Toke Over The Line,” one must first understand what a “toke” is. To toke means to draw in a puff from a cigarette or a pipe, usually containing marijuana. It normally refers to the act of getting high, something Brewer and Shipley were fairly accustomed to at the time of the song’s creation.
“When we wrote ‘One Toke Over the Line,’ I think we were one toke over the line,” Shipley once explained (via Songfacts). “I considered marijuana a sort of a sacrament… If you listen to the lyrics of that song, ‘one toke’ was just a metaphor. It’s a song about excess. Too much of anything will probably kill you.”
In between rounds of the song’s snappy chorus: One toke over the line sweet Jesus / One toke over the line / Sittin’ downtown in a railway station / One toke over the line, there is an urgency as the tune’s narrator is Waitin’ for the train that goes home, sweet Mary, and hoping and praying that the train is on time.
The singer’s fun has been had, detailed in one verse, I sailed away a country mile / Now I’m returning and showing off my smile / I met all the girls and loved myself a few, but adds, And to my surprise / Like everything else that I’ve been through / It opened up my eyes and now I’m… Queue the chorus.
The fancy-free life that the song’s narrator has been living has been at a cost, taking him over the edge and now his eyes are finally open to the fact that he’s gone one toke too far.
I was born to give and take, the final verse plays, And as I keep growin’ I’m gonna make some mistakes / The sun’s gonna set and the bird is gonna wing / They do not lie / My last wish will be just one thing / Be smilin’ when I die, as the singer closes out the song with I want to be / One toke over the line sweet Jesus / One toke over the line… Maybe this time he means going out while high on life?
“One Toke Over The Line” would go on to define Brewer & Shipley for better or for worse. “It pretty much pigeonholed us and categorized us in a way that wasn’t really valid,” Brewer said of the song. “We’ve written a whole lot of songs that were not like ‘One Toke.’ Actually, Tom and I always thought that our ballads were our forte.”
However, Brewer doesn’t consider it all bad. While he refers to it as that “one silly song we wrote to kill some time between sets,” he adds, “We were really happy just to get a hit, even if it wasn’t necessarily the one we would have picked. We’re really glad people still like it.”
Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
