When Curt Yamamoto received his friend's Beatles album, he knew it was a special gift. But until yesterday morning, he didn't know its worth.

The record, "Yesterday and Today," was recalled the day it was released in the United States in 1966 because the cover showed the Fab Four dressed as butchers and surrounded by dismembered plastic dolls. The photo was deemed too graphic for consumers.

A more tame cover, with the Beatles sitting on a crate, was pasted over the dismembered dolls image and then re-released, only to be steamed off — in Yamamoto's case with a teakettle — by collectors.

The album was one piece in Yamamoto's collection that was appraised yesterday as part of a free rock and pop memorabilia valuation at the Experience Music Project (EMP) in Seattle.

Helen Bailey, assistant vice president of popular art at Christie's auction house, estimated the "Beatles butcher cover" would sell for about $1,500.

But just because something is old doesn't make it valuable, said Bailey, whose eye is keen enough to spot a nick or scratch on a poster without a magnifying glass.

She sees Beatles memorabilia regularly — in one form or another. She said about 100 Beatles autographs cross her path daily, sometimes on concert programs, sometimes on tickets, sometimes on purses or bras. Some of them are worth a bit.

One collector yesterday had a handbill with all four signatures from a Beatles concert in Liverpool, England, from a time before Beatlemania took hold in the early 1960s. Bailey told him it was worth between $2,000 and $3,000.

Shoreline resident Susie Shubin, 54, subjected her Bob Dylan poster to Bailey's scrutiny with less luck than Yamamoto. It turned out to be a reprint of a concert poster that happened to be on display upstairs at EMP as part of a visiting Dylan exhibit. An original is worth about $7,000. It was recalled because Dylan didn't like the way it made his nose look.

"I bought it because I like it," said Shubin, who purchased her print for $28 at a Fremont shop. "But at least now I know."

As collectors trickled in and out of the showroom, brandishing "I Love Paul" buttons and reels of soundless KISS concert videos, Bailey explained the emotional roller coaster of appraising people's keepsakes.

"I do get excited at times," she said. "But people do get disappointed when they've been cherishing something for 40 years. A lot of the time, people have a sentimental attachment to things."

Such was the case with 54-year-old Barbara Wechsler of Seattle, who has kept her strip of Woodstock tickets intact and weatherproof since the day rain started falling at the concert.

Bailey appraised the tickets at $1,000.

"A thousand dollars is certainly wonderful, but I certainly wouldn't sell for that. It's too much of my personal history," said Wechsler, who hitchhiked her way to the Woodstock concert, a landmark of the love generation, held in New York during the summer of 1969.

For Bailey, the most valuable items are personal memorabilia, such as the leather necklace John Lennon wore when he posed nude with wife Yoko Ono. Bailey flew to Greece to appraise that — at upwards of $250,000 — and calls it her favorite find.

The priciest item she's ever seen was Eric Clapton's "Blackie" guitar, which sold for just shy of $1 million.

Lara Bain: 206-464-2112 or lbain@seattletimes.com