Remarkable Vinyl: The Livingston Butchers.

When looking at remarkable vinyl for my series of articles, for some reason I keep running into the Beatles. While money alone is not necessarily a good measure for something being remarkable, the number four most valuable records ever produced somehow all involve the Beatles. The most costly album ever involves the Beatles only because their record company declined for them to take part. Also check out Remarkable Vinyl No 2, and No 1. if you like.

Today’s album is the first in the series that exists several times and the most valuable versions were those heisted by the man who ordered them to be destroyed in the first place.

In early 1966 the Beatles started to get a little tired from being the Beatles. With Beatlemania haven taken its toll, Lennon recalled the band having "boredom and resentment at having to do another photo session and another Beatles thing". With that they agreed to do conceptual art instead, and came in for a sitting for photographer Roger Whitaker for a series of photographs titled Somnambulant Adventure.

The series consisted of a larger number of photographs with Beatle heads in bird cages, in cardboard boxes labeled 2,000,000 Beatles hammering nails into each other's Beatle heads, Beatles playing with baby dolls, Beatles tearing baby dolls apart, Beatles wearing butcher coats and playing with chunks of red meat. And finally in what must have been a spontaneous escalation of things, the Beatles in butcher coats, with torn apart baby dolls and large chunks of red meat.

​​One of these pictures depicting the Beatles draped with joints of raw meat and decapitated baby dolls was used to promote the single Paperback Writer, albeit not as the record’s cover. A similar photograph from this shoot was used for the cover of the 11 June 1966 edition of the British music magazine Disc. The whole thing was simply considered grumpy British black humor. No offense intended, none taken.

Encouraged by the indifference, Capitol records in the US had 750,000 copies of the upcoming “Yesterday and Today” printed in four different vinyl factories around the country All bearing the butcher cover.

Ten times as many mono records were produced compared to stereo, reflecting the market penetration of stereo turntables at the time. An unknown but rather small fraction of records were sent to radio stations and reviewers and that is when all Hell broke loose.

Capital records received immediate and sufficient complaints about the perceived tasteless nature of the record which lead to president Alan W. Livingston having all copies immediately recalled. Some of the already printed albums were thrown into a landfill near Jacksonville, Florida. There were so many covers already printed, however, that Capitol records decided to simply paste a less offensive cover on top. This cover showed the Beatles sitting on an old trunk. Interestingly enough, Mr. Livingston nicked exactly 24 copies for his private collection; 19 of these being mono and 5 stereo recordings.

Some of The Beatles defended the record cover: John Lennon said that it was "as relevant as Vietnam" and McCartney said that their critics were "soft". George Harrison, however, said in The Beatles Anthology he thought the whole idea "was gross, and I also thought it was stupid. Sometimes we all did stupid things thinking it was cool and hip when it was naïve and dumb; and that was one of them."

Fans and early buyers of the over pasted records immediately tried to peel off the alternate cover, some successfully others not so much.

At this point there are several “states” of the record, all being considered of different value. The most valuable ones are the first state that were distributed without the alternate cover and never successfully recalled. Needless to say that these are amongst the most valuable. The “second state” or “paste overs” are those that have the alternate cover intact.

And then are the Livingston Butchers. Those are in the original shrink wrapped state, have thus never been played and Livingston saw little need to hide what seemed to be a mild form of embezzlement, by putting some of those prized records up at an action through his son Peter. In 2007 the entire Livingston butcher collection was valued at over a million dollars when individual prices reached $85,000 for a stereo copy and $44,000 for the mono versions. Taking stuff home seemed to be an intricate parte of Capitol corporate culture at the time as Capitol records of Canada vice president Paul White, kept a mono cover and a stereo cover slick for his collection.

As of to date Capitol hasn't laid any claim to these copies or the money received for their sale. Pretty magnanimous of them if I do say so myself. Perhaps the company's presidents taking stuff home was just how it worked back in 1966.

Arved Deecke is founder of the Danish / Mexican Loudspeaker company KVART & BØLGE that makes audiophile quarter wave loudspeakers and sound systems at a price anyone can afford. In his free time he blogs about all things related to sound, music and audio.

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