Stories

Brewer and Shipley had become full-time residents of Missouri. Good Karma Productions had been established and managed to send Michael and me to every small college in the midwest. At least that is what it felt like. Aside from too … Read More

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