I have received a question pertaining to the Beatles from a friend. I have no idea what the answer is. What do all four Beatles hold on the cover of the Beatles ’65 album?
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I have the album right here. You forget how big these things were–12 inches by 12. (To be precise, 125/16 by 125/16.) Perfect for examining for hidden meanings while listening to the album on headphones. Can you do that with the dinky paper inserts on today’s CDs? I think not. And there were hidden meanings, too. Beatles ’65 is a good example. There are four photos, representing the four seasons. (No, I don’t mean the group the Four Seasons. I mean the cycle of meteorological variation you might have noticed had you not been holed up in your room all the time listening to records.) In the largest of the four photos, the Beatles are holding umbrellas representing winter–winter as experienced in London, one feels obliged to say, not Minneapolis. In the other photos they’re holding parasols and a knotted handkerchief for summer, brooms and leaves for autumn, and giant springs and a green shoot for spring. Springs for spring! The Beatles have grasped the pun! Truly these were multitalented guys.
At its most basic level the butcher cover was an attempt to satirize the vapid cover art of the day. You want grins, grin about this, the Beatles seem to be saying. But Whitaker had higher ambitions. The butcher shot was only one of a series of strange tableaux he photographed during the photo session on March 25, 1966. I quote from Record Collector magazine: “The photographs began with a shot of the four Beatles holding a string of sausages in front of a young girl–the latter ‘giving birth’ to the concept of ‘Beatles,’ with the sausages representing an umbilical cord. Another showed Paul and George with their heads in birdcages–literally singing like canaries….A further picture featured George banging large nails into John’s head–despite their godlike status, said Whitaker, this showed that even the Beatles were human beings, as solid as a block of wood.” Whatever.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): illustration by Slug Signorino.
