Pirate's Banana Joints

[Allan Balliett]

Donovan’s Mellow Yellow was released in 1966.   I think that US hit was
credited with initiating the fad and the co-conspirators  strangely, I find
out just now that that album wasn’t released in the UK until a couple years
later

Canterbury, still a secret to the US market, didn’t start making the
distributed scene until ‘69

Were  you friends with Kevin Ayers?

ALLAN in WV where opioids are still King

On Tue, Oct 3, 2017 at 5:42 PM Mike Weaver <mike.weaver at zen.co.uk> wrote:

> 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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