This is how one of the most famous album covers in music history got made\u2014almost by accident, in about 20 minutes, by a photographer who was totally unprepared.<\/p>
But let\u2019s rewind, because the real story starts with bugs.<\/p>
The Zoo Said Nope<\/h2>
The well-connected producer George Martin <\/strong>was a fellow of the Zoological Society of London, of course. And when it came time to shoot the cover for the Beatles\u2019<\/strong> debut album, Please Please Me<\/em>, Martin had a clever idea: photograph the Beatles at the London Zoo\u2019s insect house. Beatles. Beetles. Get it? <\/strong><\/em><\/p> The zoo said no.<\/p> Martin, undeterred, rang up Angus McBean <\/strong>(no relation to Mr. Bean, the British comedian). McBean was a theatrical photographer whose r\u00e9sum\u00e9 included Audrey Hepburn, Marlene Dietrich, and Laurence Olivier. Martin asked if McBean could swing by EMI House and do something in a stairwell.<\/p> McBean arrived, spotted the stairwell, and flopped onto the floor. He had<\/em> to be on the floor because he\u2019d brought the wrong lens. \u201cI only had my ordinary portrait lens,\u201d he later recalled, \u201cso to get the picture, I had to lie flat on my back in the entrance. I took some shots, and I said, \u2018That\u2019ll do.\u2019\u201d 📸<\/p> McBean wasn\u2019t an obvious choice for a pop album cover. He\u2019d built his reputation shooting the great theatrical stars of mid-century Britain\u2014surrealist-influenced portraits with a dreamlike quality that made him the go-to photographer for anyone who wanted to look simultaneously glamorous and slightly otherworldly.<\/p> The shoot was done in an almighty rush. Martin later described it as being executed with the same breathless energy as the album\u2019s recording sessions (also dashed off in a day)\u2014fast, instinctive, yet somehow exactly right. The outtakes from the photo session proved so useful that they were repurposed across multiple releases, including the Red and Blue compilation albums that became millions of people\u2019s introduction to the Beatles\u2019 catalog.<\/p> In 1963, while McBean had the boys looking down at him, he asked John Lennon how long they thought they\u2019d stay together as a group. Lennon\u2019s answer: \u201cOh, about six years, I suppose\u2014who ever heard of a bald Beatle?\u201d<\/strong> 🤣<\/p> It was, give or take a few months, almost exactly right.<\/p> So in May 1969, the Beatles commissioned McBean to return to EMI House and recreate the shot for the cover of their planned Get Back<\/em> album. Same location. Same photographer. Same stairwell. The intention was to create a deliberate bookend\u2014here\u2019s where we started, here\u2019s where we are now\u2014and to let the visual contrast do the talking.<\/p> The contrast did not disappoint.<\/strong> The four clean-cut mop-tops of 1963 had become four very hairy men in their late twenties, wearing the rumpled, slightly frayed look of a band that had been through just about everything. Where the 1963 photo radiates uncomplicated delight\u2014four young men who can\u2019t quite believe their luck\u2014the 1969 version carries a different weight entirely. They\u2019re still smiling. But they know things now.<\/p> McBean arrived to find that EMI had built a new porch since 1963, which prevented him from getting into the same floor position. Rather than improvise, EMI simply tore down the porch and rebuilt it after the shoot<\/strong>. The session itself produced one more memorable image: John Lennon, fascinated by cameras as always, lying down next to McBean to peer through his viewfinder, while EMI office staff streamed down the stairs around both of them. The snapshot of Lennon and McBean on the floor has never been publicly released.<\/p> The 1969 cover photo was ultimately used not for Get Back<\/em> (which became Let It Be<\/em> and got a different cover entirely) but for the Blue Album<\/em> compilation\u2014placed alongside the 1963 image on the sister <\/strong>Red Album<\/strong><\/em>, so that anyone who bought both could see exactly how much six years had cost and given in equal measure. 🎵<\/p> The McBean stairwell shot launched the Beatles visually, but it was Robert Freeman<\/a><\/strong> who transformed their album covers from pop product into something approaching art.<\/p> Freeman was a Cambridge-educated photojournalist and jazz photographer whose portraits of John Coltrane and Dizzy Gillespie had impressed manager Brian Epstein<\/strong> enough to bring him in for the second album. He arrived in Bournemouth in August 1963, where the band was playing a summer residency, and improvised a studio in a hotel corridor\u2014a dark passageway with natural light flooding in from windows at one end and a deep maroon curtain behind them.<\/p> The result was the With The Beatles<\/em> cover: four faces half-submerged in shadow, unsmiling, staring directly at the camera with the focused intensity of people who knew exactly what they were doing and didn\u2019t need to fake enthusiasm. <\/p> George Harrison<\/strong> later said that the Please Please Me<\/em> cover had been \u201ccrap\u201d and that With The Beatles<\/em> was \u201cthe beginning of us being actively involved in the Beatles\u2019 artwork\u2014the first one where we thought, \u2018Hey, let\u2019s get artistic.\u2019\u201d 🖤<\/p> Harrison was being slightly harsh on McBean, who had done excellent work with limited notice and a lobby floor. But the point stands: Freeman was operating in a different register entirely.<\/strong> He was drawing on the black-and-white Astrid Kirchherr photos<\/a><\/strong> from Hamburg that the band already loved, bringing a jazz musician\u2019s sense of mood and shadow to a pop context that had no idea what to do with either. EMI vetoed his original idea\u2014to run the With The Beatles<\/em> image edge-to-edge on the cover, with no text or logo. Apparently, the Beatles weren\u2019t yet famous enough to carry a nameless cover.<\/p> Freeman went on to shoot five consecutive British album covers\u2014With The Beatles<\/em>, A Hard Day\u2019s Night<\/em>, Beatles For Sale<\/em>, Help!<\/em>, and Rubber Soul<\/em>\u2014and each one tracked the band\u2019s evolution with an almost uncanny precision. The <\/strong>Rubber Soul<\/strong><\/em> cover came about by accident<\/strong>: Freeman was projecting the photographs onto a piece of cardboard to show the band how they\u2019d look, the card fell backwards, and the image stretched. Instead of straightening it, everyone shouted \u201ccan we have that?\u201d<\/em> Freeman said yes. The slightly elongated, vaguely psychedelic faces of Rubber Soul<\/em> arrived at exactly the moment the music started going somewhere new.<\/p> He was paid \u00a375 for With The Beatles<\/em>. Three times the standard fee, Epstein had negotiated. Freeman himself noted this was a remarkable bargain for what became one of the most imitated album covers in rock history. 💷<\/p> The old EMI building was demolished years ago. But the stairwell itself was preserved<\/strong>\u2014physically removed and reinstalled at EMI\u2019s new headquarters \u2014 which is either a touching act of cultural preservation or evidence that large corporations understand the value of mythology better than they\u2019re generally credited for.<\/p> Two photographs. The same stairwell. Six years apart. One taken by a theatrical photographer lying on a lobby floor who spent 20 minutes on the job. The other taken by the same man, six years later, after the whole porch had to be dismantled to recreate his original vantage point.<\/p> Somewhere between those two images is the entire story of the Beatles\u2014the giddy ascent and the complicated arrival at the top, the boys who became men who became legends, the band that Lennon predicted would last about six years, and did.<\/p> Who ever heard of a bald Beatle, indeed. 🎸<\/p> What Happened When the London Bug Zoo Said No<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"amazonpipp_noncename":"","amazon-product-isactive":"","amazon-product-single-asin":"","amazon-product-content-location":"","amazon-product-content-hook-override":"","amazon-product-excerpt-hook-override":"","amazon-product-singular-only":"","amazon-product-amazon-desc":"","amazon-product-show-gallery":"","amazon-product-show-features":"","amazon-product-newwindow":"","amazon-product-show-list-price":"","amazon-product-show-used-price":"","amazon-product-show-saved-amt":"","amazon-product-timestamp":"","amazon-product-new-title":"","amazon-product-use-cartURL":"","amazon_featured_post_meta_key":"","_amazon_featured_alt":"","amazon-product-template":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[33,1],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2x2Mt-cOdb7","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weberbooks.com\/kindle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189283093"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weberbooks.com\/kindle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weberbooks.com\/kindle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weberbooks.com\/kindle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weberbooks.com\/kindle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=189283093"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.weberbooks.com\/kindle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189283093\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":194564203,"href":"https:\/\/www.weberbooks.com\/kindle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189283093\/revisions\/194564203"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weberbooks.com\/kindle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=189283093"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weberbooks.com\/kindle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=189283093"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weberbooks.com\/kindle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=189283093"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com\/public\/images\/43990709-cd92-4cb7-a7c9-0834c0bbc4e4_1391x1034.png?w=640&ssl=1\"){kind=spacer}
<\/figure>The Eye Behind the Lens<\/h2>
Six Years Later: Same Stairwell, Different World<\/h2>
![](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com\/public\/images\/c5f8d6d7-98da-4dc8-9a5b-862cf8339fdc_1179x913.jpeg?w=640&ssl=1\")
<\/figure>Enter Robert Freeman: The Artist<\/h2>
![](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com\/public\/images\/9f5e0a85-a35f-462a-a813-6293d5f9f3b8_1200x800.png?w=640&ssl=1\")
<\/figure>What the Stairwell Knows<\/h2>
Visit my Beatles Store:<\/a><\/strong><\/h2>
![](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com\/public\/images\/02bced6e-aec7-483e-b9f1-457a36950524_1200x300.jpeg?w=640&ssl=1\")
<\/figure>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"