Rediscovered Drawings John Lennon Helped Create for the Beatles Became One of Rock ’n’ Roll’s First Music Videos

An English collector who acquired ten of the drawings at an auction loaned them to the Liverpool Beatles Museum for a temporary exhibition

Sonja Anderson | Daily Correspondent

June 8, 2026 3:33 p.m.

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In the mid-1960s, John Lennon and artist Stephen Verona sat at the latter’s dining table in Manhattan, smoking and coloring with felt markers. They were finishing a series of 240 drawings Verona had created at Lennon’s request—each of them representing a lyric from what would become the hit Beatles song “I Feel Fine.”

Verona made the drawings, or cells, into a promotional film set to the tune, which he then thought was called “She Said So.” (Lennon had given Verona the song on an unlabeled acetate disc.) Some have called Verona’s resulting film the first music video—predating the term itself.

Now, ten of those original drawings have been reunited and put on display in England. Collector Joseph O’Donnell recently acquired and loaned them to the Liverpool Beatles Museum. For the next few months, visitors can admire Verona’s visualizations for in love with her and baby says she’s mine.

“I’m a big Beatles fan, and I spotted these at an auction in London, where they weren’t really made a big deal of,” O’Donnell, a marketing manager from Tynemouth, tells PA Media’s Eleanor Barlow. “Each artwork features a different word from the song and I was able to piece them together to make a full sentence.”

Unlike his collected records or autographs, O’Donnell appreciates that the drawings are apt for display. “It’s nice to have something that is artwork, that you can put on the wall,” he tells ITV News.

Stephen Verona's She Said So.mp4

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Verona, born in Springfield, Illinois, in 1940, was working in advertising at the time he met the Beatle. “I met John Lennon in London while directing a commercial,” Verona once recalled in an interview, per a statement from Visit Liverpool. After work, the two men met again at a club. “We started doodling drawings on a table, and I suggested making a film from them. That became the Beatles’ first animated music video—‘I Feel Fine.’”

Verona’s film was screened at international film festivals and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and it won the CINE Golden Eagle, reports Artnet’s Jo Lawson-Tancred. The film was archived at the Library of Congress.

“Basically, ‘I Feel Fine’ was rock ’n’ roll’s first music video,” Roag Best, founder of the Liverpool Beatles Museum, tells Local TV Liverpool’s Emily Bonner. “In today’s times, you don’t get an artist or a group that doesn’t release a video to promote their music.”

After “I Feel Fine,” Verona continued to make “promotional short films” for songs, reported the Hollywood Reporter’s Mike Barnes in 2019. Through the early ’70s, Verona worked at CBS/Columbia Records, creating films for the likes of Barbra Streisand, Chicago and Roberta Flack. He later wrote the movies The Lords of Flatbush (1974) and Pipe Dreams (1976), while sustaining a career as a painter and photographer.

Verona held onto the “I Feel Fine” cells until 2000, when he sold them through auction house Christie’s. They fetched almost $59,000.

O’Donnell plans to resell his “I Feel Fine” cells after their exhibition at the Liverpool Beatles Museum. The museum is home to more than 1,000 Beatles-related objects, like guitars and drums, Paul McCartney’s bass amp and the white cello from Magical Mystery Tour.

“I think interest in the Beatles will never go away,” O’Donnell tells PA Media. “Someone has to be the best, it’s as simple as that. There has to be a greatest band in the world, and it’s the Beatles.”

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Sonja Anderson is a daily correspondent for Smithsonian magazine who covers art, archaeology and culture, from newly discovered artifacts to the latest art heists.