Last year, we ran a piece on the world of rare records but if a copy of the Beatles infamous "butcher cover" sells for its asking price it might set a new record. To coincide with the worldwide release of the digitally re-mastered back catalog of every Beatles album on 09/09/09 the Saint Giles Street Gallery in Norwich, England in association with the British Beatles Fan Club is showing the "Eleven Million Dollar Picture Show", a collection of rarely photographs and other memorabilia. The show includes an original banned Beatles "butcher cover", a printer's proof from the personal collection of John Lennon. The "butcher cover" will be exhibited with a note signed by John Lennon that says, "here's the famous banned butcher cover. You can sell it for 11 million dollars". And that will be the price. The album will be on show and on sale for $11 million from the September 10 onward. Butcher album covers vary in price generally fetching several thousand dollars.

The cover was the original cover of Yesterday and Today issued only in the United States and Canada. The original cover image, showing the band in white butcher coats holding doll parts and pieces of meat was shot by photographer Robert Whitaker. A few original covers were shipped to disc jockeys and store managers and an outcry immediately arose. The album was hastily recalled and a new cover was slapped on. In the collectibles world there are original untouched covers, covers bearing the second image and covers that have had the second image removed or partially peeled off. The rarer versions are still in the original shrink wrap.


[via Beatles News]

A rare, never-publicly-heard recording of a drunk and high John Lennon improvising naughty song lyrics is on offer for an estimated $30,000 - $40,000 at Bonhams' Entertainment Sale in Los Angeles on Sunday.

The six minute audiocasette, recorded in the fall of 1973, features Lennon's off-the-cuff rendition of the Lloyd Price song "Just Because." The recording took place during what Lennon referred to as his "Lost Weekend" when he and Yoko Ono separated and he took up with mistress May Pang.

The cassette is an outtake from a recording session for the song, which was included on Lennon's 1975 album Rock 'n' Roll. At the time, while working on the album with Phil Spector in Los Angeles, Lennon was heavily into drink and drugs, as reflected in the recording.

Though some of Lennon's lyrics are garbled, he can be heard to sing, in part, "I wanna take all them new singers, Carol and the other one with the nipples, I wanna take 'em and hold 'em tight, all them people that James Taylor had...I wanna suck your nipples, baby... Just a little cocaine will set me right."

Attention Beatles fans, Bloomingdale's has a music package tailor-made for you. The Beatles iPod Set includes a special limited edition 120 G black iPod (it's etched with the Beatles' logo on the front and Abbey Road on the back),13 original Beatles' CDs plus 2 masters and the "Love" cd, plus an engraved guitar pick.

The package isn't Apple's idea but Bloomingdale's, which means the music on all the included cds doesn't come pre-loaded on the iPod and isn't even all available on iTunes. Bizarre.

But even if you have to rip your own mp3s it's still a great package and there are only 2500 available, exclusively at Bloomingdale's, for $795 each.

Via Wired

Just a week ago, we mentioned the opening of the Beatles hotel in Liverpool, for those with more cash and a deeper case of Beatlemania you can own a flat once rented by the Beatles in London for £1.75 million (around $3.415 million). The top floor property on Green Street, Mayfair is notable because it is the only home in which all four Beatles lived together. The four shared the property for a few months in the autumn of 1963. An early publicity photo of the Beatles peering over a banister was taken at the top of the property's communal stairwell. The property is now a two-bedroom apartment that includes a large living area, master bedroom and guest bedroom and it doesn't look anything like it did when the Beatles lived there.

[Thanks, Lana]

Stay in Hard Days Night Hotel in Liverpool and you may just relive a distant memory of a Beatles concert from long ago. With Lennon and McCartney suites available in the birthplace of one of rock 'n' roll's greatest icons, Liverpool is bound to attract even more Beatles fans than ever before. This new attraction is sure to help the town's transformation from commercial marketplace to cultural hot spot. The hotel will feature 110 rooms for $340 per night, with the suites running for $1,300 per night, a Yellow Submarine jukebox, a stylish, basement bar, and modern European restaurant-- and of course tons of Beatles paraphernalia and music to boot. It opened on the first of February and is sure to bring tourists and music lovers from miles around, for years to come.

If you thought the Beatles were so Yesterday, think again. A lock of hair from the late John Lennon sold for an incredible $48,000 at an auction held Wednesday at Gorringes in Worthington. The lock of hair, along with an autographed copy of Lennon's book A Spaniard in the Works, was part of the collection of Betty Glasow, hairdresser to The Beatles during the 1960's filming of A Hard Day's Night and Help.

Also sold at the auction were signed Beatles photographs, including one dedicated to Glasow and signed "George "Dandruff" Harrison" that went for $13,000.

So, what motivated Glasow to part with her treasures after all these years? She says that rather than have these items languishing in a drawer somewhere, she wanted fans to have the opportunity to enjoy them.

John Lennon's glasses, yes the legend himself, are up for auction on the British site 991.com. The Beatle's gold wire rimmed sunglasses are currently owned by a Japanese TV producer named Junishi Yore who got them back in 1966 when he worked as a translator for the Beatles, and they'll come with a handwritten note from Yore explaining how he came to get them from Lennon. Estimates are predicting the auction will end somewhere around $1.5 million or higher, although it's a private auction so we'll have to wait and see when the bidding ends on July 31st.

Handwritten by George Harrison in "barely legible penmanship," a sheet of paper bearing the original lyrics to the Beatles song While My Guitar Gently Weeps will by auctioned off on Monday at the Barrett-Jackson & Cooper Auctions Rock 'n' Roll auction in Scottsdale. According to the auction houses, "it shows the work in progress" because it includes some lyrics that didn't make it into the final song, and is a "really significant and rare piece of memorabilia" that just about any Beatles fan would want to have. It is also one of the most highly valued items in the auction, with an estimated price of $500,000 to $800,000. Some of the lyrics to Hey Jude are on the back of the paper.

Other lots include memorabilia from the Doors, Elvis, Ella Fitzgerald, Jimi Hendrix and Britney Spears, as well as more Beatles items, such as an original John Lennon drawing ($40-50K).

An angry letter written by John Lennon sold for more than $22,000 at a Bonham's auction yesterday. The note was dashed off on a piece of American Airlines notepaper, clearly in a hurry. It was written to a journalist who accused him and the Beatles of ripping off "black" songs, but John defended the band by saying that they "drank, ate and slept the music" and "it wasn't a rip off. It was a love in."  The band started off covering hit songs in dance halls, like "Money" and "Twist n' Shout," before their own songs were "good enough." Included with the letter was a photocopy of the article that prompted it and a copy of the replying letter from the same journalist.

Though some other Lennon pieces have done very well at auction this year, a black felt hat worn by Lennon in the last official Beatles photo shoot failed to sell, despite projections that it could fetch as much as $37,000.

[Image Bonhams]

One of John Lennon's schoolbooks was sold for $226,150 in a London auction of rock memorabilia. The auction house, Cooper Owen, had set a reserve price of more than $175,000 for the book, which was a copybook titled "My Anthology" and contained 10 pages of full color drawings done by the 12-year old Lennon to illustrate the lyrics of poems that were part of his literature curriculum, including The Walrus and the Carpenter and Agincourt.

If only I had known that used schoolbooks could go for so much, I wouldn't have spent so much time trying to unload my old textbooks at the end of every semester at university. Needless to say, the illustration quality in a calculus textbook would have to be fairly high to compete with Lennon's sketches, even as a child.

Michael Jackson, struggling to pay off the approximately $300 million that he owes to the New York hedge fund, Fortress Investment Group, has announced that he has reached a deal with the group. Though the exact details were not released, a part of the deal has Jackson selling half of his shares in the Sony/ATV music library - 25% of the total collection - to Sony. After the sale, Sony will own 75% of the library. Jackson's portion, which he purchased in 1985, is currently valued at half a billion dollars and includes the rights to 251 Beatles songs as well as music by Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and Stevie Nicks.