Page 29 - the NOISE October 2013

magazines in May 1966 as promotion for the “PaperbackWriter”single.
Oddly, considering what was about to transpire in the States, there was nary a whiff of outrage. The Brits just accepted it as The Beatles being Beatles. They had more impor- tant things to worry about than a silly picture of a pop group.
America, however, did not.
The Beatles presented the butcher photo to Capitol records for use as the Yesterday And Today sleeve. The label’s protests met with a stone wall. No, THIS is the album cover. That’s just the way it is.
Capitol had a lot riding on Yesterday And Today. The release date was drawing near and everyone was salivating, ready for those summertime Beatle bucks to roll right in. The record was a guaranteed #1. Somebody somewhere made a decision.
Yesterday And Today went into production with the butcher photo on the front. 750,000 copies were manufactured. About 60,000 of these were given to disc jockeys and the press to stir up pre-release hype. The rest were sent to retailers across America. Capitol also printed their usual reams of promotion- al material, posters and the like, all with the butcher photo.
The response was almost entirely nega- tive. Many stores would not stock the record and several radio stations refused to do any promotion. Newspapers picked up the story and moral America was scandalized. Capitol had a major fiasco exploding and turned to their big daddy, Sir Joseph Lockwood of EMI, for help.
The word came from on high: recall the al- bums, replace the sleeves, and return them to the shelves as soon as possible.
The recall notices were mailed just in time. Most stores received theirs on the morning of June 15, the release date. A few retailers in Los Angeles actually sold the LPs for one day before shipping them back.
A new cover was hastily designed fea- turing another robert Whitaker photo of The Beatles around a steamer trunk. Over
100,000 butcher sleeves were junked before Capitol came up with the cost-saving mea- sure of simply pasting the new picture over the old. All promotional materials went in the trash.
the Beatles, Yesterday and Today
The whole incident cost the label $250,000.
Five days after the recall, Yesterday And Today was back in stores with its inoffensive second cover. American fans, hungry for new Beatle music and curiosities piqued by the hype, bought the LP in droves. It sat atop the charts for five weeks, despite the fact that six of its eleven tracks had already been re-
leased on singles.
The Beatles publicly stood by their initial
choice. John Lennon stated the butcher pho- to was as relevant as Vietnam. Paul McCart- ney accused their critics of being soft and added that it was “very tasty meat.” Soon- to-be-vegetarian George Harrison privately thought the whole thing was stupid and gross while ringo, as usual, had no comment.
The controversy surrounding the album was overshadowed later that summer when the U.S. magazine Datebook reprinted a five- month-old John Lennon quote concerning his beat combo and a certain religious deity. In the ensuing furor, the butcher cover was all but forgotten.
For a while.
Revolver came out in August 1966 and was a worldwide #1. The British version held fourteen tracks, the American eleven. Short- ly after, The Beatles and Capitol reached an agreement: starting with the next release, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, all U.S. and U.K. LPs would be alike.
Eventually, word leaked out about Capi- tol’s penny pinching on Yesterday And Today. Americans were tantalized: could that old scuffed-up record in the corner be ... VALU- ABLE? They had to know. Across the land, thousands of sleeves were studied, scratched, smudged, sniffed, stripped, scraped, soaped, sanded and shredded. Countless butchers were destroyed in the attempt to uncover them, but once in a while someone would get lucky.
In 1974, the butcher cover was introduced to high society when one was put up for auction in London. It sold for $456, a then- outrageous price for a record.
The cult surrounding Yesterday And Today continued to grow year by year. Collectors devised a scale for grading the album. First State is a copy that never had the trunk cover pasted over it. Second State has the trunk
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