In the latter half of the 1960s, George Harrison was feeling cooped up in The Beatles. He was delving into his spirituality and felt trapped by fame. He also felt that his bandmates, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, stifled his growth as a musician. It didn’t help that he disagreed with some major creative decisions made by the band. Harrison said he found one album cover that his bandmates defended to be tone deaf.
George Harrison wasn’t proud of 1 Beatles cover
In 1966, The Beatles posed for their Yesterday and Today cover wearing butcher coats, surrounded by slabs of raw meat and decapitated baby dolls. The image caused widespread outrage, prompting their label to recall it almost immediately. While Lennon and McCartney defended the creative decision, Harrison said he never felt comfortable with it.
“I thought it was gross, and I also thought it was stupid,” he said in The Beatles Anthology. “Sometimes we all did stupid things, thinking it was cool or hip when it was naive and dumb, and that was one of them. But again, it was a case of being put in a situation where one is obliged, as part of a unit, to cooperate.”
He believed the expression on his face made his opinions of the photo shoot clear.
“So we put on those butchers’ uniforms for that picture. In the photograph we’re going, ‘Ugh!’ That’s what I’m doing, isn’t it?” he said. “I’m disgusted, and especially so by the baby dolls with their heads off. What the bloody hell is that all about?”
Harrison believed their record company was right to replace the butcher photo with a different image.
George Harrison had already checked out of The Beatles by the time they released the album
Part of the reason Harrison could have looked frustrated in the photos may have been his general frustration with the band as a whole. He felt creatively boxed-in, and was ready to move on from the band.
“My feeling when we went our separate ways was to enjoy the space that it gave me, the space to be able to think at my own speed and to have some musicians in the studio who would accompany me on my songs,” Harrison said. “It sounds strange, because most people would like to be in The Beatles, or at that time it looked like such a great thing to be in. And it was. But it was also a great thing to get out of — just as when you grow up and leave home and spread your wings.”
While he appreciated the state of his career, he said the pressure of the band no longer felt worth it.
“There was a feeling that it was a big step to decide to leave the group, but at the same time there was so much pressure that the downside was much bigger than the upside,” he said. “The upside was that The Beatles were so famous and it was a cozy rut to be in. But it was so negative at that point that I would have given anything to get out.”
His bandmates shared their thoughts on the cover
Harrison’s bandmates did not find the photo shoot as offensive as he did. Ringo Starr said that while he didn’t understand the photos, he liked what they did for the band’s image.
“I don’t know how it came about,” he said. “I don’t know how we ended up sitting in butchers’ coats with meat all over us. If you look at our eyes, you realize none of us really knew what we were doing. It was just one of those things that happened as life went on. The sleeve was great for us because we were quite a nice bunch of boys and we thought, ‘Let’s do something like this!’”
Lennon agreed. He liked that the photo pushed against the band’s existing image. McCartney added that he didn’t find it all that offensive.
“It didn’t seem too offensive to us. It was just dolls and a lot of meat,” McCartney said. “I don’t know really what [the photographer] was trying to say, but it seemed a little more original than the things the rest of the people were getting us to do — eyeglasses!”
