This article was taken from the August 18, 1997 edition of the Republican-American which is based in Waterbury, Connecticut, USA.

The sleeve of Bob Dylan’s 1967 "John Wesley Harding" has an intriguing subtext. It is a very small subtext indeed, so if you want to find it, forget about the CD and get a copy of the LP. Look at the front cover. Grinning Dylan stands in the woods with two native American men and some dour old geezer. Can’t see it, can you? Turn the sleeve upside down and look at the tree trunk behind Bob’s head very, very closely. Perhaps with a microscope, or at least a magnifying glass.

There you will see the heads of The Beatles and The Band hanging from the trees. There’s Ringo’s moustache, look! Robbie Robertson’s face, too! As Dylan wrote in his "Ballad Of A Thin Man": "You know something is happening but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?" You’re darn tootin’ I don’t.

It is hard to judge whether images of these old rockers are, in fact, there or whether you can see them thanks only to the power of suggestion. Even when magnified, the details are so grainy that the marks could equally be gnarls on the trunk. Like Leonardo’s pupils, we are being exhorted, perhaps, to find faces in the clouds and figures in a broken plaster.

Yes. But what would it mean if the Beatles were in the trees? Did Dylan want to hand the Fab Four and his erstwhile colleagues? Or is it a proto-post-moderist critique of the symbol-laden era of album sleeves ushered in by the Beatles’ heavily designed concept sleeves, not least the Sgt. Pepper album?

Do the people who come up with these theories have too much time on their hands or what? The new Oasis album, "Be Here Now", takes us back to the time when people studied album sleeves with magnifying glasses. It’s an enigma wrapped in a riddle wrapped in cellophane and available from a record shop near you on Aug. 21.

The cover shows the scene outside Stocks Hotel at Aldbury, near Tring, southern England. A Rolls-Royce floats in a swimming pool. The scene bespeaks the era of rock ‘n’ roll excess – very Keith Moon and yet also very John Lennon (he owns a car very like that in the ‘60s). Liam Gallagher stands behind a Vespa scooter. Noel Gallagher stands a t the back of the shot, looking through a telescope at an egg-shaped globe in an egg-cup.

Another member of the band looks at a tacky white ‘60s-style TV – uncannily like the one that pumped out baked beans over Oliver Reed in the film of "Tommy." There’s more putative symbolism here than in your average Dali painting. The main difference from such art (apart from its thorough-going lack of profundity) is that it is very ugly – but even that is understandable. After all, what the sleeve is trying to evoke is the clumsy photomontages of yesteryear, to prompt millions of teenage fans to return to their bedrooms musing about the significance of the gramophone in the sleeve’s bottom right corner.

Already the sleeve has prompted more semiotic speculation on the Internet than a Roland Barthes conference. Many see it entirely as a Beatles homage (Oasis’ career could be interpreted wholly as this.) Noel and the telescope? There’s a scene in the "Magical Mystery Tour" film in which Ringo looks through a telescope. The phone box? Clearly a reference to the box the Fab Four pile into to avaoid fans in "A Hard Day’s Night." There’s a station clock in the picture, too, just like the one in "A Hard Day’s Night." (The clock has no hands – which must have something to do with the Gallaghers’ pretensions to timeless appeal.)

Too circumstantial? Try this. The Rolls’ registration plate is SYO 724F, the same as the police van parked on the sleeve of the Beatles’ Abbey Road.