The song was featured in an episode of a favorite of many a family, mine included The Lawrence Welk Show in 1971. The song was described by Mr. Welk as a “modern spiritual”. Funny how the announcer choked up a bit on the intro. Meanwhile on advice from the FCC, radio stations were banning the song. While taking a toke (puff) on joint was counterculture lingo, did no one think to ask what it was?

The word “toke” was not common vernacular but really? I can’t imagine, once Lawrence found out, that he was happy they were singing about smoking pot on his show. The research folks must have been canned after this faux pas!

The song by the Folk duo came about after smoking some weed. I believe it was Tom Shipley who said to Mike Brewer in response to a little over indulgence, “man, I am one toke over the line” and a song was born.

Speaking of smoking marijuana, the idea to post this song comes by way of a story I have not told many people. Just a disclaimer here, I have never tried the ‘stuff’ myself but I have never had a problem with those who do partake. In fact, for me growing up it was fairly ubiquitous. Most certainly I had some second hand effects at concerts, parties, behind the post office near the school, or just standing within five feet of most of the kids I knew. I was committed to going into law enforcement at an early age and taking a chance on getting a record was too big a risk. So I was steadfast in my refusal to try it, second hand exposure not withstanding. There are two touch points with this song sandwiched in between. Got the munchies already!

So, when this song came out in 1971, I was 12 years old. I lived in the working class area in the city’s East End, EOA they called it, East of Adelaide Street. While we weren’t aware of it as young kids, we would learn there was a stigma attached in the eyes of the rest of the City. Not that these experiences I am about to divulge were exclusive to the East End, but this is a little snapshot of events from my early life. With a couple exceptions I will use just a letter rather than refer to the people by name.

On occasion my elementary school chum, we will call him C, would invite me over to play records, and I can thank him for introducing me to David Bowie. One day while we were listening to The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, he introduced me to something else. “Hey Randy, I got something to show you”, so happens it was the pot plants he was growing in his basement. C was a little ahead of the times as it was some 45 years later, on October 17, 2018, that this would become legal in Canada.

A few months later C and our mutual and very dear friend R would be struck by a car while rushing to complete their paper route one evening. R would die of his injuries and C spent two months in traction but recovered enough to walk again. Those were some tough visits to the hospital.

As these things go we went to different High Schools and lost touch after a few years. We would be reunited while I was in The Regional Detention Centre ( jail ). Me? No, I wasn’t the one in jail, I was on placement for my College Law and Security program. My old friend? He was doing time for smuggling pot across the border. We really had a very nice chat. But I never saw him again.

For the second touch point we have to go back before this reunion of sorts. While I don’t recall the exact relationship between the two my jailed friend C lived just a block over from a guy named Marc. I first met Marc when I was 11 years old, so it was in 1970 and a year before todays song was released. That meeting happened through my friend S who lived around the corner from me. One day he asked if I wanted to come to The Boys Club with him, soo I went, It was operated out of a Church on Dundas St., one of the main streets in the city. At the “club” we would play sports or games and sing a bit and it was actually a lot of fun as I recall.

S and I walked the roughly 40 minutes there and 40 back for one day out of every week for a whole summer. It was there at the Boys Club that S, his friend Marc and I would hang out together, even though I was a year younger than the pair. Most days S and I would meet up with Marc on the walk to the Church.

I will leave you to check the Wiki page link or just Google Marc Emery. As I heard about him several times thereafter over the years, I also knew him as a local entrepreneur. I shopped at his used bookstore that he bought at age 17 after dropping out of High School, later he started his own newspaper. He was always someone with a lot of ambition and some big ideas. Those ideas led him on his crusade of sorts. Not like we were close and I had no direct contact with him for almost 50 years, but a lot has transpired, namely his international fame as a patron of the pot plant. There is a documentary The Prince of Pot: The U.S. vs. Marc Emery that talks about a part of his life. Here is the link from IMBD.

So, as I try and bring this all together, there I was hanging out at the Dairy Bar after Boys Club with the future “Prince of Pot’, while my buddy C was about to start to grow the stuff. For all I know they may have shared horticulture tips. They would both spend time in jail on charges relating to Marijuana. Well this whole post was prompted because Marc and I connected indirectly via Facebook just a while back. He was looking to reminisce about the Boys Club and I randomly ran across his post on a Local page we both follow. Sometimes you just never know who you might cross paths with, again.

Those of us old enough to remember, or forget perhaps, but songs about Pot were fairly popular at that time, “Don’t Bogart Me” by The Fraternity of Man was featured in the 1969 movie Easy Rider. Not sure what came first, the song or the phrase “Don’t bogart that joint”, aka “don’t smoke it all yourself and pass it around”. I can credit C for explaining that term to me, just like he introduced me to illustrations from his mothers (a nurse) smuggled anatomy books but that’s another story. Good old C, he was a good friend but we could not have been more different.

It was also C who introduced me to another album. I was reminded of this when I saw that fellow blogger Anthony of Fantasticplanet recently posted a song from Cheech and Chong, the comedy duo that made a good living talking and singing about smoking pot in the 70s and 80s. They had some pretty silly stuff, some of it very funny, even if you didn’t partake. Dear C, I do hope you are keeping well.