The Butcher Album
Many of the Beatles’ early U.S. album releases were missing songs that appeared on the original British versions. So in 1966, Capitol Records took all of the band’s omitted songs and released them in the U.S. and Canada as one album called Yesterday and Today.
Around that same time, the Beatles had a photo shoot with photographer Robert Whitaker, who instructed them to pose with pieces of raw meat and dismembered baby dolls (supposedly to illustrate the absurdity of Beatlemania). Somehow, the band convinced the record company to use one of Whitaker’s photos for the cover of Yesterday and Today. Capitol printed hundreds of thousands of copies of the album but then had second thoughts (not everyone enjoys raw meat and dismembered dolls, it seems). A new print run would cost too much money, so Capitol simply pasted a new, inoffensive image directly over it. A few copies of what became known as “The Butcher Album” slipped by, of course. Yesterday and Today originally sold for about $4. Today, a good quality copy of the album — with the original cover — can be worth as much as $12,000.
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If you’re a fan of the ballads Something, Wonderful Tonight or Layla, you can thank a woman named Pattie Boyd. The British model inspired husband George Harrison to pen his 1969 hit single Something before she caught the eye of another rock legend, Eric Clapton, who seduced her with Layla while she was still married to the Beatles guitarist. “My first thought was, ‘Oh, God, everyone’s going to know this is about me,’” Boyd recalled in her 2007 memoir Wonderful Todayof having Clapton play for her what she called “the most powerful, moving song I had ever heard.” The two men even once staged a guitar-playing duel to win her affection.
In the end, Clapton won — Boyd divorced Harrison in 1977 and married Clapton two years later — but Clapton’s victory was short-lived; he and Boyd divorced in 1988. “For years it tore at me,” she later said of the song Wonderful Tonight, which Clapton wrote for her the year she left Harrison. “[It] was the most poignant reminder of all that was good in our relationship, and when things went wrong it was torture to hear it.” For the rest of us, the song remains a classic.
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