Mellow yellow is most often defined as dried banana peel, scraped out and smoked in the belief that it produced a mild high. As a phrase it belongs to the drug slang of the 1960s, though the “high” it describes was almost certainly imaginary. The words are also used more loosely to describe a relaxed, laid-back mood, a sense that grew out of the same period and the same song that made the phrase famous.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘mellow yellow’?
The phrase reached the public through Donovan’s 1966 song “Mellow Yellow”, but the songwriter’s own explanation of where he got the title has nothing to do with drugs. Donovan said he took it straight from a newspaper advertisement for a yellow vibrator that was already being sold under the name “the mellow yellow”: “I was reading a newspaper and on the back there was an ad for a yellow dildo called the mellow yellow.” Asked about it again in a 2011 interview with NME, he said the phrase was really about “being cool, laid-back, and also the electrical bananas that were appearing on the scene, which were ladies’ vibrators.”
The drug meaning attached itself to the phrase separately, and after the fact. A rumour went round that dried banana skins could be smoked to get high, and Green’s Dictionary of Slang records “mellow yellow” as the name given to those dried skins, “which, according to contemporary rumour, could be smoked.” Donovan later insisted the rumour was not his doing at all, saying it “was started by Country Joe McDonald in 1966” and that he himself only heard of it “three weeks before ‘Mellow Yellow’ was released as a single.” The song simply gave the hoax a ready-made name to attach itself to.
The phrase has picked up at least one further, unrelated sense since then. In South African usage, “mellow yellow” has been applied to a yellow police armoured vehicle, a transferred use of the name of a yellow soft drink that was, in turn, “probably named for the song ‘Mellow Yellow’ by Donovan.” So the phrase has drifted from a suggestive advertisement, to a pop song, to a drug hoax it never actually described, to a soft drink brand, and finally to a piece of police hardware, each step borrowing the last one’s name rather than its meaning.