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Black Sabbath – What's Bill doing? Oh, he’s cooking his banana skin
Identifier
026965
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
From time immemorial there has been a myth circulating that smoking banana peel produces intense erotic experiences of bliss and peace, hallucinations, out of body experiences - plus many more amazing effects.
It has become such a well known joke that some compete in the forums to invent the best story of what happened, we have an example in the description for bananas [follow the link], which is one of the more imaginative and funny.
But the daftest thing is that, despite the fact the entire story is a complete fabrication, banana peel contains dopamine and is being seriously studied to help those with Parkinson's disease.
Depending on the banana, Dopamine levels of 22-48 micrograms per gram have been found in the fruit pulp, but 210-720 micrograms per gram has been found in the fruit peel [see references Riggin et al].
Bill was clearly the brightest of all of them.
A description of the experience
Tony Iommi – Iron Man
When we arrived [in Zurich] the place was packed. This band was up there playing away, looking happy and they even had champagne. We thought, this is marvellous, we’ll have some! Little did we know they had been there for six weeks and it was their last night. All these people were there seeing them off, so it was a big party night. As soon as we started the place was dead.
We went, wait a minute, what happened? Where's all the people? They had this one nutter coming in every day. He d stand on his head, all his money would fall out of his pocket, he'd pick it up again and leave. And there was this old hooker sitting at the corner by the bar and that was it.
Because it was deserted anyway, we started making stuff up. And we thought, hang on, if Bill does a drum solo for one set and I do a guitar solo for the next set, the other guys can have a rest.
That was great for a couple of days but of course they caught on.
During Bill's solo the owner’s daughter came up and said: 'Shut that noise! 'We're paying for you to play, not all this!'
It was a really grim place. We all slept in one room, together with a bunch of rats. The owner of the club had taken our passports, so we couldn’t get out. It was like slavery, with us playing five forty-five-minute spots and seven on the weekends with hardly any pay. But we did have a lot of laughs, also because we had the occasional joint.
And Bill smoked banana skins. He used to eat the banana, scrape all the residue off the skin, put it on to a piece of tin foil, put that in the oven, cook it and then smoke it.
He claimed it got him high, thought it was great and was really proud of it.
'What's Bill doing?'
'Oh, he’s cooking his banana skin"