Beatles “Butcher Cover” Brings Boffo Bucks
A rare unopened copy of The Beatles infamous, “Yesterday and Today” LP sold for more than $26,000 at an auction in Beverly Hills, according to KABC-7 News Los Angeles.
The original cover was quickly yanked from store shelves back in 1966 after numerous complaints from rack jobbers within the industry. It featured the band dressed in bloody butchers aprons, surrounded by hunks of raw meat and baby doll parts.
About 5000 copies were released before the recall. Most of the recalled copies had a new cover with a different picture glued over the top, and there have been many instances reported where owners of the record had been able to apply steam and lift off the correction to reveal the banned photo. A sealed copy however, is an entirely different animal as it essentially confirms itself as one of the original 5000.
The stereo version is apparently even more valuable than the mono one, because fewer of those are known to exist. One of the rarer stereo copies was reported to be sold at a 2006 auction in Dallas for $39,000.