Expensive Beatle Gag Misses Mark (1966)

 Expensive Beatle Gag Misses Mark

By Pete Johnson

The Los Angeles Times

June 20, 1966

     Capitol Records would gladly have paid a fortune for a machine to rip records out of their covers and put them in new wrappers last week. Re-jacketing nearly a million albums requires an awful lot of manual labor. What happened? A printing mistake? No, a little joke, which left the record company's executives grinning rather grimly. 

    In recent years, album covers as interesting as their content have materialized through imaginative layouts, artwork, photography, and superb printing techniques. Designers exploiting their imaginations to the limits have made the far-out far-in. 

    Well, there is this rock and roll group called The Beatles, who have had 10 singles selling more than a million copies and nine gold albums on Capitol. So, when they cough, the Capitol Tower in Hollywood vibrates sympathetically. 

    A photograph was sent from London to grace their new album Yesterday and Today with the word that this was the cover the Beatles wanted. Picture the Beatles, each widely grinning, wearing stained white butcher smocks, their figures draped with dismembered doll torsos and assorted cuts of meat, all captured in living color. Capitol muttered "no" several dozen times when the picture reached them, but they couldn't say no too firmly. And Brian Epstein and his four charges prevailed.

     About a million copies of the album were pressed at the factory, and nearly as many album covers had been run off. Then the Beatles organization decided to withdraw the covers from the market and substitute a milder form of art. 

    A sampling of public opinion in the United States said the record company had shown that the portrait, intended as pop art satire, was subject to misinterpretation. Misinterpretation is a mild description of what would have probably ensued when the 13-year-olds began trotting into kitchens to show their  mothers what their photogenic idols were up to. 

    The record company and Epstein would have been deluged with a wrathful chorus. "How can the Beatles associate themselves with infantside?"  They will have all the teenagers killing off their tiny siblings.

     Though saved from this piece of gallows humor, the public's projection from offbeat Beatles jokes is far from through. The Beatles' latest single, 'Paperback Writer', has odd echo effects bouncing around at the end of verses as a parody of other records with more resonance than singing. The flip side of the release, 'Rain', has a final verse made up of the words of the first verse recited nonsensically backward in a playful slap at the profoundly jag, which has lately seized popular music.  And a side previously released in England, "Drive My Car," has a chorus consisting of a series of comic high-pitched vocal beeps.