Mellow Yellow Mellow Yellow "Mellow Yellow" is a song written and recorded by Scottish singer-songwriter Donovan. In the US it reached No. 2 on the "Billboard" Hot 100 in 1966, (Both Good Vibrations by The Beach Boys and Winchester Cathedral by The New Vaudeville Band kept it from hitting No. 1). Outside the US, "Mellow Yellow" peaked at No. 8 in the UK in early 1967. The song was rumoured 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 Yellow and Blue the end of a long life, he wrote: "It has always been a great joy to me, revisiting Ann Arbor, to hear the song still sung in fraternity houses, and on the campus in the twilight. I have heard it in mid-ocean, on the streets of Florence and Rome, and hither and yon as I have traveled about the world. A song written in the days of one's youth, if it by good luck expresses the emotion and enthusiasm of succeeding generations of young men and women, is a thousand times more worthwhile than many books of learning." The Yellow