Pirate's Banana Joints

[Mike Weaver]

The Electric Prunes' single the Great Banana Hoax was released in 1967. 
The lyrics don't have any direct bearing on the story apart from the 
last line - "we love to put you on".

My memory (from three or four years later) was that it was acknowledged 
as a put on from word go. A quick search now takes me to a book 
_American Fun: Four Centuries of Joyous Revolt_ by John Beckman, where 
he says it was Ed Denison manager of Country Joe and the Fish who 
started it in a column in the Berkley Barb.

In the UK from the mid 60s to early 70s riffing on bananas was the 
domain of Daevid Allen (aka the Alien Banana) and Kevin Ayers, founders 
of Soft Machine. Kevin said that this was because where they lived, 
around Canterbury was a commuter belt - cornflake country - and what 
goes best with cornflakes - bananas of course. So Daevid's first solo 
album was Banana Moon, the word 'banana' is intoned with no context on 
KA's Joy of a Toy and later albums were Bananamour and Yes We have no 
Mananas.

Pynchon was following in a counter culture tradition, taking it that 
much further than anyone else and as David says imbuing it with depths 
of meaning.


On 03-Oct-17 6:55 PM, Jade Becker wrote:
> Hey folks,
>
> I'm in the middle of Danny Goldberg's /In Search of the Lost Chord: 
> 1967 and the Hippie Idea/, and he describes the false story that 
> circulated in 1967 about how "people could get high scraping the 
> inside of banana peels, boiling the residue, drying it, rolling the 
> resulting 'bananadine' into a joint, and smoking it." The myth became 
> so prevalent--in part because of LSD users who smoked 'bananadine' 
> while already high (and thus believed it heightened the effect)--that 
> Congressman Frank Thompson started rallying for the Banana Labelling 
> Act, a piece of legislation that would require bananas to be labeled 
> with warning stickers like cigarettes. The FDA had eventually come out 
> and confirm that bananas contained no hallucinogenic effects.
>
> This was news to me (youngster that I am), and it brought Pirate's 
> banana breakfasts to mind. I haven't been able to re-read that section 
> of /GR /yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if Pynchon were riffing on 
> the banana-smoking phenomenon in some way or another.



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