![]() What a fantastic period to have lived in. Quite an eye bulging experience for 3 - 17 year-old guys at the time! Sure wish someone would organize one more love-in just to have the chance to relive that day. ![]() ![]() Some of them were so high on other drugs they never realized it when the sheets fell off. Will never forget the beautiful girls walking around with nothing but a white sheet wrapped around them. Well, besides rasping our lungs out, it didn't do a thing, but we sure had a great time. So we thought, "What the Heck! Let's try it!". When we arrived at Golden Gate Park sure enough, all of the hippies were smoking what they called "Mellow Yellow"! We asked one guy what the high was like and he said it just mellowed you out and it was perfectly legal to smoke it. So one day we loaded up one of our buddy's cars and headed out for San Francisco from LA during the Easter Break. To me, listening to this song now, I can hear an unrealized direction that music might have taken.When this song first came out we thought it was about smoking the white stuff scraped from the inside of banana peels, too. At the time it came out, Donovan was a pioneer who was being mentioned as the British Bob Dylan. At the time that "Mellow Yellow" came out it wasn't a novelty song from a brief gear shift in the history of music. It also represented the peak of Donovan's career, as the nascent "electric folk rock" would split into either easy listening or hard rock.īut this is all in retrospect. " Sunshine Superman" had been a #1 single, and "Mellow Yellow" got to #2. "Mellow Yellow" went to number two in the charts, and with its singalong chorus and easy rhymes, it seemed to be almost a bubblegum song. And to me, Donovan was a pop singer who wrote accessible songs who was briefly popular before Jimi Hendrix changed everything. In my memory of the 1960s, there was a brief period, basically less than a year, around 1966, when British Invasion groups singing about romance dabbled in psychedelia before everything broke open into psychedelia and hard rock. And the line about "I'm quite mad about fourteen" might be about something quite unsavory.īack to the 1960s and remembering them: I was born in 1979, which means I remember the 1960s quite well. Apparently, the line about an "electrical banana" referred to the new availability of vibrating dildos. The lyrics are a lyrically celebration of being a laid-back dude, and were misunderstood at the time about smoking banana peels. "Mellow Yellow" was a single by Scottish folk-rocker Donovan, released in October of 1966. Mike is, in fact, so mellow that he creates a ' shock cone' of anti-mellow with him at the centre.Īs the joke goes: "If you remember the 60s, you weren't there". In this state of extreme mellowness the physics of mellow are reversed. Mike has become so mellow that he has passed some kind of quantum mellow barrier and become ultra-mellow. Mike is so mellow that the mere presence of anyone within his shop is enough to harshen his buzz. Michael has achieved a state of mellow beyond what any human could reasonably hope for. When money is deposited the machine makes loud laughing sounds as the poor tourist realises that this is just another of Mellow Yellow's mindfucks.Īfter extensive investigation we concluded that the cause of the distinct lack of mellow at Mellow Yellow was the owner (lets call him Michael). The fiendish Nazis who run Mellow Yellow have put a pay machine next to the toilet that has nothing to do with the operation of the toilet door. We warned them that Mellow Yellow had eyes everywhere. A conversation ensued and we exchanged pages and drawings from our notebooks. We met two girls in Mellow Yellow who were about to take some magic mushrooms. It's OK to smoke dope on the premises just as long as you are very careful not to have any fun you will also get thrown out of Mellow Yellow (probably at knife point) if you don't have exact change. Oh and Mellow Yellow is also the least mellow place on earth. The owners are pretty intense and have an intelligently dispassionate attitude towards tourists that some may perceive as unfriendliness. The decor is light and airy (and very very yellow) which makes for a refreshing change to the claustrophobic environments found in many other coffeeshops in the Noord Holland province. It is located on Vijzelgracht in the Southern Main Canal district. Founded in the 1970s Mellow Yellow was one of the very first coffeeshops in Amsterdam.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |