The butcher on Hastings

As the owner of more than one hard-to-find Beatles record, I know a good deal (or a bad one) when I come across it. But rarely do I come across a deal that's blatantly suspicious. For instance, the other day, when I found myself staring at one of the rarest LPs in the world – one I have seen stickered at $4,000 and had to travel all the way to Tokyo to see – for $34.99. Yes, the decimal was in the right place.

There it was as I strolled into Beat Street Records on Hastings Street, the legendary "butcher cover" staring at me from the front of the Beatles rack. I knew something was fishy even before I saw the price tag. First of all, anyone who owns one of these doesn't stick them for sale in a record bin. You hold onto it at home and advertise for the highest bidder. And if you're the owner of a record shop looking to show it off to customers, you keep it locked in a glass case behind the counter. And if your shop is on Crack Row (Hastings Street), around the corner from Blood Alley (real name), you don't keep it in the shop at all.

So it was no surprise when I saw the "cheap" price tag, because I had already surmised that this was a reproduction. The only question left: was it an official repro or a fake?

This was the first time I had encountered any form of the butcher cover in Canada. In Japan I saw three. Strangelove Records in the Shinjuku district had a butcher cover behind the counter. It wasn't for sale, but the clerk took it down and let me hold it. That alone was a thrill. Vinyl Records nearby had a prime specimen on the wall, going for C$4,000 (the shopkeeper wouldn't let me photograph it). The RecoFan outlet in Shibuya had one with a big rip through John Lennon's face (pictured), a sign that this was a "bad peel job", as they call it in butcher-collector circles. Some of the butcher covers had been "corrected" by Capitol records by pasting the new cover over the old one. Those who bought a paste-over inevitably would try to steam or peel it off, usually ruining the product altogether, but not to the point of making it worthless – this "peel job" in Shibuya was being offered for C$2,500.

Capitol's recall letter; click to enlarge

I should back up and tell you what makes this cover such a prize. To begin with, this wasn't even a formal Beatles record. The group had always taken great care in sequencing the songs on their British LPs, giving good value for money with 13 or 14 tracks. However, the American label that had rights to the songs on this continent – Capitol Records – would issue the LPs a few tracks short, then collect the missing songs onto compilation records, of which this was one. When Yesterday and Today was ready to hit the American marketplace in June 1966, Capitol called up the group's management to request a cover. This is what they got. The fact that Capitol even used the image was out of character, as the American label had a habit of tarting up and dumbing down the arty British covers by adding garish colours and simple-minded photos to make them more consumer-friendly. Capitol realized their "mistake" on this one and recalled the album after only a day on the marketplace. The fact that some retailers refused to stock the record helped them with the decision. Those who actually bought this one-day-only record landed themselves a rarity.

The album was re-released the following week with a new, innocuous cover, one showing the boys huddled around a steamer trunk.

Many fans theorized that the submission of the original cover was the Beatles' way of protesting Capitol's "butchering" of their records. That would have made a great story had it been true, but sadly this wasn't the case.

At Beat Street Records, I approached the gangly, middle-aged clerk at the cash desk. I don't want to knock the guy personally, but, although he fit right in with a Hastings five-and-dime, this wasn't the font-of-all-knowledge used-record-store-clerk I was familiar with. I'm used to bantering with record-shop clerks who regale me with stories about whatever piece of vinyl I approach them with. Sometimes these guys are entertaining and informative. Sometimes they're pricks. (See the film High Fidelity for some hilariously piercing portrayals.) Either way, these guys know their stuff.

Except at Beat Street.

"This is a reproduction, right?" I asked.

"Uh, yeah. That's part of the catalogue re-mastering they just did."

No, the recent catalogue re-issues comprised all the British LPs, not the American ones, and certainly not with this out-of-commission cover. So I explained the history of this particular record.

"Yeah, I can see that," he said, starting to grimace. "I never really looked at it, but yeah, it's kinda weird, right? Like, what does all that have to do with the title? Like, Yesterday and Today and slabs of meat? That's just demented, man."

I took the LP out of the sleeve for examination. Not only was it in beautiful condition, without any evidence of being pre-owned, it was on 180-gram, marble-blue vinyl – the kind of refined touches marketed specifically to collectors. So, for the moment, a seed was planted that this might be an official re-issue of some kind. Bootleggers would never go to such lengths, would they?

Despite how much I loved the record, though, I was apprehensive. I put it back in its place and left to do some online research. No official pressing for sale on Amazon. Nothing on the Beatles collectors' websites. Googling "butcher cover re-issue" and such came up with evidence of a limited re-pressing in Japan (on red or sky-blue vinyl, not the marbled light blue I saw), but this was just unofficial chatter on message boards, and others were replying that the Japan pressings were unofficial. Regardless, I figured I'd go back to Beat Street and pick it up. The mystery made it more appealing.

A different clerk this time, someone more High Fidelity and less straight-outta-rehab, but still not all that up to speed on his stock.

"What's the deal with this record?" I asked. "Who re-issued it?"

"I dunno," he shrugged. "It was in the last shipment from the distributor."

"Yeah, but is it an import? Did it come from Japan, or what?"

"I dunno. It was in the box the distributor sent."

I was taking the evasiveness as a sign that I was likely about to purchase a fake. But it's a beautiful fake. Despite the flawless sound, there is one giveaway upon playing the record that this is not a genuine article. The sound mix is in mono, as the label states. However, the manufacturers of this piece used the stereo mixes and folded them down into mono, rather than using the original mono tracks. (The backwards guitar on "I'm Only Sleeping" differs between the mono and stereo version, a noticeable tell for collectors.) An unfortunate oversight, as the mono tracks have been readily available on CD since 2009.

I'll chalk it up to kismet that I discovered this just a few blocks from Vancouver's east-side institution, Save-on-Meats – an ideal locale to find a butcher cover for only $34.99.

~~~~~~~

Here's what to those who knew best had to say about the most infamous album cover in pop-music history (quotes from Anthology, published in 2000, with a wee bit of paraphrasing):

George: An Australian photographer called Robert Whitaker came up to London. He was avant garde. He set up a photo session which I never liked at the time. I thought it was gross and stupid. Sometimes we did stupid things, thinking it was cool or hip when it was naïve and dumb, and that was one of them. It was a case of being put in a situation where one is obliged as part of a group to co-operate. Quite rightly, somebody took a look and said, "Do you think you really need this as an album cover?"

John: By then we were really beginning to hate photo sessions. It was a big ordeal and you had to look normal and you didn't feel it. Robert Whittaker was a bit of a surrealist and he brought along all these dolls and pieces of meat, so we really got into it. I don't like being locked into one game all the time, and we were supposed to be sort of angels. I wanted to show that we were aware of life, and I really was pushing for that album cover, just to break the image. It got out in America. They printed about 60,000, and then there was some kind of fuss, and they were all sent back or withdrawn. Then they stuck on that awful-looking picture of us looking deadbeat.

Paul: We'd done a few sessions with Robert Whittaker before and he knew our personalities. He knew we liked black humour and sick jokes. I don't know really what he was trying to say, but it seemed a little more original than the things the rest of the photographers were getting us to do.

Ringo: I don't know how we ended up sitting in butchers' coats with meat all over us. The sleeve was great for us because we were quite a nice bunch of boys and we thought, "Let's do something like this." What was crazy about that sleeve was that, because it was banned, they glued the new sleeve over it and everyone started steaming it off. They made it into a really heavy collector's item.

The Eno record I owned without knowing

Brian Eno changed the way I listen to music. His 1974 record Taking Tiger Mountain (by Strategy) was my first foray into his large body of work, and music hasn't been the same for me since. (Must be said that this introduction came in the early 1990s; someone as avant garde as Eno wasn't exactly on every teenager's Walkman when I was in high school.) 

What makes Eno such an engaging figure, and what makes his music so inventive and inimitable, is that he pays attention to the way music is changed by elements not related to the music itself. That could mean the shape of the room it was recorded in, the mood of the artist creating it, the mood of the listener, the quality of equipment the record is being played on, accidents and happenstance with the instruments being used. Even the titles and the album artwork affect our perception of the sounds inside the package. Eno is known as the pioneer of ambient music, but even in his straightforward pop compositions, there's a sense he's more interested in the sonic nuances rather than the craftsmanship. Eno once offered up a method of jerry-rigging "surround sound" before the concept was even marketed, except his technique only involved a third low-fi speaker and a bit of wire. The instructions he gave on the back of his album sleeve were simple to follow and I still use his method today.

We know how certain songs are coloured by our memories of the times and places where we first heard them. What if someone could record an album that has those discretionary emotions built into it? It's that sort of question that Eno would ask and then attempt to pursue in his music.

Here's how Interview magazine put it: "If humans were able to hear light and parse the poetry of the spectrum, then perhaps there would be no need for Brian Eno, who seems to do it effortlessly. While the rest of us are generally content to hear sound, Eno can clearly see it. How else to explain the elaborate sonic color fields and glowing soundscapes that he creates, which feel as much like floating shapes and waves of light as they do music?"

It's not that I was never aware of these qualities in music, but now I was thinking about them in more active ways. Getting acquainted with Eno gave me a deeper appreciation for other artists who pursued music with a similar ethic – The Beatles, for instance, when John Lennon asked his engineers to make him sound like the Dalai Lama chanting from a Himalayan mountaintop in "Tomorrow Never Knows", or Brian Wilson trying to capture the mood of lost innocence on Pet Sounds. While Eno's approach to music isn't entirely unique, he's been able to pursue his ideas further than any other pop artist by eschewing commercial expectations. (As inventive as The Beatles were, for instance, they still had to churn out singles for radio airplay and abide by contractual obligations.) You listen to Eno's body of work over the past 40 years and it's hard to find anyone comparable who's created such a wide-ranging catalogue of music that is exhilarating in its invention, both cerebral and unpretentious, all of it having miraculously found its audience with no mainstream radio airplay.

And I heap that praise without really liking most of his work. The albums I do enjoy are just that much more special, because I approach them with no expectations, ready to be grabbed (or sedated) in unlikely ways. The albums of his I don't particularly care for are regardless full of wonderful ideas that are likely to be inspirational to someone else with a different perspective.

I vaguely recalled that Eno pulled the name Taking Tiger Mountain (by Strategy) from the English translation of a famous Chinese opera, which brings me to the ostensible point of this post. Having held this and other Eno albums in high regard, it was hard not to smile when I serendipitously discovered that I have actually had the original Chinese opera in my collection for the past six years – and I had, in fact, written about it on my blog a few weeks ago, completely unaware of the connection. A friend, with my previous blog post fresh in his mind, sent me a link to a record-collector website where he had been browsing for Eno rarities. My pal stumbled upon an LP that looked a lot like one from the collection of Chinese revolutionary operas I picked up in a Shanghai antiques market.

While the covers were distinctly different, the painted figures on both were alike, with their capes and pistols and feisty poses. The title, though, took me aback:Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy: Modern Revolutionary Peking Opera. Looking carefully at the Chinese writing on both this cover and my own, it looked like I had a match. I just had to figure out if the writing was indeed the title, and not something generic found on all Chinese records at the time, such as, "Another fine platter of clanging and caterwauling presented to you from Chairman Mao's personal collection," or "Stereo, also playable mono."

A bit of crowdsourcing on Facebook confirmed it. A couple of the translations offered up by friends were Taking Tiger Mountain by Wisdom and Taking Mighty Tiger Mountain by Wit.

Realizing that I now had both Tiger Mountain records, I pondered that aspect of Eno that makes him and his work so admirable – his authenticity. His own experiences and dreamlike perception of the world are at the heart of all his music, and I like to imagine that his own story of coming across this title might be as memorable as my own. 

One video, two songs: "Under" (1993), "Taking Tiger Mountain (by Strategy)" (1974):