Behind The Songs: "Mellow Yellow" & "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds"

MELLOW YELLOW
WRITER: Donovan Leitch
PERFORMER: Donovan
RELEASED: October 1966
CHART PEAK: No. 2 U.S., No. 8 U.K.

Written while Donovan vacationed in Greece, this “cheeky little song” was a followup to his No. 1 hit, “Sunshine Superman.” With a knowing wink, it hinted at the pleasure of those altered states of mind that were fashionable in the summer of 1966.

As Donovan says in the book Inspirations, “Like ‘Sunshine Superman,’ this song was once again termed by many as drug-oriented, and this time I was said to be singing about smoking bananas. What I actually meant by the title was that I was a laid-back kind of dude—and smoking the safe little green herb was in part responsible—and not the dried banana skins as was assumed.”

The lyric’s hodgepodge of “electrical bananas,” “saffron” and “wind velocity” needs some explanation. “As with some of John Lennon’s songs at the time, I pasted images together from newspapers, billboards and magazines, just as pop artists had done since Picasso and Braque,” says Donovan.

“The electric banana was a reference to the vibrators which had become available as marital aids on the back pages of periodicals. The rest of the lyric is culled from books of saffron-robed monks and saff ron cake from Cornwall. And there was an obvious reference to my teen girl fans at the time, who were mostly 14 and just mad about music.”

John Paul Jones, who later joined Led Zeppelin, arranged the song. As the musicians ran through his charts, it became clear that the horn section was overpowering Donovan’s airy vocals. Th e trombonist suggested “putting the ’ats on,” slang for using their mutes to soften the attack.

“The sound before the hats had been like a stripper’s song in a night club,” Donovan recalls. “It wasn’t mellow, but now it was. Mickie Most [the producer] beamed out at me—he knew we had a hit. He knew before the session; he always did.”

It has long been rumored that the whispered “quite rightly” lines on the chorus were done by Paul McCartney. Not true, according to Donovan. “Paul came into the session, although contrary to what most books say, he did not sing the whisper vocal. I sang this piece, and Paul joined in on the party parts.”

LUCY IN THE SKY WITH DIAMONDS
WRITERS: John Lennon & Paul McCartney
PERFORMER: The Beatles
RELEASED: May 1967
CHART PEAK: Never released as a single
VERSIONS: Elton John, Percy Faith Orchestra, William Shatner (whose version was voted the worst Beatles cover of all-time in a BBC poll)

In February 1967, John Lennon’s four-year old son Julian came home from nursery school with a painting that he’d done of his classmate, Lucy O’Donnell. When John asked his son about the picture, which showed a girl fl oating among the stars, Julian replied, “It’s Lucy, in the sky, with diamonds.”

“I don’t know why I called it that or why it stood out from all my other drawings,” Julian Lennon has said. “I used to show Dad everything I’d built or painted at school, and this one sparked off the idea for a song.”

John Lennon loved wordplay and surrealism, and his son’s evocative phrase gave him a direction for the lyric. As John recalled in Th e Beatles Anthology: “Th e images were from Alice In Wonderland. It was Alice in the boat. She is buying an egg and it turns into Humpty Dumpty. Th e woman serving in the shop turns into a sheep, and the next minute they’re rowing in a rowing boat somewhere—and I was visualizing that. Th ere was also the image of the female who would someday come save me—‘a girl with kaleidoscope eyes’ who came out of the sky.”

Another influence on the song was The Goon Show, a 1950s British radio comedy featuring Spike Milligan, Harry Secombe and Peter Sellers. In fact, the antics of the early Beatles owe a lot to the Goons. Lennon once told Milligan that “Lucy” was inspired by his love of Goon Show dialogue. Indeed, the Goons had a bit about “plasticine ties” which could easily have been the source for the line “plasticine porters with looking glass ties.”

“We went up to his music room and wrote the song, swapping psychedelic suggestions as we went,” Paul McCartney recalls. “I remember coming up with ‘cellophane flowers’ and ‘newspaper taxis’ and John answered with things like ‘kaleidoscope eyes’ and ‘looking glass ties.’ We never noticed the LSD initial until it was pointed out later—by which point people didn’t believe us.”

The Beatles’ history is full of strange coincidences, though none stranger than the song’s initials corresponding to the Summer of Love’s drug of choice. John Lennon would spend the rest of his life denying any deliberate connection.

“I saw Mel Tormé introducing a Lennon- McCartney show, saying how ‘Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds’ was about LSD,” he said in Anthology. “It never was, and nobody believes me. I swear to God, or swear to Mao, or to anybody you like, I had no idea it spelled LSD. Of course, after that, I was checking all the songs to see what the letters spelled out.”