“You can’t show that”: The Beatles album cover George Martin insisted on changing
A producer’s job is to make the artist’s dreams a reality. Although they might have their own taste about what they should be doing, it should always come back to whether the people touring the music are satisfied with what they’re working with. And while George Martin was more than capable of turning any Beatles song into solid gold, he had to admit when some pieces of their catalogue could have been scaled back a bit.
Then again, Martin would always come from a different world than the rest of the band. After all, he was the one who properly studied music and mastered most of what he was doing before they had even walked in the door. Still, when paired with their naivety towards music theory, they started working out pieces that no one else would have bothered thinking of during their time together.
No one would have ever thought of using something like backwards music on a record until The Beatles opened that door, and while it sounded absolutely ridiculous at the time, Martin’s arrangements for tunes like ‘A Day in the Life’ and ‘I Am The Walrus’ are the best examples of controlled chaos happening over the course of a rock and roll song.
That’s because the Fab Four were always looking to change with the times. The entire 1960s had given way to artists who wanted to become more surrealist in their art, so why not find some time to make music that leaned into avant-garde techniques as well? And looking at what they had done on an album like Revolver, the group had come out with pieces that most people would have found impossible to replicate.
No one was going to hear a song like ‘Eleanor Rigby’ being played by any other rock and roll band, and along with being a technical marvel, ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ is among the greatest production jobs that Martin ever did, creating the kind of musical cacophony that seems perfectly mapped out from the minute that John Lennon comes in with the strange Leslie effect on his vocals.
Although Martin remained defiantly proud of the album, he was less enthusiastic when looking at the original cover, with artist Klaus Voorman recalling, “Paul looked closer and said, ‘Hey that’s me sitting on a toilet!’ George Martin took a look and said, ‘You can’t show that!’ Paul said, ‘No, it’s great!’ But then he gave it some thought and said, ‘Well, maybe we should take that one off..’ So that broke the ice. Then they started talking about it. Everybody loved it.”
While most people wouldn’t think twice about that kind of imagery today, the final product remains one of the most striking images in the band’s catalogue. Abbey Road has been etched into people’s memories for a reason, but this kind of collage perfectly encapsulates the kind of off-the-wall imagery that was only hinted at on Rubber Soul, only this time with different pieces of their history being scattered across the record.
Even if some of the more sophomoric photos didn’t make the final cut, it was probably for the best that the Fab Four knew when to scale things back. If they didn’t have the good sense to take out certain bits of Revolver, John Lennon would have probably had his wish granted when insisting that Hitler be on the cover of Sgt Peppers one album later.
