Look Who it Was Random video

527 - Donovan - Mello Yellow - cover by George44

661 views · Published 28 September 2011 · 4:18 · Indexed 31 October 2026

Channel: George Possley · 2011 · Music

Watch on YouTube

SOTD for Tuesday, October 18, 2011

From Wikipedia:
"Mellow Yellow" is a song and single release by Donovan.[1] It reached #2 on the Billboard charts in the U.S. in 1966 and #8 in the UK in early 1967.

The song was rumored to be about smoking dried banana skins, which was believed to be a hallucinogenic drug in the 1960s, though this aspect of bananas has since been debunked. According to Donovan's notes accompanying the album Donovan's Greatest Hits, the rumor that one could get high from smoking dried banana skins was started by Country Joe McDonald in 1966, and Donovan heard the rumor three weeks before "Mellow Yellow" was released as a single. (According to The Rolling Stone Illustrated Encyclopedia of Rock and Roll, he admitted later the song made reference to a vibrator; an "electrical banana" as mentioned in the lyrics.)[2] The phrase "mellow yellow" appears on page 719 of the first American edition of James Joyce's Ulysses, where it is used to refer to Mrs. Marion Bloom's buttocks, but it is not known if Donovan got the phrase from there.[3]

The record had a "Beatlesque" feel to it, and was sometimes mistaken for a Beatles song. Donovan, in fact, was friends with the Beatles. Paul McCartney can be heard as one of the background revelers on this track, but contrary to popular belief, it is not McCartney whispering the "quite rightly" answering lines in the chorus, but rather Donovan himself. Donovan had a small part in coming up with the lyrics for "Yellow Submarine", and McCartney played bass guitar (uncredited) on portions of Donovan's Mellow Yellow album.

More from this channel