As relevant as the Vietnam War: the Beatles' butcher cover 50 years later

This is the second in a series of features celebrating the 50th anniversary of The Beatles' landmark Revolver album.

In March 1966, two routine events set the stage for The Beatles' annus horribilis: John Lennon's fateful interview with The London Evening Standard's Maureen Cleave where he pronounced "the Beatles are bigger than Jesus," and a routine photo session with Robert Whitaker.

Only it wasn't routine. On March 25, the Australian-born photographer collected The Beatles in a studio in London's posh Chelsea to pose them for a conceptual art piece entitled, A Somnambulant Adventure.

"I felt The Beatles needed a new approach with their image," Whitaker explained in The Beatles: An Oral History. Whitaker got George to pretend to hammer nails into John's head, each of them to wear bird cages over their heads and all of them to hold a strand of sausages. Whitaker got more carnivorous by draping the band in white butcher smocks and throwing slabs of raw meat and dismembered plastic dolls over them.

Fifty years later, it's not entirely clear how the infamous butcher image wound up on the cover of Yesterday and Today, but it sounds like the band (probably except George who detested the images) submitted the butcher photos to EMI and Capitol to promote their next releases, including the June 10 Paperback Writer single in the UK.

This ad first appeared in the New Music Express in the last week of May 1966, then on June 4 in Disc and Music Echo ahead of the June 10 release of Paperback Writer/Rain. A week later, the same magazine printed a colour photo on its cover, an alternate image beneath the headline, "What a carve-up!" The image raised a few eyebrows in Britain, but nothing more.

However, when the first printing of Yesterday and Today hit American records stores on June 20, it unleashed a firestorm and we all know what happened next: a costly, massive recall that resulted in unknown quantities of a generic cover slapped over the offending butcher cover, thus instantly rendering those copies collector's items.

"The original cover concept never really materialized," explained Whitaker. "It was meant to be a double-folded album cover where the front showed the four Beatles holding sausages, which would have stood for an umbilical cord." The link of sausages would connect with a woman in the inside gatefold to symbolize the birth of the Beatles and "all kinds of surreal, far-out images."

Well, that would have been different. Regardless, Whitaker was surprised that the butcher cover wound up on the front of Yesterday and Today and wonders if The Beatles sent Capitol the butcher image as a dark joke for this "filler" album.

In the valley of the dolls. Robert Whittaker's fateful photo shoot with The Beatles begins.
It ends in either black humour, poor taste or a protest against Capitol Records.

If 1967 was the Summer of Love, then 1966 was the Summer of Hate. At least, for The Beatles. The year began pleasantly enough with the band getting an overdue rest after three non-stop years of work before recording Revolver in the spring. Three songs were pulled from the early sessions to pad out yet another hodgepodge that Capitol presented to Beatles' fans as their so-called "new" album.

Let's consider Yesterday and Today, which was released 50 years ago today. Sure, it's full of great songs, including Nowhere Man, Day Tripper, We Can Work It Out and the title song, but the collection is disjointed and ultimately unsatisfying. Stylistically, songs jump from the country-and-western Act Naturally and What Goes On to the psychedelic I'm Only Sleeping and the heavy guitars of And Your Bird Can Sing and Day Tripper. Yesterday and Today also suffers from an imbalance of voices: Paul sings lead on only three of the 11 songs, Ringo takes two, George gets one, and John the rest. If anything, Y&T is a survey of John Lennon's songwriting from 1965-6.

Capitol got away with this tawdry re-packaging in Something New and Beatles VI in 1964 and 1965 because the Beatlemania sound was homogenous over this period, but Y&T captures the Beatles in a period of rapid maturity. Only 12 months separate the releases of Help! and Revolver, but artistically The Beatles traveled light years in this time. Can you imagine Act Naturally on Revolver?

To be fair, every British Invasion group, including The Rolling Stones and Animals, suffered the same crass re-packaging of their music that routinely short-changed American fans (UK albums boasted 14 songs and no singles). Y&T was especially egregious. Yesterday, Act Naturally, We Can Work It Out, Day Tripper, Nowhere Man and What Goes On were already selling as 45s in American record shops when Y&T landed on June 20, 1966. That means that less than half of the album's music was actually new. Of course, Capitol didn't care. Y&T sold 500,000 copies in two weeks, and topped the charts for three weeks.

In 2016, Yesterday and Today is largely a nostalgia piece for North American baby boomers and a curio for later generations. Yesterday and Today symbolizes a pop band that suddenly outgrew its teenybopper image and was rapidly reshaping music. The butcher images that promoted the album and Paperback Writer were meant to sever the band from their cute moptop image. Sgt. Pepper would accomplish that with more subtlety and imagination 12 months later.

In 1986, the butcher cover re-appeared on official vinyl as the B-side of the limited-edition Paperback Writer picture disc. In 1980, it graced the gatefold of the North American release of the Rarities LP.

On a more important level, the butcher cover was the first of several controversies in 1966 that culminated in The Beatles retreating from concert stages forever and retiring Beatlemania for good. The Beatles were never the same after the summer of 1966.

They were a sardonic, cynical bunch, and the symbolism of peeling back the innocuous moptop image of Yesterday and Today to reveal the hidden butcher cover beneath is obvious. The mood of the era was darkening, too. By 1966, America was falling deeper into the amoral Vietnam War while its Civil Rights Movement was growing bloodier with riots and demonstrations.

The butcher cover, sneered Lennon was "as relevant as Vietnam."

book review: Photograph by Ringo

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Photograph is the unofficial sequel to Postcards from the Boys, 2004's disappointing collection of postcards Ringo sent to friends, fellow Beatles included, over the years. Both books were published in lavish, signed limited editions by England's Genesis Publications, which specializes in issuing expensive, signed limited editions. The posh Photograph came out two years ago with a print run of 2,500. For those who can't afford to mortgage their home, Photograph has just been released as a $70 (in Canada) large mass-produced coffee-table book.

The results this time are far more satisfying. Photograph is Ringo sharing his photo album with his fans, showing snapshots of his life from him as a baby to today. It's charming and personal, and the closest we'll ever get to an autobiography from Mr. Starkey. 

The Beatles, of course, appear in most photos, though they don't appear until p.82 of this 302-page tome. That's good. The first section allows the reader to get to know Ringo, illustrating his difficult childhood against the backdrop of grim, postwar Liverpool, and establishing who he is before he became famous.

Ringo is a happy lad in those shots but his brief captions relate a rough upbringing. “Admiral Grove was uglier than it looks in this photo,” he describes the stark rowhouses he called home with his beloved mum, Elsie, and his stepfather, Harry. There are as many pictures of hospitals and nurses as there are of classmates, given how Ringo was hospitalized for long periods as a boy. A few photos show him playing hookey from the hospital by spending his birthday in London with an uncle.

Suddenly, Ringo enters his teenage years and plays drums. We see several pictures of him in clubs in various bands, but Rory Storm and the Hurricanes dominate. His captions tell us that Rory was Merseyside's top band before The Beatles rose. Ringo poses with as many girls as drums, and he comes off as a carefree lad, like any teenage boy playing in a rock band. And boy does he look young.

In these pages, Ringo is the most candid he's ever been in print or in front of a camera, but only in short captions that accompany his pictures and, frankly, he doesn't offer details or wild stories in these pages. (This is Ringo, after all, not John or George.) Ringo keeps it simple and to the point, much like his drumming. Why did he leave Rory Storm and join The Beatles? “I just loved the band,” he answers, “that's why I moved.”

The Beatles photos are private shots, capturing him and his bandmates, for example, sequestered in the Georges V Hotel in Paris in January 1964. There's Paul mugging in a beret and George washing his hands in an ornate bathroom. Ringo writes, “I never had a bathroom in Liverpool.” In New York as they took American by storm the following month, we see Brian Epstein and George Martin sporting ridiculous Beatle wigs, John wearing strange glasses and a hat, and Paul vamping in shades and unbuttoned shirt like a young Elvis (above). This is a world of hotel rooms and limousines. There's nobody else around except The Beatles and their inner circle.

Fans appear intermittently, like a carload of excited teens somewhere between Washington and Miami. There are shots of police cars escorting them, and even a toll booth, which blew Ringo's mind. He found Murray the K “great,” but unsurprisingly thought Phil Spector “really weird.”

Most of the Beatles photos are in black-and-white though a few, like Miami in February 1964, are in glorious colour. They're snapshots of friends, vacation pictures we all take, like the one of Ringo, his first wife Maureen, John and Cynthia proudly holding some fish they caught on a trip.

Ringo's companions were, of course, The Beatles, but you won't find revealing moments here that'll deepen your understanding of his old band. There are a few shots of John and Paul singing during the sessions for A Hard Day's Night, but disppointingly Ringo's text offers no insight into these moments. 
 

One highlight are the pictures taken from a little-known stopover in India during the Asian leg of their 1966 summer tour. Ringo snaps colour shots of his bandmates walking down the streets of Delhi using a fish-eye lens (above). The result is trippy and captures the mood of the era. It's the first time I've ever seen the Beatles in India in 1966. Another psychedelic effect is the prism lens Ringo uses during the Hey Bulldog session of February 1968.

After that, The Beatles are rarely seen. Instead, we glimpse Ringo with actor friends and on various film sets, such as Who drummer, Keith Moon, and singer Harry Nilson.

The Rowboat verdict: Photograph is fun viewing for Beatles fans and, while you learn more about Ringo, you won't gain any insight into The Beatles.