From LA Free Press (UPS)
Get 15 pounds of bananas and scrape off the insides of the peels. This will take one person one hour to finish.
Put peeling in pots, add water and boil for two to three hours—until you get a solid paste.
Spread on cookie sheets and dry in oven for about fifteen minutes. Final product is a fine black powder.
Yes, banana powder works. Two or three bombers will get you stoned out of your skull. A toke or a joint will give you a beautiful subtle mellow high. Makes the universe into a tranquil delight for an hour! The first puff will get you up there, just like good grass!
Do you realize what this means??? Do you??? Everybody can get high any time they want to from now on! You can light up a banana joint in the street, at the freakout, in public, anywhere, anywhere, wheeee!
We sent Star Reporter Ronnie Reaganola up to Berkeley and found the man behind Mellow Yellow—phase two of the Psychedelic Revolution!
Here he is, Undergrounders, possibly the next Leary-guru of Psychedelphia, Larry Starin, 26, who walked off his job as Executive Assistant to the Vice President of WASP-Money, Inc. last August 31 and fled death-city NYC two days later to get his head straight in California.
“My buddy, Charley Simon, the psychedelic flutist, told me he heard this rumor about banana high a couple of weeks ago,” says Larry. “It was a real vague underground thing. So I went out and bought a couple dozen pounds of bananas and I experimented with the technique until I got it right.
“The secret is to use ONLY the inside of the peel and to start with at least ten pounds of whole bananas,” Larry says. “No, I don’t know anything about how it works chemically. That’s for the labs to figure out. All I know is that Mellow Yellow gives you a beautiful high. And I don’t see how there can be any dangerous side-effects, because we aren’t using anything but 100% Pure Banana Peel Insides.”
Like all great ideas, it took a while for the incredible potential of Mellow Yellow to truly register on Larry Starin. At first, he was merely dealing bananadine underground. “I’m ashamed to admit I was selling matchboxes of Mellow Yellow for as much as fifteen dollars. I guess I’m just a natural-born hustler and I really needed the bread back then—but nobody in Berkeley who bought a lid from me has ever asked for a refund.”
Then one night, Larry was sitting around getting stoned on bananas with his pals and it occurred to him that it would be a groovy idea to place an ad in the “Barb” calling for a smoke-in on the steps of Sproul Hall, so that all the nouveau bananaheads could get together on a mass Mellow Yellow.
Unfortunately, it was raining like a mother the day of the smoke-in, but a dozen hardy heads turned out along with a small audience of frustrated cops who couldn’t find anything to arrest anybody for.
“Sure, anybody can process Mellow Yellow,” says Larry. “But the work is a drag and there are certain fine points to the technique that take practice. I guess you could call me the world’s first mass-production bananamaster.”