Sep 12, 2016 7 min read

HOUSTON – Exterminator George Stegenga was out on a job a hop and a skip from his Houston home a few years ago when he saw a pile of records in the basement where he was working.

A music enthusiast and collector, he asked if he could take a look at them, and most of what he found was not out of the ordinary – there was a Byrds disc, an Elvis Presley album, other hits from a half-century ago.

It was all pretty commonplace – except for one album.

The otherwise nondescript batch of long-players contained a copy of the Beatles’ 1966 American album “Yesterday … and Today,” a compilation that pulled together singles that had been released in the United States but had not yet found a home on a domestic album, a few songs that had gone unreleased in this country from the British edition of the 1965 “Rubber Soul” album, along with a few tracks destined for release in other parts of the globe on the upcoming “Revolver” album. Of course, it being a Beatles album, it sold millions of copies after it first appeared on the Billboard album chart in July 1966.

But what made this copy of “Yesterday … and Today” stand out is that hiding underneath the front cover, which depicts John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr lingering morosely around or, in McCartney’s case, inside a trunk, is another cover entirely.

Lurking beneath what has come to be known as the “trunk cover,” and visible through its white spaces, was the “butcher cover,” a notorious photo that depicted the heretofore cuddly moptops decked out in butcher smocks and draped with dismembered baby dolls and chunks of meat.

“When I found the butcher cover in my client’s basement, it almost seemed surreal to find such a treasure less than a mile from my home,” Stegenga remembers. “It’s a once in a lifetime find, for sure.”

In a world where Beatles collectibles are furiously traded and frequently command prices equal to a mortgage payment, the butcher cover remains one of the most well-known and most talked-about of relics. Within a decade of its brief appearance on store shelves, copies of a butcher cover masked by the trunk cover were commanding prices of $200 or more. Prices have remained steady or crept upward ever since – a stereo copy of a “pasteover” cover can get you $2,500 or $5,000. If you find a sealed copy of a “first state” butcher cover, well, then you might be able to just pay off a considerable chunk of your mortgage.

Stegenga has three copies of the butcher cover – one is “peeled,” another has the trunk cover with a mono record inside, and the other has a stereo record. They are among a handful of high-end Beatles collectibles the 56-year-old owns, including a copy of the 1961 German single “My Bonnie” which has “The Beat Brothers” backing English singer Tony Sheridan, and a 1962 British copy of the “Love Me Do” single on the Parlophone label, the first official release under the Beatles’ name.

“I grew up with the Beatles,” Stegenga said. “All my siblings collected Beatles records. It’s a sentimental thing.”

How did the butcher cover come to be? The photo that adorns the sleeve was taken by Robert Whitaker, a 26-year-old British photographer who was a fan of Salvador Dali-esque surrealism. The image was snapped during a photo session in March 1966 and was inspired by the work of German artist Hans Bellmer, who had published a book depicting dismembered dolls and mannequins. Initially, a different design built around the trunk photo was crafted, but then rejected by Beatles manager Brian Epstein.

Capitol Records, the Beatles’ American label, was thrown for a loop when Epstein sent back another photo entirely – the photo that ultimately ended up on the butcher cover. It was done at the behest of Lennon and McCartney over Epstein’s objections.

Alan Livingston, the McDonald native and brother of “Silver Bells” composer Jay Livingston, was then president of Capitol Records, and was left with the unenviable task of telling Epstein the cover was unacceptable. He later told Beatles scholar Bruce Spizer, who has written several books detailing how British and American Beatles releases came together, that his initial reaction was “We can’t put that out.”

Livingston, who died in 2009, told Spizer, “I called Brian in London and I said, ‘Brian, I can’t put this album out with this cover, I need another cover. And he argued with me. He wouldn’t listen. And I said finally, ‘I’ll tell you what we’ll do. We’ll have some printed up and we’ll put them out, send them to disc jockeys, our distributors and sales managers and see what happens.”

The response was unequivocally negative, but the label went ahead and pressed up thousands of copies in order to meet its release schedule. Once some distributors refused to carry it and some stores refused to stock it, the decision was made to yank it out of stores it had reached, recall it from distributors, and destroy them.

Some were, in fact, shipped to a landfill; however, it’s thought that as many as 300,000 to 400,000 copies were run through the presses again, with a new cover over top the butcher cover.

In a recent phone interview from his law office in New Orleans, Spizer described the butcher cover as “the most common rare record in the world.”

He noted that there are a bumper crop of myths and misconceptions that surround the butcher cover: that it was the Beatles’ commentary on the practices of Capitol, or a statement about the Vietnam War. Other stories had it that rogue employees ran the covers back through the presses again because they had been called in to work on the weekend and wanted to go home early; the reality is that it was a cost-saving measure.

It turns out that Livingston himself ended up being the source of some of the rarest butcher covers in the world – a box of sealed copies that he took home with him was uncovered in his garage in the 1980s. They have sold indivually for anywhere from $40,000 to $120,000.

Meanwhile, Starr has admitted that he doesn’t have one, and Lennon gave an autographed copy to a fan in the early 1970s, who later got Starr and McCartney to sign it.

When he was interviewed in the 1990s for the door-stopping “Beatles Anthology” video series and book, Harrison said he “never personally liked” the butcher cover.

“I thought it was gross, and I also thought it was stupid,” he explained. “Sometimes we all did stupid things, thinking it was cool or hip when it was naive and dumb, and that was one of them. But again, it was a case of being put in a situation where one is obliged, as part of a unit, to co-operate.”

On the other hand, McCartney, who has largely taken a more charitable and less-jaundiced view of the Beatles’ deeds and misdeeds, had a more sanguine view of the butcher cover.

“We weren’t against a little shock now and then,” McCartney said in “The Beatles Anthology.” “It was part of our make-up.”