In 1967, The Beatles unveiled the cover for their album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. It featured the four Beatles in colorful uniforms, surrounded by a group of historical and contemporary figures. It has gone down in history as one of the most iconic album covers of all time. Before the band released it, though, their lawyers worried it would land them in a heap of legal trouble. ..
The Beatles’ lawyers worried about one of their album covers
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The cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band features musicians, movie stars, artists, and philosophers. Among the people on the cover are Bob Dylan, Mae West, former Beatle Stuart Sutcliffe, Karl Marx, and Fred Astaire. The collage of all these figures is what has made this cover famous. It is also what worried the band’s lawyers.
“When the cover was finished, [EMI chairman] Sir Joseph Lockwood had a meeting with Paul,” road manager Neil Aspinall said in The Beatles Anthology. “I was there when he brought the album cover in. It had the flowers, the drum, the four Beatles — and a big blue sky. They’d wiped out all the people behind, because he was frightened that they might all sue or not want to be on the cover.”
Lockwood was terrified that people featured on the cover would sue. McCartney did pay his concerns much mind, though.
“I said, ‘Don’t worry, Joe — it’s going to be great, man,’” McCartney recalled. “He said ‘We’ll have dozens of lawsuits on our hands — it will be absolutely terrible. The legal department is going mad with it.’ I told him, ‘Don’t worry, just write them all a letter. I bet you they won’t mind. So write to them, and then come back to me.’”
Some people declined to be on the cover of the Beatles album
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For the most part, McCartney was right. Practically everyone agreed to have their likeness appear on the cover.
“Paul refused and said that no way would they lose all the people. In the end Brian [Epstein’s] office wrote to everybody, saying: ‘Sign here if you agree,’” Aspinall said. “Everybody did, except Leo Gorcey of the Bowery Boys who wanted $500. He was on the back row, so they just put a bit of blue sky where he had been. Brian thought the sleeve was wonderful. It gave him a bit of a headache having to ask everybody’s permission, but he thought the idea was great.”
The cover cost an unprecedented amount of money
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Another problem EMI executives likely had with the cover was the cost to shoot it. At that time, album covers did not cost too much to make.
“When we started dreaming up ideas for the cover, the main problem was that people thought it would be too expensive,” McCartney said. “They’d never paid so much to have a cover put together. Normally it was about seventy quid: a good photographer like Angus McBean would come in and take your snap, and that would be his fee; seventy pounds.”
Per Rolling Stone, the album cover cost over 3,000 pounds.
