Beatles Posing With Butchered Baby Dolls on Rare Album Cover Sparks Debate

A rare Beatles album cover, which shows the band members posing with dismembered baby dolls, has sparked debate and conspiracy theories on social media.

The original cover for the album Yesterday and Today, taken by photographer Robert Whitaker, featured John Lennon, George Harrison, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr wearing butchers' coats while holding baby doll parts and meat.

Before its release, the cover was met with a backlash from some who had seen advance copies, including DJs and reviewers, prompting Capitol Records to replace it with an image of the musicians posing around a steamer luggage trunk.

Earlier in December, Sameera Khan, who describes herself in her Twitter bio as an "anti-woke" journalist, shared a screenshot of the original album cover along with the caption: "What in the SHAITAN is this?!?" Shaitan are evil spirits in Islam.

Khan, a former Miss New Jersey, who has more than 120,000 followers on the social media platform, added in another tweet on the matter that the Beatles "were the first to popularize wokeism in the U.S."

The tweet sparked a strong reaction from other users of the platform, a number of whom suggested that The Beatles were somehow tied to a satanic cult.

"They so disgusting and shameless, they openly show and promote satanism, and yet people support and like these guys," wrote one person of the musicians. "I honestly think The Beatles members sold their souls for fame and fortune, the fact that there's a picture like this, promoting abortion, is a sign that they did."

Delving into QAnon territory, another claimed the band was formed and financed by the U.K. government "to help create a counter culture w/ rock music & drugs to study it," referencing a book on the British "deep state."

The Conspirators' Hierarchy: The Committee of 300, written by John Coleman and originally published in 1992, lays out the conspiracy theory that a secret group founded by the British aristocracy in the 1700s controls all global affairs.

As the wild claims continued to roll in, another suggested that The Beatles' very existence was orchestrated to "manipulate" and sully society.

"Like almost everything else since the 60s. Very few of the trends the past few generations have been exposed to were spontaneous," freelance writer Robert Kearney tweeted. "It was all pre-planned to manipulate society into degeneration for easier control by Elites."

Other theories have been floated regarding the cover, including baseless claims that the stars were promoting abortion and child sacrifice, as well as a bizarre assertion that McCartney has actually been dead for decade.

However, a number of Twitter users also pushed back on the suggestions, with one writing that "those are dolls—not real babies! I know it might be difficult to see, but if you look closely they have seams on the joints, and one has a big hole in its back! Hope this clears things up!"

'Yesterday and Today' Album Cover Story

In an age where conspiracy theories can run wild on social media, it's worth reiterating that the members of the band were, in fact, posing with dolls.

Before the controversial image was taken, The Beatles posed for a series of more conventional pics during a shoot with photographer Whitaker, who spiced things up by introducing offbeat props during the March 1966 session.

Among the photos that emerged from the shoot were the musicians holding sausages, Harrison with his head in a birdcage and Harrison holding a hammer and large nails over Lennon's head.

They then posed for several photos with the broken dolls and raw meat while wearing smocks. The blog Stuff Nobody Cares About has shared the images.

According to the blog, the band members learned soon after the shoot that Yesterday and Today would be the next album released in the U.S. by their label. Whitaker's photos were selected after the band's management was asked to provide suggestions for the album cover.

While Capitol executives pushed for the steamer trunk photos, Lennon is said to have expressed a preference for the so-called "butcher shots," with manager Brian Epstein going on to inform the label of the choice.

It is said that 750,000 copies of the album with the cover featuring the band, the dolls and meat were pressed. Following uproar over the image, the label recalled the copies, though some had already been put out for sale by large retailers before the official release date.

By June 20 1966 the albums were out for sale with the less controversial steamer trunk photo on the cover. However, it was later discovered that in some cases the new image had been pasted over the butcher images rather than replacing them, leading a number of fans to start peeling their covers back.

A Boston Globe article from June 25, 1966—shared on Twitter by musician and journalist Ryan Walsh—reported that the cover recall and replacement cost Capitol Records $250,000, which would be the equivalent of approximately $2 million today.

A spokesperson told the Globe at the time that the cost of repackaging the records "wiped out" the profit that the album would make.

As for what happened to the butcher record sleeves after the records were repackaged, thousands of them may be buried in Needham, a town southwest of Boston.

Walsh also shared a memo dated June 28, 1966, in which local distribution manager Joe Sobeck wrote that 50,700 Beatles record covers had been destroyed by June 27, 1966.

According to the memo, the covers were buried in a water-filled hole in a "swampy part" of Needham's town dump.

Sobeck told Capitol's national distribution manager R. L. Howe: "By the time the hole was ready for us it had filled with water. The jackets were dumped on the ground as close as possible to the hole and then a bulldozer pushed the jackets into the hole.

"The hole was then covered with about one to two feet of dirt and will subsequently be covered with garbage which will be well compacted as time goes by."

In May 2019, Lennon's own copy of the original record cover featuring the signatures of Lennon himself, McCartney and Starr was sold for around $250,000, the third-highest price ever paid for a vinyl record, according to Rolling Stone.

Newsweek has reached out to Capitol Records for comment.