Yesterday and Today
Yesterday and Today is a studio album by the English rock band the Beatles. Released in the United States and Canada in June 1966, it was their ninth album issued on Capitol Records and twelfth American release overall. Typical of the Beatles' North American discography until 1967, the album contains songs that Capitol had withheld from its configurations of the band's recent EMI albums, along with songs that the group had released elsewhere on non-album singles. Among its 11 tracks are songs from the EMI albums Help! and Rubber Soul, and three new 1966 recordings that would later appear on Revolver in countries outside North America. The album's title plays on the song "Yesterday".
Yesterday and Today is remembered primarily for the controversy surrounding its original cover image. Nicknamed the "butcher cover", it depicted the band wearing white butcher smocks and covered with decapitated baby dolls and pieces of raw meat. While the photo was intended to be a critique of the public's adoration of the Beatles, the band members claimed that it was a commentary on the Vietnam War. Others interpreted it as the Beatles protesting Capitol's practice of "butchering" their albums for the North American market by altering track lists. In response to retailers' concerns about the gory imagery, Capitol immediately withdrew the LP and replaced the cover image with a shot of the band gathered around a steamer trunk.
The original LP became a highly prized item among collectors. Since some of Capitol's pressing plants merely pasted the trunk image onto the existing LP covers, the album also encouraged a phenomenon of stripping back the top layer of artwork in the search for a banned butcher cover. Having been deleted from Capitol's catalogue in the early-to-mid-1990s, Yesterday and Today was reissued on CD in 2014.
Background
In keeping with the record company's policy for all the Beatles' North American LPs until 1967, Capitol Records selected songs for Yesterday and Today from the albums the band released in Britain and other territories overseen by EMI, and from tracks issued on non-album singles outside North America. The industry preference in the US for shorter LPs facilitated this policy, as did the fact that the Beatles' A Hard Day's Night and Help! albums were presented as "genuine" soundtrack albums in the US, since the non-film songs were replaced by orchestral selections from the respective film scores. In this way, even though the group had recorded six albums for EMI by early 1966, Yesterday and Today was the Beatles' tenth American Capitol album, and twelfth overall. The two non-Capitol albums were A Hard Day's Night, then on United Artists Records, and Introducing... The Beatles on Vee Jay Records.That Capitol should be preparing a new Beatles album for a June release, the first of three for the year, was also consistent with the US approach to the band's LP releases, following the pattern of 1964 and 1965. Similarly, the February 1966 single "Nowhere Man" – a song Capitol omitted from its reconfigured Rubber Soul in December 1965 – was a typical practice whereby the company exploited the most commercial-sounding EMI LP tracks and signalled a forthcoming album.
Song selection
Yesterday and Today included songs from the Beatles' two most recent LPs that had not yet been included on American albums, plus three from the LP they began recording in April 1966, plus two songs which until then had only been released back-to-back on a single:- from Help!: the tracks "Yesterday" and "Act Naturally"
- from Rubber Soul: "Nowhere Man" and "What Goes On", plus "Drive My Car" and "If I Needed Someone"
- both sides of the December 1965 double A-side single: "We Can Work It Out" / "Day Tripper"
- from the not-yet-released Revolver: the tracks "I'm Only Sleeping", "Doctor Robert" and "And Your Bird Can Sing". The mono mixes were different from those used for the August 1966 release of Revolver, while the stereo version of Yesterday and Today initially contained duophonic mixes of the three songs. Subsequent issues of Capitol's album used the true stereo mixes.
The hodge-podge nature in which Capitol repackaged their work for the North American market infuriated the Beatles, as it did Brian Epstein and George Martin, the band's manager and record producer, respectively. The June 1966 LP was unusual in its inclusion of tracks that had yet to be issued in the UK. These three Revolver recordings were all written by John Lennon, whose presence as a composer on Capitol's eleven-song version of Revolver was therefore greatly reduced. In a 1974 interview, Lennon complained that the Beatles "put a lot of work into the sequencing" of their albums and that they were told "there was some rule or something" against issuing the full fourteen-song LPs in the US, which led to Capitol releases such as Yesterday and Today.
Artwork
Whitaker photo session
On 25 March 1966, British photographer Robert Whitaker hosted a photo session with the Beatles at his studio at 1 The Vale, off King's Road in Chelsea. Having spent three months away from the public eye, the band members had expanded their interests and were eager to depart from the formula imposed on them as pop stars, both in their music and in their presentation. Whitaker similarly had ambitions that the photo session should break new ground. He planned a conceptual art piece titled A Somnambulant Adventure, which he later described as "a considered disruption of the conventions surrounding orthodox pop star promotional photography". Whitaker conceived the piece as a comment on the Beatles' fame, having accompanied them on their August 1965 US tour and been alarmed at the scenes of Beatlemania he witnessed then.Whitaker assembled props such as plastic doll parts, trays of meat, white butchers' coats, a hammer and nails, a birdcage, cardboard boxes, and sets of false teeth and eyes. During the shoot, he took several reels of film of the band members interacting with the objects, culminating in a series of photos of the group dressed in the white coats and draped with pieces of meat and body parts from the baby dolls. The band were used to Whitaker's fondness for the surreal and played along. Lennon recalled that they were motivated by "boredom and resentment at having to do another photo session and another Beatles thing. We were sick to death of it." Whitaker's concept was also compatible with their own black humour and their interest in the avant-garde.
File:Bob Whitaker "Hammer & Nails" March 1966.jpg|thumb|upright=0.7|George Harrison apparently hammering nails into John Lennon's head. Whitaker intended the image to serve as the basis for the right-hand panel of his triptych.
Whitaker intended that A Somnambulant Adventure would be a triptych design across two panels of a 12-inch LP cover. Among various comments he later made on the subject, he said the panels would be the inner gatefold spread or, alternatively, the front and back cover. The butcher photo was to appear in the central portion of the triptych or on the back cover. He planned to reduce the image to just "two-and-a-quarter inches square" and set it in the middle of the panel; bejewelled silver halos would be added behind the band members' heads, and the remaining space would be designed as a Russian religious icon in colours of silver and gold. Whitaker said: "The meat is meant to represent the fans, and the false teeth and the false eyes is the falseness of representing a god-like image as a golden calf."
For the front cover, or left-hand portion of the triptych, Whitaker planned to use a photo of the Beatles holding two strings of sausages, symbolising umbilical cords, that appeared to connect to the belly of a woman whose back was to camera. This photo would be set inside another image, showing a woman's womb, thereby representing the Beatles' birth and emphasising their human qualities. The third part of Whitaker's triptych was a photo of George Harrison hammering long nails into Lennon's head, suggesting trepanation. Apparently in a state of transcendence, Lennon's face would be rendered as wood grain and a horizon would be added in which ocean and sky were reversed. Whitaker credited Man Ray as a partial inspiration for this idea and said it again emphasised the band's human qualities over their idol status.
Cover images
The Beatles submitted photographs from the session for their promotional materials. Contrary to Whitaker's original vision, the band chose the butcher photo as the cover image for Yesterday and Today, and Lennon and Paul McCartney insisted that it was the Beatles' statement against war, particularly the Vietnam War. Capitol president Alan Livingston was immediately against using the image, but Epstein told him that the Beatles were adamant. In a 2002 interview published in Mojo magazine, Livingston recalled that his principal contact was with McCartney, who pushed strongly for the photo to be used as the album cover and described it as "our comment on the war". Capitol's art director was more impressed with the image and prepared it to appear like a painting, with a canvas effect.The cover photo was soon replaced with a picture of the four band members posed around an open "steamer" trunk. This image was taken by Whitaker at Epstein's NEMS offices, near Carnaby Street. Rather than being submitted as an afterthought, the trunk photo had been pasted onto a mock-up LP sleeve and was being considered by Epstein while the Beatles filmed promotional clips for "Paperback Writer" and "Rain" at Chiswick House on 20 May. Lennon later described the replacement as "an awful looking photo of us looking just as deadbeat but supposed to be a happy-go-lucky foursome". Music critic Tim Riley describes it as "tame" but, due to the Beatles' sullen expressions, still evocative of their will to ridicule the standard band portrait.