Yesterday and Today

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Yesterday and Today, the Beatles' ninth album on Capitol Records, arrived in America in June 1966 carrying one of the most controversial covers in pop music history. The front image showed four young men in white butcher smocks, draped with raw meat and severed baby doll parts, staring blankly at the camera. Within days, Capitol had ordered every copy recalled. What followed was a scramble involving hundreds of thousands of records, a quarter-million dollars in replacement costs, and a phenomenon that would obsess collectors for decades. But the story of this album is really several overlapping stories at once. How did a British photographer's conceptual art project end up on a Beatles LP? Why was America receiving a different Beatles catalogue than the rest of the world? And how did a recalled record sleeve become one of the most sought-after artefacts in popular music?

• 2. Capitol's American Assembly Line

  ›

  By early 1966, the Beatles had recorded six albums for EMI, yet Capitol was preparing to release what it counted as their tenth American release on the label. The gap exists because Capitol built its own North American catalogue by stripping songs from the band's British LPs and reassembling them into shorter albums. The US music industry preferred shorter records at the time, and that preference gave Capitol room to peel tracks off British releases and hold them for future packages.

  The Beatles' manager Brian Epstein and producer George Martin were both infuriated by the practice. In a 1974 interview, John Lennon said the band put serious effort into the sequencing of their albums and that they were told "there was some rule or something" that prevented the full fourteen-song British LPs from appearing in the US. The February 1966 single "Nowhere Man", for instance, was a song Capitol had kept off its version of Rubber Soul in December 1965, then used it to signal the forthcoming Yesterday and Today.

  Yesterday and Today drew from Help!, Rubber Soul, the double A-side single "We Can Work It Out" and "Day Tripper", and three tracks from the as-yet-unreleased Revolver: "I'm Only Sleeping", "Doctor Robert", and "And Your Bird Can Sing". All three Revolver tracks were written by Lennon, which meant that when Capitol assembled its own shorter Revolver for the North American market later that summer, his presence on that record was sharply reduced. Author Michael Frontani noted that the collection spans a wide range of phases in the Beatles' development, covering material between June 1965 and May 1966 alone.

• 3. Robert Whitaker's Triptych

  ›

  On the 25th of March 1966, British photographer Robert Whitaker convened a session with the Beatles at his studio at 1 The Vale, off King's Road in Chelsea. He had accompanied the band on their August 1965 US tour and had been unsettled by the scenes of Beatlemania he witnessed there. The session was his attempt to do something about it.

  Whitaker's concept was called A Somnambulant Adventure, a conceptual art piece designed as a triptych across two panels of a 12-inch LP cover. He described it as "a considered disruption of the conventions surrounding orthodox pop star promotional photography". The butcher image was only one panel of the three he planned. For the front or left-hand panel, he intended a photo of the Beatles holding strings of sausages meant to represent umbilical cords, connecting them to the belly of a woman whose back was turned, set inside an image of a womb. The third panel showed George Harrison hammering nails into Lennon's head, suggesting trepanation; Whitaker credited Man Ray as a partial inspiration.

  Whitaker assembled plastic doll parts, trays of meat, white butcher coats, a hammer, nails, a birdcage, cardboard boxes, and sets of false teeth and eyes. The band were accustomed to his fondness for the surreal and played along. Lennon later described their motivation as "boredom and resentment at having to do another photo session and another Beatles thing. We were sick to death of it." Whitaker planned to reduce the finished butcher image to just "two-and-a-quarter inches square" in the centre of the panel, with bejewelled silver halos added behind the band members' heads and the surrounding space styled as a Russian religious icon. He later said: "The meat is meant to represent the fans, and the false teeth and the false eyes is the falseness of representing a god-like image as a golden calf."

  The band chose to take the butcher photo out of its intended triptych context and use it as a standalone cover image. Lennon and Paul McCartney insisted the image was the Beatles' statement against the Vietnam War. Capitol president Alan Livingston was immediately against it. He was told by Epstein that the band were adamant. In a 2002 interview in Mojo magazine, Livingston recalled that McCartney pushed strongly for the photo and described it as "our comment on the Vietnam war". Capitol's art director, however, was more enthusiastic and prepared the image to look like a painting, with a canvas effect.

• 4. Operation Retrieve

  ›

  Capitol printed approximately 750,000 copies of Yesterday and Today with the butcher cover for a scheduled release on the 15th of June. Around 60,000 copies had already gone out to radio stations, print media, and Capitol branch offices when disc jockeys and retailers began raising objections. Many retailers found the image so distasteful they refused to stock the record. Livingston notified Epstein, who agreed to have the cover replaced.

  On the 10th of June, Capitol launched "Operation Retrieve", recalling all copies from distributors along with associated promotional materials. Replacing the cover and the promotional items cost $250,000, wiping out the company's initial profit on the release. On the 14th of June, Capitol sent a memo to reviewers quoting Livingston's explanation that the original cover, "created in England, was intended as 'pop art' satire" but that US public opinion indicated it "is subject to misinterpretation".

  The replacement image, a photograph of the four Beatles gathered around an open steamer trunk, had been taken by Whitaker at Epstein's NEMS offices near Carnaby Street. It was not an afterthought: the trunk photo had been pasted onto a mock-up LP sleeve and was already being considered by Epstein while the Beatles filmed promotional clips for "Paperback Writer" and "Rain" at Chiswick House on the 20th of May. Lennon was uncharitable about the result, describing it as "an awful looking photo of us looking just as deadbeat but supposed to be a happy-go-lucky foursome". Music critic Tim Riley called it "tame" but noted that the Beatles' sullen expressions still suggested their will to push back against the standard band portrait.

  In Britain, the same butcher photograph had already appeared in advertising. A full-page black-and-white ad ran in the 3rd of June issue of the NME to promote the "Paperback Writer" single. A different image from the same session, with raw meat but without the doll parts, ran on the cover of the 11th of June edition of Disc and Music Echo under the caption "Beatles: What a Carve-Up!" The backlash against the cover in the US was reported in the 25th of June issue of Billboard, marking the first time the media and distributors had publicly criticised the Beatles' judgment.

• 5. How Critics and Fans Responded

  ›

  Capitol released Yesterday and Today with the replacement cover on the 20th of June. Record World included it among its albums of the week. Billboard called it a hot album release and noted that five previously unissued tracks "all have singles potential", naming "And Your Bird Can Sing" and "Drive My Car" in particular. Cash Box praised the new recordings as "top notch" and described the overall package as a "stunning set".

  Not everyone agreed. KRLA Beat called it "the most nauseating album cover ever seen in the US" and warned that the band seemed ignorant of their audience's tastes. The review concluded with a grim prediction: "No one can kill the Beatles except themselves. And perhaps they're doing it now." Writing in the October issue of HiFi/Stereo Review, critic Gene Lees connected the butcher cover to the Beatles' then-recent treatment of Filipino First Lady Imelda Marcos and concluded that both reflected the same "obnoxious arrogance". Lees found the LP musically dull and described the title track as a "pretty miserable" performance.

  The band members themselves grew more ambivalent over time. At a press conference during the August 1966 US tour, Lennon said the image was "unsubtle", and both he and Harrison admitted they might have fought the recall decision if the photo had been stronger. By the time of The Beatles Anthology, Harrison dismissed the cover as "gross" and "stupid", adding: "Sometimes we all did stupid things thinking it was cool and hip when it was naïve and dumb; and that was one of them." George Martin, writing decades later, recalled that the cover caused his first serious disagreement with the band. He said: "I thought it was disgusting and in poor taste... It suggested that they were madmen. Which they were, but not in that way."

  Despite the controversy, Yesterday and Today was certified a gold record by the RIAA on the 8th of July. It reached number 1 on the Billboard Top LPs chart on the 30th of July, displacing Frank Sinatra's Strangers in the Night, and held that position for five weeks. It also topped the Cash Box and Record World charts.

• 6. The Collector's Obsession

  ›

  Capitol's last-minute solution to the cover crisis created the conditions for one of pop music's most dedicated collector communities. Rather than destroying all the printed covers outright, the company had replacement images pasted over the existing ones. The Jacksonville, Illinois plant did deliver most of its copies to a landfill, but the Los Angeles and Scranton, Pennsylvania plants sent out large numbers with the trunk image glued over the butcher photo. The new cover had to be trimmed by about 3 mm on the open end because the replacement slick was not placed exactly square.

  Plant of origin was documented numerically near the RIAA symbol on the back of each cover. Stereo copies from the Los Angeles plant were marked "5"; mono Los Angeles copies were marked "6". Mono copies outnumbered stereo by roughly ten to one, making stereo versions significantly rarer. As word spread that the original image lay hidden beneath the paste-over, owners began trying to peel back the replacement cover. A vocabulary developed for the different states of the cover: a never-pasted copy became a "first state" butcher cover; a pasted-over copy that had not yet been peeled became a "second state" or "pastoever"; a successfully peeled copy was a "third state". Second state copies can sometimes be identified by looking for Ringo Starr's black V-neck shirt from the original cover, visible through the paste-over to the right of the trunk lid, aligned with the word "Today" in the title.

  Since the first documented sale of a mono butcher cover LP in 1974 for US$457, values have climbed steadily. By 2006, a first state mono version was worth around $20,000. The rarest copies of all are the "Livingston Butchers": in 1987, Alan Livingston disclosed that when Capitol recalled the original covers in June 1966, he had taken a case of already-sealed butcher cover albums from the warehouse and kept them in a closet at his home. He had his son offer them at a Beatlefest convention at the Marriott Hotel near Los Angeles International Airport on Thanksgiving weekend 1987. The collection comprised nineteen mono and five stereo sealed copies. In April 2006, Heritage Auction Galleries sold one sealed mono Livingston Butcher at auction in Dallas for close to $39,000. A first state stereo copy in mint condition and in shrink-wrap sold in 2016 for $125,000.

• 7. Lost, Found, and Reappraised

  ›

  Sociologist Candy Leonard notes that Yesterday and Today was "beloved by fans at the time" but became "lost for decades after the transition to digital music", remembered chiefly for the cover controversy rather than its music. When Capitol standardised the Beatles' North American catalogue to match the original EMI releases in 1987, the US-only albums including Yesterday and Today were deleted on LP in 1989 and faded from availability on cassette in the early 1990s.

  In his 1977 book The Beatles Forever, Nicholas Schaffner had already observed how the divergence between American and British releases created parallel but incompatible canons. A British fan and an American fan might agree entirely on the merits of, say, Revolver, but actually be discussing different compilations.

  The album received its first compact disc release in 2014, both individually and as part of the Beatles' U.S. Albums box set. The 2014 CD used the butcher cover image, with a sticker of the trunk cover included. Several mixes differ from the original North American LP: the mono version of "Drive My Car" was replaced with the UK mono mix, and the mono version of "Doctor Robert" omits Lennon's quiet spoken words at the end. Writing in Mojo about the box set, Jon Savage described Yesterday and Today as a "rag-bag of material" and called the withdrawn butcher cover an apt image, since the album represented "the worst piece of vandalism" Capitol had carried out on the Beatles' music. According to figures published in 2009 by former Capitol executive David Kronemyer, the album had sold 967,410 copies in the US by the 31st of December 1966, and 1,230,558 copies by the end of the decade. As of 2014, the RIAA had certified it at 2x Multi-Platinum, indicating US sales of over two million copies.