Yesterday and Today by The Beatles

Yesterday and Today was a Capitol creation, a Beatles album cooked up for the North American market and released in the US and Canada in June 1966, the band's ninth album on the label. As Capitol had been doing all along, it filled the record with songs it had held back from its versions of the group's EMI albums, tracks from Help! and Rubber Soul, a batch of non-album singles, and three fresh 1966 recordings that the rest of the world would hear on Revolver. George Martin produced at Abbey Road, and the title riffs on "Yesterday".

So it's a grab bag, but what a bag. John Lennon and George Harrison on guitars, Paul McCartney on bass, all three trading lead vocals, Ringo Starr on drums: you get the lonely hush of "Yesterday" alongside the stinging riffs of "Day Tripper" and "We Can Work It Out", plus the chiming rush of "And Your Bird Can Sing" and the drowsy daze of "I'm Only Sleeping", the sound of a band already drifting somewhere stranger.

The music got overshadowed by the sleeve. The original cover, soon called the "butcher cover", showed the four in white butcher smocks draped with raw meat and decapitated baby dolls. The photo was meant to poke at the public's worship of the band, the Beatles said it was about the Vietnam War, and others read it as a jab at Capitol for chopping up their albums. After retailers balked, Capitol pulled the LP at once and swapped in a photo of the band around a steamer trunk. Some plants simply pasted the new picture over the old one, which sent collectors peeling back sleeves in search of the banned shot. Dropped from the catalog in the 1990s, it returned on CD in 2014.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.