Youth: Tripping on Banana Peels
For turned-on hippies, the search for new and legal “highs” is endless. In recent years, youthful mind-benders have tripped (or thought they did) on everything from airplane glue to morning-glory seeds, from nutmeg to black tea.
But now that the psychedelic “revolution” is really under way, they are discovering new highs with dizzying speed, and their discoveries are passed quickly around the underground through such newspapers as Manhattan’s East Village Other and the Berkeley Barb.
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-danced through the bemused multitude, cheered on by girls wearing banana crowns, while one student, dressed in a yellow slicker, tried to pass himself off as the biggest banana of all.
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.
But do bananas really work? The best that chemists can suggest is that bananas contain serotonin, a neurochemical that is closely related to such potent mind-benders as psilocybin and dimethyl tryptamine, and which just 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.
* 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.
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