![]() ![]() Densen reported that he’d heard about the recipe from members of the band Country Joe and the Fish, which he also managed. In his column “Folk Scene,” the writer Ed Denson presented a “Recipe of the week,” where he described a method of preparing banana peels for smoking by scraping out the white pith and drying it out in an oven before rolling it up in a joint. Wherever the hoax originally started, it was a short piece in a March 1967 issue of the counterculture magazine Berkeley Barb that seems to have kicked off the wider craze. Donovan would later state definitively that the song was actually written about a yellow vibrator, but lyrics such as “Electrical banana / Is gonna be a sudden craze / Electrical banana / Is bound to be the very next phase,” didn’t help. Nonetheless, the rumor quickly gained traction based on word of mouth.Ĭoincidentally, in early 1967, the Scottish songwriter and recording artist Donovan’s song “Mellow Yellow” was making its way to the U.S., and at the time, many people assumed that it was about smoking banana peels. Realizing that bananas also contain serotonin, the eager hippies invented the concept of smoking bananas.įor the record, while it is true that bananas contain some amount of serotonin, it is too slight to cross the blood-brain barrier. ![]() ![]() According to Krassner’s version of the myth’s origin, the editors of the paper were discussing the mechanics of LSD and serotonin in the brain, and then began to wonder if something more natural could produce the same effect. That’s why people fell for it.”Īs relayed in an extensive 2012 article by the Local East Village about the history of the craze, the counterculture publisher Paul Krassner claims that the rumor began in the publishing offices of The East Village Other. ![]() Bananas were cheap, so if banana scrapings worked, this would be a really cheap high. “But pot cost money, and hippies had little money. It was a highly experimental era driven perhaps most by LSD and by growing pot use,” says the historian William Rorabaugh, who’s written multiple books about the 1960s including American Hippies. “Young people in the ’60s were looking for new ways to get high. Rumors of bananas as narcotics began swirling around the hippie scene in the mid-1960s. But few of these viral blips approach the lasting influence, and outright silliness, of that time in the 1960s when people started smoking banana peels. Even today, mythical ways of getting high, from the gross-out nonsense that was Jenkem to the digital absurdity of “ i-dosing,” are still popping up in the popular consciousness. One of the oldest coffeeshops in Amsterdam is called "Mellow Yellow".Anybody got a light? Alexas_Fotos/Public Domainĭrug scares are a dimebag a dozen, but the hysteria surrounding fake drugs is always fascinating to behold.He also clarifies Paul contribution to the song: you can hear him cheering at the end of the song, with other people gathered in the recording studio. Although it has been said that the words "quite rightly" in Mellow Yellow are whispered by Paul McCartney, in his autobiography The Hurdy Gurdy Man Donovan claims it was actually him, not Paul.Marion Bloom's buttocks, but it's not known if Donovan got the phrase from there. The words "mellow yellow" appears on page 719 of the first American edition of Joyce's Ulysses, where it is used to refer to Mrs.The controversial lyrics ("electrical banana") actually refered to a yellow vibrator. But Donovan's notes in the album clarify the origins of the rumor: it was started by Country Joe McDonald in 1966, and Donovan learned about it three weeks before the release of Mellow Yellow single. It was rumored that the song was about smoking dried banana skins, which was believed to be a hallucinogenic drug in the 1960s.Shawn Phillips: sitar on Sunny South Kensington.Tony Carr: percussion on Sunny South Kensington.Eric Ford: electric guitar on Sunny South Kensington.Danny Thompson: bass on Sunny South Kensington.John Cameron: arrangement and keyboards on Sunny South Kensington.Danny Moss and Ronnie Ross: horns on Mellow Yellow.John Paul Jones: bass and arrangement on Mellow Yellow.Paul McCartney: uncredited backing vocals on Mellow Yellow. ![]()
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