I don’t remember exactly how long I lived at the Good Karma house in Kansas City. It seemed like forever. Not that it was a bad place to stay and most of that time we were on the road dodging … Read More
Kansas City. After a lot of years traveling the country, first by myself and later as part of Brewer and Shipley, it looked like I was about to settle down there. If you consider that any traveling musician actually settles … Read More
Traveling around the country could be a scary proposition for a couple of guys fresh from California. First of all, we didn’t look like a lot of people in the rest of the country. We looked like the scary creatures … Read More
Good-bye yellow brick road. That’s where it stood. Brewer and Shipley were leaving LA. I had been camped in Michael’s back yard as we finished our “Down In LA” album and now I was free to do as I please. … Read More
When last we met, Leon Russell was playing the pipe organ. But I need to step back a bit to get it all in. As we became Brewer and Shipley and started recording, Michael and I had made a move. … Read More
Michael and I were still just a couple of singer/songwriters signed to the same publishing company. Our writing room was not very professional by anyone’s standards. Michael had a long, walk-in closet with a piece of a telephone pole or … Read More
I had finally gotten a start in Hollywood…sort of. I had done a demo with Ruthann Friedman and The Poor almost had a hit with one of my songs. But things had rapidly slowed down. There was the occasional gig … Read More
Recently I did a series of stories called “Folkies.” In it, I talked about folk-rock and its origins in the coffee houses of the late 1950s and early 1960s. The stories were surprisingly well met along with many requests to … Read More
I do my best to keep politics out of my posts on One Toke Tom and Facebook. There is a song Brewer and Shipley wrote that, like some others, could be taken as political. A while back I did a … Read More
The Kansas City Chiefs. Decades of heartache. The discomfort of wearing a bag over one’s head season after season. It seemed I had become like an old Chicago Cubs fan. Hoping for the best but always praying that the team’s … Read More