The first times I ever really heard music by The Beatles, The Stones, and-yes-Donovan, were all when we played back those tapes.

Dad let me listen to those recordings when I hit the age that I started understanding what music meant-and what radio could sound like. So my father, who spent his nights in the Navy bootlegging airchecks of European pirate radio stations on a reel-to-reel tape recorder, pulled himself up to the head of his bed. John Lennon and I used to look in the back of newspapers and pull out funny things and theyd. “MELLOW YELLOW.” He rolled those words off his tongue like he was sharing a secret of the universe. They call me Mellow Yellow, Im the guy who can calm you down. “Hey! You know what song we used to sing along to?” he asked. Those chimes are one of the few little gifts I’ve held on to after all our moves around the country.Ģ4 years later, on my dad’s last lucid day in hospice, when it was just him and me in the room, his face lights up. But his sincerity in that moment really touched me, and he told me he was so grateful that the segment we made covered so many facets of his career. He made such a ceremony of gifting these to me-even though I assumed he did the same little ceremony with someone at every stop on his promo tour. A little-known cool cover version of 'Mellow Yellow' was done by the jazz-soul combo Young Holt Unlimited.I’ve received more than my share of promotional merch over the years, but Donovan was very excited about having convinced his label to spend some budget from his Sutras album to make these little wind chimes.

The famous lyrical reference to an electric banana gave rise to fantastic rumors that smoking banana peels would get you high, though the words were surely intended in a lighthearted humorous fashion, not as a serious revelation. That partying atmosphere, something like a bridge between the Beatles' 'Yellow Submarine' and 'All You Need Is Love' ambience, sticks with the rest of the song, particularly the fadeout. When his good friends The Beatles wrote When Im Sixty Four, did it seem like a hundred Paul McCartney wrote that song and hes still got his hair. As for the phrase mellow yellow, it first appeared a. (Though those whispers have sometimes been rumored to have been voiced by Donovan's friend Paul McCartney, actually these were by Donovan.) After a near drum-roll of a turnaround, the song glides into an instrumental break of celebratory partying, with voices whooping it up as a striptease-like brass section takes over the main riff. In fact, it referred to a yellow vibrator that caught on around the time Donavan wrote the 1966 song. It was certainly difficult not to sing along with that chorus, too, particularly as it was immediately rejoined by a responsive knowing, nudge-nudge affirmative whisper. Only in 19, perhaps, would that nickname be worn as a badge of honor, but it fit in well with the psychedelic era, when the more outrageous the language and flouting of convention, the better. What makes this a psychedelic folk-rocker, rather than a sassy jazz tune, is the insistent chorus in which Donovan gleefully announces that they call him Mellow Yellow. The verses are certainly mighty melodic in a pop folk-rock fashion, with the singer's sly declarations of love for various fantastic women accompanied by only minimal electric guitar and bass. The big hook in 'Mellow Yellow' is not a riff or note, but a jazzy walking beat which carries the instrumental intro until Donovan's usual breathy vocal makes its entrance.

Countercultural bliss, of course, did not prohibit commercial success, and 'Mellow Yellow' was a very big hit, reaching number two in the U.S. 'Mellow Yellow,' in tandem with its predecessor 'Sunshine Superman,' established Donovan as the ultimate bearer of good vibes at the dawn of the psychedelic era.

Mellow yellow song beatles