It makes a corny kind of backwards sense to arbitrarily christen this blog with a post on this topic. It’s a quintessentially infamous image, though most of us have never seen it. It’s a collectible both cliché and forever hip, in part because it’s a twenty-seven-and-a-half-minute slab of rushed mixes, singles and songs left over from other chopped-up releases, mastered with some extra reverb and sweet equalization, that came out sounding like the greatest thing they (or anyone else) had ever made (until a few weeks later when they released an even better one), and in part because “they” were The Beatles.
The story and the details behind “Yesterday” …And Today‘s original “butcher” cover are well known to collectors. Suffice to say that if you have one with the replacement “steamtrunk” cover pasted over it, don’t peel it off unless you want to see grown men cry (well, yes, but don’t peel it off anyway, okay?). Something you may not have heard though is that a disproportionately large percentage of these rarities were shipped to the Seattle area. So there’s that for ya.
