YESTERDAY AND TODAY
Unceremoniously tacked up on the wall at Goldmines Records was one of the most famous and most infamous (not to mention rarest) record covers of all time, the "butcher" cover that the Beatles briefly had as the cover for their 1966 American album, Yesterday and Today. How the suits ever let this one get loose is absolutely beyond me: posing the Beatles among butchered meat and decapitated baby dolls, with those same beatific smiles. After they realized that they had a problem, Capitol Records simply pasted a new cover over the butcher cover and shipped the albums out. The albums with the double covers are fairly easy to spot, and it wasn't long before people were steaming off the new cover to get to the butcher cover. Nowadays, the double-cover albums that are still intact are the most valuable, not counting of course the few albums with the original covers that were sold in the first few days of the album's release.
(November 2012)
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"Yesterday" is included on the British release of Help! but not on the American release; it is basically the title song of the U.S.-only Beatles album, Yesterday and Today.
(June 2015)
