“Yesterday and Today” butcher cover is being withdrawn

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Likely on April 29, 1966, The Beatles had an impromptu photo shoot with Robert Whitaker at Brian Epstein’s NEMS Enterprises offices in London. Whitaker used a blue steamer trunk as a prop, and took several photos of the band.

Around the same time, Capitol Records requested a photo for the cover of a new Beatles album they were assembling, to be named “Yesterday and Today“. Epstein sent them one of the photos from the steamer trunk session. Capitol’s art department quickly came up with a cover design, but this design was rejected by Brian Epstein.

Whitaker had recently taken photos of The Beatles dressed as butchers, holding raw meat and mutilated plastic baby dolls, for an art project. John Lennon insisted that one of these butcher photos be used for the cover, even though Epstein was opposed to the idea. Epstein was forced to submit the butcher photo to Capitol.

Capitol was reluctant to use the butcher photo, but Brian Epstein and The Beatles refused to change their minds. Capitol’s art department then designed a cover using the butcher photo. Epstein also decided to use photos from the butcher session to promote the single “Paperback Writer / Rain” in the UK press.

On June 3, the butcher photo was first printed in black and white in UK music magazines. On June 11, the magazine Disc And Music Echo published another photo from the butcher session in full colour on its front page, with the title “BEATLES: WHAT A CARVE-UP!” The picture attracted an unfavourable response from many of the magazine’s readers.

By June 7, in the US, 750,000 copies of the album with the butcher cover had been pressed, packaged, and shipped to distributors. However, Capitol began to receive consistent negative responses from its distributors and sales teams. Capitol’s president Alan Livingstone then decided to change the cover design, and Capitol’s art department designed a new cover using a “trunk” picture and the psychedelic font used on the butcher cover.

On June 10, Capitol launched “Operation Retrieve“, recalling all copies of the LP from distributors to replace the offending image, as well as items such as promotional posters.

Different strategies were pursued to deal with the 750,000 “butcher” covers. Some of the stock saw the records removed and the covers destroyed. For some of the stock, the new cover was pasted over the existing “butcher” cover.

On June 14, Capitol sent a memo to reviewers asking them to disregard the artwork and explaining that “The original cover, created in England, was intended as ‘pop art’ satire. However, a sampling of public opinion in the United States indicates that the cover design is subject to misinterpretation.“

The backlash against the butcher cover in the US was reported in the June 25 issue of Billboard. The cover controversy marked the first time that the Beatles’ judgment was criticised by the media and distributors.

“Yesterday And Today” was eventually released on June 20, just five days after the original release date.

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Holding his cigarette lighter close to Whitaker’s sheet of transparencies, Epstein told me: “What I’d really like to do is set fire to the whole lot and never let them see the light of day.” I agreed wholeheartedly that the “butcher session” might well be disastrous to the career of any lesser band but I had to say that The Beatles were big enough to withstand the bad publicity. A year earlier, Epstein would have stood his ground and destroyed the transparencies. Like the rest of us, he was sickened by some of the stuff Whitaker had taken but he bent under pressure from John, chose one of the less offensive shots where The Beatles were grinning rather than sneering, and sent the transparency to Alan Livingston at Capitol. He released several other similar shots to EMI in London to use in press advertising for the new UK single which coupled ‘Paperback Writer’ and ‘Rain’ and he handed one to Disc And Music Echo, which published it in colour on the front cover of the June 11 issue.

In Hollywood, Livingston’s delayed reaction was that Capitol couldn’t use the “butcher session” picture although this meant recalling some “Yesterday… And Today” sleeves that had already been printed and put into circulation. The Capitol boss told Epstein bluntly that the dealers wouldn’t stock it and the sales people wouldn’t handle it. Advance copies sent to US media reviewers and deejays were scrapped and Ron Tepper, Capitol’s manager of press and information services announced that the artwork “created in England, was intended to bepop art satire”. The few copies of “Yesterday… And Today” with the original “butcher” cover became highly prized souvenirs and are valued at more than a thousand dollars in today’s memorabilia marketplace.

Tony Barrow – From “John, Paul, George, Ringo & me: the real Beatles story“, 2006

In those days you’d turn up at a session and the photographer would normally have an idea. In the very early days Dezo Hoffmann asked us to put glasses on. I said, ‘I don’t wear glasses, Dezo.’ He said, Yeah, but I’ll be able to sell these to eyeglass magazines all over the world.’ We were getting all these little clues of how it was done. So we were used to photographers giving us bizarre ideas, sometimes we’d ask why we should do it, and they’d say, ‘It’ll be OK,’ and we’d agree.

We’d done a few sessions with Bob before this, and he knew our personalities: he knew we liked black humour and sick jokes. It was very prevalent at that time. And he said, ‘I’ve had an idea – stick these white lab coats on.’ It didn’t seem too offensive to us. It was just dolls and a lot of meat. I don’t know really what he was trying to say, but it seemed a little more original than the things the rest of the people were getting us to do – eyeglasses!

He had a little history of doing that kind of shoot. I remember we came in once and he had some polystyrene that he wanted us to break, and he took action photos of us doing it. I suppose when the photos came out, it looked as if we were wrecking everything, but it was only because we were asked to do it as an idea for a photo session, and that’s what the ‘butcher’ cover was. So we liked it – we thought it was stunning and shocking, but we didn’t see all the connotations.

It was Capitol Records that didn’t want it, but you have to remember the climate then. I remember Sir Edward Lewis, head of Decca, not wanting the Stones’ album cover because it had graffiti on a toilet seat on it. Mick came round to talk to us about it, and I actually rang up Sir Edward and said that I thought they should put it out, but he wasn’t having any of it. We weren’t against a little shock now and then, it was part of our make-up.

Paul McCartney – From “The Beatles Anthology” book, 2000

I was mentioning to you off the air that the Yesterday and Today album, I always take the cover and I try and peel back…

Peel it to look for the dead babies bit, yeah.

How did that happen that that album cover never saw the light of day or, if it did, got pulled off fairly quickly?

We took the pictures in London at one of those photo sessions. By then we were really sort of beginning to hate it. A photo session was a big ordeal, and you had to try and look normal, and you didn’t feel it. And the photographer was a bit of a surrealist, you know? And he brought along all these babies and pieces of meat and doctors’ coats, so we really got into it, and that’s how we felt, eurgh! So we sort of — I especially — pushed for it to be an album cover, just to break the image, you know?

And it got out in America, and they printed… about sixty thousand got out, and then there was some kind of fuss, as usual, and they were all sent back in, or withdrawn. And they stuck that awful-looking picture which you have in front of you, of us sitting, looking just as deadbeat, but supposed-to-be-happy-go-lucky foursome.

You look very unhappy!

Yeah! Right, right! So we tried to, you know, do something different.

Album covers were much simpler then, right? Just the cover?

Yeah, you just walk in, take your photo, and walk out, you know? Especially in America, we made only, say, ten albums actually, in America there seem to be thirty of them. And so we would design a cover or have control of it, more of our own covers in England; but America always had more albums, so they always needed another picture, another cover.

John Lennon – From John Lennon on the Dennis Elsas Show, WNEW-FM, 28 Sept 1974.

The sleeve was great for us because we were quite a nice bunch of boys and we thought, Let’s do something like this!’ What was crazy about that sleeve was that, because it was banned, they glued paper over it and everyone started steaming it off. They made it into a really heavy collector’s item – which, I’m afraid to say, I don’t have a copy of, because in those days we never thought, ‘We’d better save this.’

Ringo Starr – From “The Beatles Anthology” book, 2000

The 1966 American album, Yesterday and Today, was the one with the controversial sleeve. I think Brian Epstein had met a photographer in Australia called Robert Whitaker, who came to London where Brian introduced him to us. He was avant-garde and took a lot of photographs. He set up a photo session which I never liked personally at the time.

I thought it was gross, and I also thought it was stupid. Sometimes we all did stupid things, thinking it was cool or hip when it was naive and dumb, and that was one of them. But again, it was a case of being put in a situation where one is obliged, as part of a unit, to co-operate.

So we put on those butchers’ uniforms for that picture. In the photograph we’re going, Ugh! That’s what I’m doing, isn’t it? I’m disgusted, and especially so by the baby dolls with their heads off. What the bloody hell is that all about? Quite rightly somebody took a look at it and said, ‘Do you think you really need this as an album cover? So the record company said: You don’t want to do a cover like that. We want to have a nice one with you all sitting in a little box.

George Harrison – From “The Beatles Anthology” book, 2000

What was your reaction to the furore around the sleeve?

I thought it was not my fault! If they had asked me what the artwork was I don’t think it would have been that frightening. I don’t blame people for being upset about it. But as it turns out it actually released John to say that they were pissed off looking like pretty little boys all the time and that they were human beings. It gave them a release.

Robert Whitaker – From An Interview with Robert Whitaker – Beatles in London, October 6, 2016

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From The Beatles Butcher Cover – Yesterday and Today (rarerecords.net):

Replacement Cover Design

Capitol quickly came up with a replacement cover design; this one was much more innocuous and depicted the band surrounding a steamer trunk. This image may have been considered for use as the original cover of the album, and several different prototype cover slicks exist with slight variations on this image.

The decision then needed to be made as to what to do about the returned albums, that had the design that would soon be known as the “Butcher cover.” The decision regarding what to do about the covers may have been made at the corporate level or by individual plant managers.

At the Jacksonville, Illinois, plant, all of the returned copies had the records removed and the covers were reportedly taken to a landfill, where they were dumped into a hole that was then filled with water.

At the Los Angeles and Scranton plants, a different decision was reached – the cover slicks with the new artwork would be pasted over the existing “Butcher cover” slicks.

This process proved to be less expensive than reprinting the covers completely, but was also more time consuming. Not only was the process of precisely aligning a new slick over the old one a difficult task, but the finished covers also had to be trimmed at the mouth (the right edge) to account for any misalignment at the opening of the cover.

Once the covers were either reprinted (Jacksonville) or modified (Los Angeles and Scranton), the albums were again shipped to distributors for their June 20, 1966 release date. […]

Collectors and Butcher Covers

The fact that the original covers for Yesterday and Today were withdrawn and replaced wasn’t a secret, and the public soon discovered that many of them had purchased albums that had a cover with a second cover underneath. Not only that, but it was fairly easy to see the old cover under the new one on most copies, as the new cover was mostly white and the cover underneath was quite a bit darker. In addition, due to the haste with which the new slicks were applied to the old covers, many covers had trunk slicks that were slightly misaligned, making it even more obvious that there was another cover underneath the trunk cover.

A few enterprising individuals discovered that steam from a tea kettle could be carefully applied to the cover, which allowed the trunk slick to be removed and the Butcher cover underneath to be exposed. With time, the glue used to attach the trunk cover slicks became pretty secure, and attempts to peel the covers using steam became less successful, resulting in thousands of badly damaged and largely useless Butcher covers.

Within a few months, all of the “pasteover” copies of Yesterday and Today had been sold, and by the end of 1966, all of the copies seen in stores were copies that had been manufactured with the trunk cover only.

Butcher Cover Terminology

By January, 1967, four distinctly different versions of Yesterday and Today were in existence. These were the original issues with the “Butcher cover” photo, the second version of the album, with the trunk cover slick pasted over the Butcher cover, the buyer-created “peeled” versions with the trunk cover removed, and the fourth version, which was manufactured with the trunk cover slick.

While all versions of the album are currently sought out by collectors, the first issues are unquestionably the most prized and the most valuable. The second issue is also quite valuable, and the third issue may or may not be, depending on condition. The fourth version is of interest only to hard-core Beatles collectors and people who simply like the Yesterday and Today album, which, the opinion of the Beatles themselves notwithstanding, is a pretty good collection of songs. […]

From Wikipedia:

Collectability

The original LP sleeves for Yesterday and Today were assembled at Capitol’s four US plants situated in different cities: Los Angeles, California; Scranton, Pennsylvania; Winchester, Virginia; and Jacksonville, Illinois. Numbers designating where the covers originated were printed near the RIAA symbol on the back; for example, stereo copies from the Los Angeles plant were designated “5” and mono Los Angeles copies were marked “6”. Mono copies outnumbered stereo copies by about ten to one, making the stereo copies far more rare and valuable to collectors. Capitol initially ordered plant managers to destroy the covers, and the Jacksonville plant delivered most of its copies to a landfill. However, faced with so many jackets already printed, Capitol decided instead to paste the replacement cover over the old ones. The new cover had to be trimmed on the open end by about 3 mm (1/8 inch) because the new sheet, known as a “slick”, was not placed exactly “square” on top of the original cover. Tens of thousands of these so-called ‘trunk covers’ were sent out. As word of this manoeuvre became known to the public, owners of the altered cover attempted, usually unsuccessfully, to peel off the pasted-over cover, hoping to reveal the original image hidden beneath. Eventually, the soaring value and desirability of unpasted-over ‘butcher covers’ spurred the development of intricate and complex techniques for peeling the ‘trunk cover’ off in such a way that only faint horizontal glue lines remained on the original cover.

Copies that have never had the white cover pasted onto them, known as “first state” covers, are very rare and command the highest prices. Copies with the pasted-on cover intact above the ‘butcher’ image are known as “second state” or “pasteovers”. Today, “pasteover” covers that have remained unpeeled are also becoming increasingly rare and valuable; these can be identified if Ringo Starr’s black V-neck shirt from the original cover can be seen through the paste-over to the right of the trunk lid (in alignment with the word “Today” from the album title). Covers that have had the ‘trunk cover’ removed to reveal the underlying ‘butcher’ image are known as “third state” covers; these are now the most common (and least valuable, although their value varies depending on how well the cover is removed) as people continue to peel second state covers. The most valuable and highly prized first and second state ‘butcher covers’ are those that were never opened and remain still sealed in their original shrink-wrap. Since the first documented collector’s sale of a mono “butcher cover” LP in 1974, which fetched US$457.00, the value of first state mono versions has consistently appreciated, reaching $20,000 in 2006.

In 1987, Alan Livingston released for sale 24 “first state” butcher covers from his private collection. When the original cover was scrapped in June 1966, Livingston took a case of already-sealed ‘butcher cover’ albums from the warehouse before they were to be pasted over with the new covers, and kept them in a closet at his home. These albums were first offered for sale at a Beatlefest convention at the Marriott Hotel near Los Angeles International Airport on Thanksgiving weekend 1987 by Livingston’s son. These still-sealed pristine items, which included nineteen mono and five stereo versions, are the very rarest and most valuable ‘butcher covers’ in existence. These so-called “Livingston Butchers” today command premium prices among collectors, the five stereo versions being the most rare and valuable of these. In April 2006, Heritage Auction Galleries sold one of the sealed mono “Livingston Butchers” at auction in Dallas for close to $39,000.

An extremely rare original “first state” stereo copy that was not from the Livingston collection was presented for appraisal at a 2003 Chicago taping of the PBS series Antiques Roadshow. It was still in the possession of the original owner, who had bought it at Sears & Roebuck on the day of release in 1966 – the only day that the original ‘butcher cover’ versions were on sale before being recalled by Capitol. Although not in its original shrink-wrap, it had rarely been played and was still in excellent condition, and Roadshow appraiser Gary Sohmers valued it at US$10,000–$12,000. In 2016, a mint condition “first state” stereo copy of Yesterday and Today in shrink-wrap was sold for $125,000.

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Last updated on December 23, 2023