Inside Beatles' Bloody, Banned 'Butcher' Cover
"My original idea for the cover was better – decapitate Paul," John Lennon once cracked while discussing Yesterday and Today, a 1966 collection of assorted recent Beatles tracks cobbled together for the North American market. Joking aside, his concept is almost tame compared with the photo that ultimately graced the LP upon its release that June. Fans seeking the aggressively inoffensive hit "Yesterday" name-checked in the title were shocked to find a grotesque tableau starring the group, clad in white butcher coats, snickering like naughty (murderous, even) schoolboys while draped in slabs of raw meat and cigarette-burned doll parts. Lennon could have drawn and quartered his bandmates and it might have inspired less outrage.
Half a century later, the image of a cheerful Fab Four posing post-baby-slaughter remains unspeakably bizarre. Though the cover was immediately withdrawn, the fact that it was produced at all is a testament to the band's unprecedented status. You couldn't show a toilet seat on an album cover in 1966, and it would be a decade before punk rockers approached this level of public provocation. Yet there sat the Beatles, gleeful among the carnage.
The so-called "butcher" cover vaulted an otherwise unremarkable record into rock infamy and spawned what George Harrison once called "the definitive Beatles collectible" worth tens – and sometimes hundreds – of thousands of dollars. Still, the cover remains one of the most misunderstood chapters in the band's chronicle. Was it their comment on the Vietnam War? A protest against their record company? A publicity stunt? A sophomoric prank by bored rock stars? The truth is more complex.
By: Jordan Runtagh
Source: Rolling Stone
