Word: bananas
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Current smokes include almost anything from the supermarket spice and herb shelves plus dried hydrangea leaves, chlorine-soaked lettuce, and green peppers (aged until rotten, then used as a bulbous cigarette filter). But far and away the biggest new fad is tripping on banana peels...
Delicious Legality. The kick is known to hippies as "electrical bananas" or "mellow yellow."* Banana-heads scrape the white fibers from the inside of the peels, boil the scrapings into a paste, which is then baked. The dark brown ash that results is smoked in hand-rolled cigarette "joints" or in pipes, tastes vaguely like a burning compost heap...
Most people who have tried mellow yellow do not try it again. The reason is simple: lots of work for little, if any, high. But banana-heads find the craze appealing, largely because of its delicious legality. Already they have taken to wearing T shirts emblazoned with a blue United Fruit Co. seal. Sales of bananas at Harvard Square groceries have tripled in the past week. Highlight of Manhattan's Easter Sunday "bein" in Central Park was a raggle-taggle mob brandishing a giant 3-ft.-long mock banana and chanting "Banana! Banana! Ba-nan-a!" as they snake...
State of Mind. In San Francisco's psychedelphic Haight-Ashbury section, Top Banana Larry Starin, 26, has even opened the Mellow Yellow Co. to sell half-ounce portions of baked banana scrapings-enough, he says, for 35 to 40 joints-for $5 (the cost to Starin: less than 5? for each half-ounce). Starin plans to give away the "worthless" banana meat to underfed Haight hippies...
...From British Folk-Rock Singer Donovan's Mellow Yellow: "Electrical banana is gonna be a sudden craze. Electrical banana is bound to be the very next phase. They call it mellow yellow (quite rightly) . . ." Donovan insists that his song has no hidden meaning, but seekers found one anyway...