Beatles Revolver First Pressing Value

[David]

TheBeatles sit among the ranks of icons like Mother Mary and iPhones for how universally well-known they are. Fly to the far corners of the globe and chances are high that if you hold up a jaunty four-framed photo of Paul, John, George, and Ringo, someone will recognize them. It goes without saying how significant The Beatles were for the music industry, but what isn't said nearly enough is how important they can be for your wallet. The Beatles merchandise is some of the only pop culture collectibles that don't suffer from low-values because of the sheer amount of it that was sold. After all, 'tis the season for making a good decision while vinyl's still hot; hunt down some of the most valuable Beatles albums and records to sell for college tuition level amounts of money.

They say that everything sounds better on vinyl, and while playing your favorite double-sided LP over and over again may be great for your ears, it's terrible for your wallet. Some well-preserved albums from top talent can sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars to interested collectors and fans around the world. And, of course, The Beatles vinyl collection that stretches the 1960s and beyond tops the list of valuable albums you can sell. From little known compilation records to number one albums, all of these Beatles albums and records are worth looking for at the record store and in your grandparent's dusty collection.

Beatles for Sale was released in 1964 as the band's 4th studio album, but some pressings made in 1965 have a few spelling errors that make it more desirable. For example, the track "I'm a Loser" is listed as "I'm a Losser" and the song "Eight Days a Week" is mislabeled as "Northern Ssongs." According to Goldmine, a music collectors' magazine, the album averages about $300 in revenue.

Another valuable misprint is the 1965 Rubber Soul vinyl from Parlophone. Some unfortunate employee at Parlophone's distribution office misspelled the famous song "Norwegian Wood" as "Norweigian Wood", unintentionally leaving a valuable legacy behind. People sell this album on average for about $600, according to Goldmine.

Golden Discs was supposed to be a compilation EP that included all of the band's singles that had gone gold by 1964. While the EP never came to fruition, four test pressings were made, making these super limited edition albums worth about $2,550 each, according to Goldmine.

While streaming lets you have an artist's new song the instant it's released, back in the day, record labels had to physically make all of the albums they planned to sell. For really popular artists, this meant that sometimes one company couldn't make enough vinyls to match demand, as no one was in more demand than The Beatles. Their second to last studio album, Abbey Road, was contracted out to Decca processing plants, and these export vinyls have a circular impression 15mm from the vinyl's outer edge, and they don't have a G or D printed near the matrix number. Albums with these features can sell for around $1,700, according to Goldmine.

Besides the twelve studio albums we all know and love, Apple (The Beatles label - not to be confused with the iPhone giant) would send promotional kits to famous journalists, and one of these compilations - consisting of the band's first four singles released on their label - can sell for a little over $4,000 thanks to their limited numbers and still in-box condition.

The very first songs that started it all, the demo of what would become a major hit single "Love Me Do" (with "P.S. I Love You" on the B side) was sent to journalists and radio stations around Europe and the US to try to drum up interest in the newly minted band, The Beatles. Only 250 of these promo copies were sent out in 1962, and this limited run coupled with a misprinting of the "Lennon-McCartney" duo to "Lennon and McArtney" have been known to sell as high as $7,000, according to Goldmine.

Brian Epstein, the band's famed manager, owned a rare early 10" acetate record of various Beatles recordings. Epstein's handwriting can be found on the label, where he misspells the title "Hullo Little Girl" and credits the album to "Paul McCartney & the Beatles." It sold for a whopping $107,600 in 2016, and while you won't find another like it, any albums with connections to Epstein will fetch a ton of money from die-hard fans.

An American studio album released in 1966, Yesterday and Today, was less known for the mishmash of various songs from their British label's albums Help!, Rubber Soul, and Revolver, than it was for its controversial cover art. Publically known as the 'Butcher' cover, you won't find the Fab Four sitting down for meat and potatoes in this photograph, but meat and babies instead. The band wears white lab coats, and members are draped in plastic doll parts and slabs of meat. Let's just say the 1960s lived up to its reputation as being one 'high' decade. One sealed stereo copy of this infamous album (that was quickly pulled from shelves) sold for $125,000 in 2016. Even used copies of this album are still super valuable to hardcore collectors because of the sensation that surrounded them.

Before there was The Beatles, there was the Quarrymen, consisting of a different line-up sans the lovable drummer with a fabulous name. Recorded in 1958, this was the band's first commercially created record, but it's never actually been heard by the public at large. If you want a taste of these early Quarryman days, you'd have to go to Paul McCartney's personal stash of memorabilia. Yet, experts estimate the original copy is worth about $170,000.

The first few pressings of any hit album are bound to be worth a lot to collectors, and none more so than ones owned by the band members themselves. Such is the case for The Beatles' 1968 self-titled album that you probably know as The White Album. The four band members were each given one of the first four pressings of the album, and Ringo Starr's copy recently came to auction and dispelled rumors that John Lennon was given the very first copy; instead, it sold for an astronomical and record-breaking $790,000.

With a legendary success like the Beatles, you're dealing with severe levels of scrutiny when it comes to slapping a price tag on any of their products. While two LPs might look exactly the same to your eye, they can have wildly different values because of a few specific characteristics:

You might not've been able to buy The Beatles' love, but you sure can buy your own with the loads of cash that you make off of any of the most valuable Beatles albums. While finding the right buyer and hitting the market at the right time does have a huge impact on the final number, this is one band that's so popular, it'll never be hard for you to find someone willing to take an original copy of their work off of your hands.

The original Yesterday and Today album cover, released in June 1966 only in the United States, was printed with a cover depicting the Beatles dressed in butcher smocks, surrounded by pieces of raw meat and plastic doll parts. Due to the negative reception Capitol Records received from reviewers who received advance copies of the record, the original album cover art was quickly replaced by one with a more modest design.

The value of the copies of Yesterday and Today with a Butcher cover lies with the cover itself; the records within them are relatively common. For those interested in owning a Butcher cover, there is both good news and bad news.

In Britain, albums usually contained fourteen songs, and ordinarily did not contain songs that had been previously released as singles. The reasoning for this was the perception among record companies that the public might not be interested in buying expensive albums that contained songs that they had previously purchased as singles.

In Britain, the Beatles and their record company, Parlophone, carefully planned out their releases, choosing songs that were intended to be released as singles while assigning others to albums. In the United States, Capitol Records, encouraged by the tidal wave of Beatlemania, was interested in releasing as many Beatles albums as possible, with twelve tracks, of course, rather than the fourteen used in Britain.

The front cover slicks for the cover were printed on a special paper with a slightly rough texture, and the photo used was given a slightly grainy appearance in order to make the finished cover look somewhat as though it had been painted on canvas.

At the time of the release of Yesterday and Today, record companies in America were still pressing records in both stereo and mono, as stereo records were playable only on stereo equipment and most buyers only had mono record players. Because of this, approximately 80%-90% of the finished covers were in mono, with the remainder in stereo.

Several hundred copies of the finished Yesterday and Today album were shipped to radio stations and reviewers in order to help the album receive press attention prior to release. Most of the remaining copies were shipped to distributors around the country.

Distributors and reviewers were asked to return all copies of the album to Capitol Records, as described in an article in a contemporaneous article in Billboard magazine about the struggles of distributors to return the albums with the Butcher cover to the record company.

Capitol quickly came up with a replacement cover design; this one was much more innocuous and depicted the band surrounding a steamer trunk. This image may have been considered for use as the original cover of the album, and several different prototype cover slicks exist with slight variations on this image.

At the Jacksonville, Illinois, plant, all of the returned copies had the records removed and the covers were reportedly taken to a landfill, where they were dumped into a hole that was then filled with water.

This process proved to be less expensive than reprinting the covers completely, but was also more time consuming. Not only was the process of precisely aligning a new slick over the old one a difficult task, but the finished covers also had to be trimmed at the mouth (the right edge) to account for any misalignment at the opening of the cover.

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