Something about the Hollywood Bowl album cover & more...

When Capitol was designing the Hollywood Bowl album cover in 1977 they decided to use a pair of concert tickets for the cover. Perhaps not having access to complete original Beatles Hollywood Bowl tickets, or maybe because the original tickets did not have a photo on them, they made up their own imitations using ticket styles from the Shea Stadium concerts as well as 1975 Hollywood Bowl shows by Joan Baez and America. In the process, they incorrectly printed the day as "Sat." (instead of "Sun.") on both tickets.

Shown above are three advance proofs of the tickets. The first two are the ones used for the album cover, but with one final change- Capitol deleted their logo, which was on their earlier designs.
The third ticket makes the story even more interesting, as it shows the correct day of "Sun.". Since the Capitol logo is absent, one can assume that it was made AFTER the other versions - so somewhere along the way the wrong artwork was submitted to the printer. Capitol was immediately informed of the error, as proven by a letter (shown below) sent to them in July of 1977 by a Beatle fan from Holliston, MA., and directed to their art department. They may have ignored the letter, or perhaps considered the matter trivial, as it was never corrected for later vinyl and tape pressings. This is one of the few Beatles albums still not released legitimately on CD. Bootleggers took note of this in the early 1990s and released a high-quality replica (see scan at end of page).

Above up, a close-up of the album cover showing Capitol's tickets. The photo used behind the tickets was an actual shot of The Beatles on stage at the Bowl, but the curved background of the building was blended in using a then-current photograph. The photo is a close-up crop of the original still-unpublished photo of The Beatles that Capitol used, taken from the original negative.

Shown below are original tickets from both Hollywood Bowl concerts - quite different from the ones that Capitol made. Only a handful of Hollywood Bowl complete tickets exist today in collectors' hands. These tickets are near the top of the list in historical significance and value.

Original early design artwork

This superb-quality bootleg CD so perfectly duplicates the artwork and songs from the LP release that many collectors have been fooled into thinking it was an authentic EMI/Parlophone release.

Hollywood Bowl promotional 8-track tape

In 1977 Capitol Records issued this 8-track promotional tape for the Hollywood Bowl album (SMAS-11638). The In-Store Promotion tape featured 5 songs from the album, and is the only promotional 8-track ever issued of Beatles material. No promo cassettes or promo LPs were ever issued of the album.