The Beatles album John Lennon used to bash America: “It’s as relevant as Vietnam”

For anyone in The Beatles’ generation, cracking America was the one indicator of success.

The whole point of them making rock and roll was to imitate the legends that they had heard from teh bread basket of America, and even when they were working on their first singles, Brian Epstein vowed to not take the Fab Four to the States until they were one of the greatest bands that the world had ever seen. But when they eventually showed up, John Lennon realised things looked much different on the other side of the Atlantic.

But we must emphasise the gravity of the situation when The Beatles crash-landed on the Ed Sullivan Show. Everyone was still reeling from the death of President Kennedy, so now that there were four lads willing to cheer everybody up again, it was easy for every teenager to welcome them in with open arms by singing along to ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ and ‘Twist and Shout’.

They were practically inescapable by the time they made A Hard Day’s Night, but that wasn’t necessarily a good thing. As it turns out, having zero breaks in between playing tours, giving interviews, and partying makes someone want to do anything else, and if the band weren’t going to be let out of their little bubble, they were going to at least have a little bit of fun where they could find it.

Some of that fun may have included toking up with Bob Dylan when they were in the States, but the biggest hangup for them was getting over their pretty boy image. They needed to shed their skin as the squeaky-clean band, and while Epstein was not willing to let that go, there was hardly anyone thinking that the band were arbiters of good taste when they posed with a bunch of mutilated baby dolls and slabs of meat on the cover of Yesterday and Today.

The idea of them making a separate album for the American market was already a bit unnecessary, but since they had to keep their mouths shut about the Vietnam War during this time, Lennon remembered that the “butcher cover” was the few ways they could take jabs at America, saying, “It’s as relevant as Vietnam. If the public can accept something as cruel as the war, they can accept this cover.”

Were there more tasteful ways of going about that? Probably, but that doesn’t mean this wasn’t a decent cover at the time. It may have shocked people and turned a handful of listeners off before they played the record, but that was the whole point. If they had a problem with violence towards children on an album cover, then why wouldn’t they be equally as disgusted at people being blown to bits half a world away?

Harrison may have eventually condemned the cover for being too racy, but this was the first in Lennon’s habit of pushing the envelope on records. In this instance, it was to blow off steam, but the fact that he went from that to getting stark naked with Yoko Ono and posing on the cover of Two Virgins is one of the boldest leaps any pop star had ever taken.

The original pressing of Yesterday and Today might be a rare collectable now, thanks to how many of them have been pulled from the shelves, but Lennon was never willing to roll over and accept the restrictions put on him by the label. He saw music as a means to wake people up from the blinders they put on themselves, and with the Summer of Love being right around the corner, it’s this kind of cover that reminded everyone why fighting for peace and love was so important.