The Beatles
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Smith saw clear signs of growing conflict within the group during the Rubber Soul sessions; Smith later said that "the clash between John and Paul was becoming obvious" and "as far as Paul was concerned, George could do no right." In June 1966, Yesterday and Today—one of the compilation albums created by Capitol Records for the US market—caused an uproar with its cover, which portrayed the grinning Beatles dressed in butcher's overalls, accompanied by raw meat and mutilated plastic baby dolls. A popular, though apocryphal, story was that this was meant as a satirical response to the way Capitol had "butchered" their albums. Thousands of copies of the
Controversy, studio years and breakup (1966–1970)
album had a new cover pasted over the original; an unpeeled "first-state" copy fetched $10,500 at a December 2005 auction. During a tour of the Philippines the month after the Yesterday and Today furore, the Beatles unintentionally snubbed the nation's first lady, Imelda Marcos, who had expected the group to attend a breakfast reception at the Presidential Palace. When presented with the invitation, Epstein politely declined on behalf of the group, as it had never been his policy to accept such official invitations. The group soon found that the Marcos regime was unaccustomed to taking "no" for an answer. The resulting riots endangered the group and they escaped the country with difficulty. Almost as soon as they returned home, they faced a fierce backlash from US religious and social conservatives (as well as the Ku Klux Klan) over a comment Lennon had made in a March interview with British reporter Maureen Cleave. Lennon had offered his opinion that Christianity was dying and that the Beatles were "more popular than Jesus now". The comment went virtually unnoticed in England, but when US teenage fan magazine Datebook printed it five months later—on the eve of the group's final US tour—it created a controversy in the American South's "Bible belt". South Africa also banned airplay of Beatles records, a prohibition that would last until 1971. Epstein publicly criticised Datebook, saying they had taken Lennon's words out of context, and at a press conference Lennon pointed out, "If I'd said television was more popular than Jesus, I might have got away with it." Lennon said he had only been referring to how other people saw