The Smiley Smile Message Board

The reasons why I'm posting this here are: 1. It's a fascinating story to reemerge after almost exactly 55 years and reveal more backstory behind that legendary recalled Beatles album and 2. There is a similar story with Capitol having to destroy however many thousands of Beach Boys "Smile" front cover slicks a few years after this "Butcher" episode. The main difference being, of course, there were no discs pressed for Smile and there were no full covers produced...just a run of front-cover slicks that were to be pasted onto the jackets when the package was ready to be manufactured. So it wasn't quite the dog-and-pony show which it seems the process behind Capitol's salvaging the Beatles album became as the links below will show. But the common wisdom regarding those Smile cover slicks is that they too were summarily dumped into a landfill.

I thought some of the details were fascinating, and new to me (especially the memo and the typed recollections of the Capitol exec given the task of destroying these covers), I hope anyone with an interest enjoys reading more about the saga that created probably the most well-known Beatles "Holy Grail" for collectors. And it makes you wonder what went into the Smile cover destruction and if there are or were even more that got sneaked out by a record exec and are sitting in a closet somewhere similar to the exec who took home a sealed case of butcher covers in '66... ;D

It all started with the research of an author and musician from the Boston area named Ryan Walsh (the '66 memo and exec's letter are found on his Twitter), and an article that appeared on the Boston.com website:

https://twitter.com/JahHills/status/1408415609331847174 (https://twitter.com/JahHills/status/1408415609331847174)

https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2021/06/27/beatles-butcher-lp-covers-buried-needham/ (https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2021/06/27/beatles-butcher-lp-covers-buried-needham/)