Yesterday and Today

The Beatles released Yesterday and Today in June 1966, just as British pop was starting to become bolder. The album compiled tracks that had already been released in Europe on Help! and Rubber Soul, but in North America, the label Capitol had left them out to create its own versions of the albums. Among those eleven tracks, three were new recordings from April–May 1966 that would later end up on Revolver for the rest of the world. The album’s title plays on the hit Yesterday, but what stuck in people’s minds was something else: the cover. A photo by Robert Whitaker showed the band wearing butcher’s aprons, decapitated baby dolls, and chunks of raw meat. The band claimed it was a protest against the Vietnam War, while others saw it as a complaint against Capitol for “butchering” their albums for the U.S. market. When record stores refused to stock the image, the label replaced it with a photo of the four around a steamer trunk, but the original became a cult object among collectors. Some vinyl copies even turned into a puzzle: to find the banned cover, you had to peel away the top layer of the artwork.

Year: 1966
Songs: 1
Duration: 2 min 6 seg

Listen to the album ★

1 song|s

Song list

# Title Available ⏱

yesterday

2:06

Genres

Classic rock Rock Pop Britpop mainstream rock

Details

Year: 1966
Duration: 2 min 6 seg

About the album

Yesterday and Today, according to DoReSol

The most curious thing about the album isn’t in the songs but in how it was assembled. Capitol often took tracks from The Beatles’ British albums and mixed them with B-sides of singles that hadn’t been included on any LPs in Europe. In this case, they included Drive My Car, Nowhere Man —which Capitol had omitted from its version of Rubber Soul in December 1965— and Day Tripper, which until then had only appeared on a single with We Can Work It Out. Recording sessions spanned June 1965, October–November 1965, and April–May 1966 at EMI Studios in London, with George Martin at the helm. The result was an album that, despite the controversy, became the tenth LP by The Beatles on Capitol and the twelfth in the United States, continuing the annual release pace the band already had in North America.

The album vanished from Capitol’s catalog in the early 1990s but resurfaced on CD in 2014. Today, the banned cover remains a topic of discussion, but the album itself is a document of that era when The Beatles transitioned from pop stars to exploring sounds that would later change music forever.

Discography