Sausage links, false teeth, joints of raw pork, glass eyes, hammers, nails, white coats, a bird cage, a severed pig’s head and doll parts were laid out like an occult flea market. … We’re more popular than Jesus now I don’t know which will go first – religion or rock & roll.” The quote would mushroom into a nearly life-threatening scandal when it was reprinted in the United States later that summer, but the Beatles entered Whitaker’s studio on March 25th filled with confidence and a strong desire to indulge their appetite for experimentation.Īn irreverent take on religious iconography was certainly a selling point for the band, but it was the extraordinary prop list that held their notoriously short attention span. “Christianity will go,” he famously opined to the Evening Standard‘s Maureen Cleave. Like Whitaker, Lennon had become fascinated by the role of religion in the modern world. The result was an intellectual growth spurt as all four pursued individual interests and devoured books, plays, paintings, music and everything else available in London’s burgeoning counterculture.
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The early months of 1966 had been booked to accommodate shooting their third feature film, but when a script failed to materialize they found themselves with their first sizable block of free time since achieving worldwide stardom. The Whitaker shoot was the quartet’s first public outing since their final British concert in December 1965. The hypnagogic piece was to be called “A Somnambulant Adventure.”Ĭlearly this was no run-of-the-mill photo session, but the Beatles couldn’t have been better primed. Influenced by a film collaboration between Salvador Dali and Luis Buñuel called Un Chien Andalou, the work of conceptual artist Meret Oppenheim and the doll assemblages in Hans Bellmer’s book Die Puppe, Whitaker also drew upon images that occurred to him in dreams. His piece would take the form of a triptych, retouched and manipulated to resemble a Russian religious icon. But this emotion that fans poured on them made me wonder where Christianity was heading.” “To me they were just stock standard normal people. “All over the world I’d watched people worshiping like gods, four Beatles,” he explained.
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Having personally witnessed the biblical level of Beatle adulation, including their record-breaking concert at Shea Stadium, Whitaker was inspired to create a satirical photo series that would address the absurd degree of their fame and remind fans that these rock deities were actually flesh and blood. “I got fed up with taking squeaky-clean pictures of the Beatles, and I thought I’d revolutionize what pop idols are,” he told author Jon Savage. When the group arrived at his studio in London’s hip Chelsea neighborhood on March 25th, 1966, the well-read Whitaker had a more ambitious concept in mind. Drawn from the Greek myth of Narcissus and a quote from Euripides, the image beautifully captured the Beatles’ idiosyncratic sensibilities. Responsible for some of the most striking images of the group, Whitaker won particular praise for his whimsical 1965 portrait of John Lennon posed with a dandelion over one eye. The image was the brainchild of Robert Whitaker, a 26-year-old Australian photographer whose dark humor and love of the surreal made him one of the band’s favorite cameramen. Was it their comment on the Vietnam War? A protest against their record company? A publicity stunt? A sophomoric prank by bored rock stars? The truth is more complex. Still, the cover remains one of the most misunderstood chapters in the band’s chronicle. The so-called “butcher” cover vaulted an otherwise unremarkable record into rock infamy and spawned what George Harrison once called “the definitive Beatles collectible” worth tens – and sometimes hundreds – of thousands of dollars.
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