The legendary, infamous, highly sought-after, extremely valuable original cover from the Beatles' album Yesterday and Today.
Originating from a photo shoot in 1966, the Butcher cover involves the Fab Four sitting together in white butcher's coats, with various bloody hacked-off body parts of babies1 everywhere. Limbs, torsos, and heads are strategically placed on John, Paul, George, and Ringo's shoulders, in their laps, in their hair, etc.
This caused great consternation at the Beatles' American distributor, Capitol Records, who realized that the cover would be a public relations disaster among the idiots who didn't understand satire. They were *NOT* going to release the cover in the United States.
Capitol therefore requested that all advance promotional copies of the record be returned. All of the other covers had a "slicker" of the Beatles standing around a steamer trunk (with no body parts) pasted on top of the butcher cover.
Surviving Butcher Covers can fetch prices in the $25,000 range. Apparently, if you have a Butcher Cover with the steamer trunk slicker still pasted on top, it's more valuable.
It has been speculated that the Butcher Cover was a protest by the Beatles against Capitol Records' very real butchering of the Beatles' previous albums.
http://www.eskimo.com/~bpentium/butcher.html contains more than you want to know about this bit of recording history.
1Pieces of meat, plastic baby dolls, glass eyes, and the like. Now stop that; you're a sicko. |
