Tom Smothers, one half of American comedy duo The Smothers Brothers with his brother (Richard) Dick, has died at age 86.
Smothers was a friend of John Lennon. He played acoustic guitar on Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band peace anthem ‘Give Peace A Chance’. Tom also gets name-checked in the song. “Ev’rybody’s talking ’bout John and Yoko, Timmy Leary, Rosemary, Tommy Smothers, Bobby Dylan, Tommy Cooper Derek Taylor, Norman Mailer, Alan Ginsberg, Hare Krishna, Hare, Hare Krishna”.
The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour aired on US television from 1967 to 1969. It its time guests inclued George Harrison, The Who, The Doors, Harry Nilsson, Simon & Garfunkel, Cream and Ray Charles.
The show was regularly controversial in its day with CBS regularly censoring the show from political comment at the time of the Vietnam War. Eventually CBS insisted The Smothers Brothers delivered their finished shows 10 days before airtime so the shows could be edited. When the show was cancelled by CBS, the brothers filed a breach of contract suit against the network and won a $776,300 pay out. That would be the equivilant of around $6.5 million today.
In 2009, Tom and Dick Smothers both appeard in the ‘O Brother, Where Bart Thou?’ episode of The Simpsons.
In 1977, Tom and Dick founded the Remick Ridge Vineyards in California. Tom sold the the property with the winery earlier this year.
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