The Beatles Butcher Cover

By Scott Heron

Any Beatles fan can probably tell you about the controversy caused by the cover or their album released in 1966. The butcher cover is the picture on their "Yesterday and Today" LP they released in the summer of 1966. The album featured the Beatles smiling in white outfits covered with dismembered babies and pieces of raw meat strewn about the area.

This shot was taken as a last minute ad on during a photo shoot with Robert Whitaker. He encouraged the Beatles to have it taken. Paul McCartney liked the picture so much that he pushed Capitol Records to use it as the cover for the new album.

Capitol Records went ahead and used the photo on the Beatles album. They sent out the first album release to some radio stations and to some music stores as an advance release copy. The outrage caused by the butcher cover was immediate. Capitol Records immediately recalled all albums that had been sent out and wanted to have all of them destroyed.

However, after reconsidering the cost of reprinting all of the pictures into something more acceptable, Capitol Records came up with a new idea for the cover of "Yesterday and Today". The new idea was to paste a new cover picture over the old Beatles cover and then re-release the record to the stores and radio stations. Some music stores sold the first Beatles cover album for about a day before hearing about the recall, so not every cover was destroyed or pasted over as the record label wished.

The paste over covers were not done very efficiently so almost every Beatles fan knew about the original cover being under the new cover from Capitol. Many people tried to peel the two covers apart with little success.

Today all the different albums featuring some form of the butcher cover are valuable. The original Beatles cover is worth nearly $40,000 to some collectors while the pasted over cover is worth slightly less. For those fans who managed to separate the paste cover from the original Beatles cover, their album is not worth the $40,000 that the original unpasted cover is worth, but it is worth something.

This story of controversy surrounding the album cover and the Beatles "Yesterday and Today" album was only the beginning of record companies trying to direct the artist in the direction most profitable to the company. The butcher cover album is an amazing collectible that is virtually priceless to any true Beatles fan today.

Further Reading On The Beatles Butcher Cover

If you would like to learn more about the Beatles Butcher cover then head on over to buythebutchercover.com. You will find some amazing facts about this incredible album cover that the Beatles and their management wanted to keep secret! Head on over and read about the Butcher Cover now!

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