The Beatles butcher babies

The cover for The Beatles' 'Yesterday'...and Today release is perhaps the best known banned album cover of all time, and is certainly among the most sought after. Produced as a sampler of singles from the previously released Help! and Rubber Soul albums and the upcoming Revolver, this album quickly garnered massive attention by way of a public outcry over the cover. Dubbed the "Butcher Baby" cover, Capitol Records was forced to withdraw nearly 750,000 copies it had already printed and made ready for distribution. To save a dime, the company decided not to destroy the records, but opted instead to paste over a much more tame photograph of the Fab Four looking rather bored around a piece of luggage.

Before long, enterprising teens discovered they could peel off the milquetoast photo in such a way as to preserve the Butcher cover underneath. Those who did it best began hocking their skills to assist others, and soon it was possible to say you had had your copy "professionally peeled". The obsessive bunch that are collectors of rare vinyl records have developed a taxonomy to describe copies of the album in its various conditions: "First State" being one of the original uncovered versions that survived the Capitol recall, "Second State" being a still-covered luggage version, and "Third State" being a peeled copy. Due to the fact so many people have opted to peel their personal copies over the years, and many damaged the covers in the process, a mint copy of the "Second State" non-peeled version has now, oddly, returned to being a particularly prized possession. Of course, the rarest of the rare, a "First State" never-covered Butcher cover remains the most valuable of the bunch.

As legend has it, the Butcher cover was shot in 1966, when photographer Robert Whitaker asked The Beatles to pose for a conceptual art piece entitled "A Somnambulant Adventure" -- referring to the state of sleepwalking. For the shoot, Whitaker had the lads dress in butcher smocks as he draped them with pieces of meat and body parts from plastic dolls. Bored with their usual photo shoots, and playing to their inclination for black humour, the boys were more than happy to oblige. Though not originally intended as an album cover, when The Beatles were asked to submit pictures to accompany a sampler album before the release of their next studio LP Revolver, they included shots from the Butcher shoot. The president of Capitol Records, Alan Livingston, claims it was Paul McCartney who was most vigorous in asking for the photo's inclusion on the cover, stating that it would be the band's commentary on the Vietnam War -- a fact that might surprise Beatles' fans given it is John who is most usually associated with such political commentary and noir satire.

Though the cover may have caused Capitol a major headache in the late-1960s, Alan Livingston's son, Peter, would make good for himself in 1987 by arriving at a Beatles convention with a crate of 24 sealed original "First State" Butcher records that he had no doubt pilfered from his father's credenza. These "Livingston copies" have since become the crown jewel in the heraldry of banned album covers.

If you happen to own a copy of the record with the steamer trunk cover you might be lucky enough that it is one of the 750,000 Butcher covers that had to be pasted over. The "Second State" covers are discoverable by looking for a small black triangle of colour bleeding through the white background of the conservative cover about mid-way down the right edge. This triangle is Ringo's black turtleneck that he sports on the Butcher cover. If you are fortunate enough to see this black triangle, don't go peeling away, as the "Second State" version has become more prized than a peeled away version. If you don't discover a black triangle, then you likely have one on the later prints of the album after the Butcher covers had all been unloaded, and you will just have to enjoy the music.