Even today, The Beatles‘ butcher cover is one of the most controversial album covers in classic rock history. John Lennon once explained how Salvador Dalí inspired the Fab Four’s disturbing album art. He also contrasted the reception of that album cover with another one created by Yoko Ono that features a nude Richard Nixon.
Boredom and Salvador Dalí inspired The Beatles’ butcher cover
The Beatles’ butcher cover shows the Fab Four dressed like butchers, smiling, and covered in raw meat and dismembered baby doll parts. It’s pretty unsettling, especially for a band once known for cute hits like “Eight Days a Week!” During a 1980 interview from the book All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, John gave fans insight into the image.
“That was a repackage for the Americans called Yesterday and Today,” he recalled. “The original cover was The Beatles in white coats with figs ‘n’ dead bits o’ meat and dolls cut up. It was inspired by our boredom and resentment at having to do another photo session and another Beatles thing. We were sick to death of it. Also, the photographer was into Dalí and making surreal pictures. That combination produced that cover.”
The Beatles’ ‘Yesterday and Today’ became a collectors’ item even after getting censored
According to Rolling Stone, the butcher image became so controversial that Capitol Records started pasting an inoffensive cover over the original cover of Yesterday and Today. The new cover showed The Beatles with a trunk. It wasn’t exactly great art and it never achieved the iconic status of the sleeves for Yesterday and Today, Abbey Road, or Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Fans started a tradition of steaming off the inoffensive cover of Yesterday and Today to find the grotesque image beneath. Yesterday and Today is now a sought-after collectors’ item. It’s most valuable if it never included the second, pasted-on cover.
John Lennon compared the butcher cover to the cover of ‘Some Time in New York City’
In All We Are Saying, John discussed the impact of the cover for his solo album Some Time in New York City. “You see how they banned the picture here,” he said. “Yoko made this beautiful poster: Chairman Mao and Richard Nixon dancing naked together, you see? And the stupid retailers stuck a gold sticker over it that you can’t even steam off. At least you could steam off that Beatles cover.”
The “Imagine” singer discussed his mindset during his Some Time in New York City era. “So you see the kind of pressure Yoko and I were getting, not only on a personal level, and the public level … but every time we tried to express ourselves, they would ban it, would cover it up, would censor it,” he said. While it was controversial, the cover of Some Time in New York City never gained the notoriety of the butcher cover.
Yesterday and Today gave us the most controversial album art of The Beatles’ career — and it remains iconic to this day.
