The Beatles' Infamous Butcher Cover Turns 60

On June 10, 1966, Capitol Records faced a crisis after distributing 60,000 advance copies of the Beatles' album "Yesterday and Today" featuring the controversial "butcher cover." The cover, photographed by Robert Whitaker in March 1966 in a Chelsea building, showed the band in butcher smocks surrounded by raw meat, dentures, blood, and dismembered dolls. Inspired by surrealist Hans Bellmer's grotesque dolls, Whitaker intended the image as part of a triptych titled "Somnambulant Adventure," a satire on mass adulation. Capitol president Alan Livingston received hundreds of complaints from retailers, leading to the album's release being postponed from June 15 to June 20. To avoid destroying the entire 750,000-copy first pressing, Livingston ordered a new, more sober cover to be pasted over the original. This created three collector categories: "first state" (original intact), "pasteover" (new cover glued over), and "third state" (second cover removed). Mono copies are more common than stereo, making first-state stereo copies the most valuable, fetching hundreds of thousands of dollars at auction. The Beatles had mixed reactions: McCartney claimed it was a protest against the Vietnam War, Lennon saw it as a critique of Capitol's distribution practices that "dismembered" their discography, while Harrison called it "disgusting" and "stupid." Producer George Martin later said it was a source of early conflict with the band.