Word: mellowing
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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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...
...might, under combustion, trigger genuine physiological effects. It is far more likely that any high produced by bananas is imaginary, another indication that, given a receptive state of mind, it is possible to turn on with practically anything-or virtually nothing. Witness the fact that some undergraduates, dissatisfied with mellow yellow, are already beginning to tout the high potentiality of yet another new ingredient: spider webs...
Reign's End. Detractors lay much of the blame to an aging but not notably mellow Schenley spirit: Chairman Lewis Solon Rosenstiel, 75. Rosenstiel founded the company shortly before repeal in 1933, and remains its dominant shareholder, controlling stock worth some $55 million. Ever contentious, he has for decades feuded with the industry over various marketing practices; more recently, he has spent much of his time in and out of court waging private wars with, among others, his estranged fourth wife, his daughter, one of his own lawyers, and his Greenwich, Conn., neighbors...