THEORIES, RANTS, ETC.

Editor-in-Chief & Associate Publisher Phil Alexander Deputy Editor Andrew Male Senior Editor Danny Eccleston Art Editor Mark Wagstaff Reviews Editor Jenny Bulley Associate Editor (Production) Geoff Brown Deputy Art Editor Russell Moorcroft Associate Editor (News) Ian Harrison Picture Editor Matt Turner Picture Researcher Ian Whent Contributing Editors Sylvie Simmons, Keith Cameron For mojo4music.com contact Danny Eccleston Liked your writings on Dylan’s 1966 double album in MOJO 272. Have you noticed the similarities its cover has with The Beatles’ Rubber Soul? Dylan wearing a jacket like Lennon’s, a distorted front cover picture and an arrangement of black-and-white photos in the fold-out as on the back of Rubber Soul. Then, of course, the next Dylan album, John Wesley Harding, has a sort of anti-Sgt. Pepper cover, a B&W picture with unknown people. But when the music he made in 1967 (Dylan thought Pepper was overproduced and over-arranged) was released as The Basement Tapes in 1975, it was all colour, fold-out and lots of people, many of them well known. Interesting. Bengt Lindstrom, via e-mail On the surface, your reader James Cavanagh (Theories, Rants, Etc, MOJO 272) has a point. However, what is often missed on the importance to The Beatles of George Martin is… the importance to George Martin of The Beatles. The Beatles arrived at Polydor, EMI’s joke label, as a group that excited everyone who saw them, myself included, at many, many Cavern sessions. After long stints in Hamburg, they were polished, professional and rehearsed enough to effortlessly reproduce, in the minimum of takes, their first two, self-composed singles, the second of which went to Number 1. OK, George Martin suggested they speed up Please Please Me! Prior to The Beatles, George Martin produced The Goons, Peter Sellers and other comedians. So let’s not get too carried away. Just as George Martin had never produced pop records, Brian Epstein had never managed a pop group and in fact his inexperience cost them millions in the long run. But – and it’s a big but – The Beatles only talk good about both of these guys and these two guys certainly played a massive part in the biggest music phenomenon ever. Without George and Brian, wouldn’t anyone else have spotted The Beatles? We can only ponder. I don’t think so… Dennis Conroy, via e-mail Roy Wilkinson’s Associates feature (MOJO 272) was a complete and moving entertainment, from the opening detail of the dead telephone box in Auchterhouse – where Billy made all those forgotten calls – to the final visit to Billy’s grave. I relistened to Sulk and Fourth Drawer Down with rekindled admiration for the greatness of Billy and Alan – if only more groups had their manic freespiritedness – and to the sporadically wonderful solo recordings Billy made without him. It was also a reminder of why the concise, filtered and lovingly designed magazine feature is preferable to the kind of overlong pieces you get online – can you now do something similar about ABC? Mike Collins, via e-mail It was good to see coverage given to Bob Dylan’s Tarantula in MOJO as it has been a lifelong obsession for me, having penned articles and selfpublished booklets (culminating in A Crash Course On Reading Tarantula). Tarantula is invariably described as “stream-of-consciousness”. Whatever Tarantula is or is not, the language is too paced and precise for that. It has “measures & heartbeats”. It remains his most protracted creation. In fact, Dylan was carrying both the Blonde