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Remembering George Martin (1926-2016)
George Martin, best known as the record producer of The Beatles, had a long and varied musical career and continues to enjoy a rare reputation as one of popular music’s true ‘good guys’.
Martin was born into a working-class family in Drayton Park, England, on January 3, 1926. His training in classical music did not begin until he was 20; The only formal musical education Martin received as a child was eight piano lessons from an aunt. However, he continued to play the piano on his own and in his teens led a small group called The Four Tune-Tellers, as well as being able to play several classical pieces by ear. He had also begun composing his own songs, with the intention of one day writing soundtracks for films.
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At the time, World War II was underway and, at age 17, Martin enlisted in the Fleet Air Arm, serving as an aircraft spotter. While in the service, he found a mentor in Sidney Harrison, who critiqued his early scores and encouraged him to pursue a musical career, and he appeared on a BBC radio programme, playing an original piece. Returning to civilian life in early 1947, Martin found himself at a professional crossroads, without much formal education or training. Sidney Harrison encouraged him to enter London’s Guildhall School of Music, where Harrison taught, and arranged an audition. Martin passed and studied for three years at the Guildhall, paying for his studies with a veterans’ scholarship and studying oboe as a second instrument.
After graduating and working at the BBC Music Library, Martin was offered a job at EMI’s Parlophone record label, as assistant to its director, Oscar Preuss. Preuss hired the label’s artists and produced the majority of its recordings, and it was these jobs that Martin gradually took over as Preuss retired, leaving Martin in charge of the label at age 29, the youngest label manager in England in the pre-rock era. Parlophone was primarily dedicated to classical and regional music, which Martin directed and produced; He later expanded his output with highly successful comedy records (including Peter Ustinov’s ‘Mock Mozart’ and several Goon Show recordings with Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan, who became close friends) and rock and roll when he reached Gran Brittany.
Despite his triumphs, George Martin almost went down in music history as ‘the man who rejected Tommy Steele’, passing up his chance to produce Britain’s first genuine rock star to hire the Steele’s backing group, the Vipers. Fortunately, this mistake was overshadowed by another signing of Martin, a few years later…
Martin and the Beatles’ manager, Brian Epstein. They met when Epstein decided to make acetate test discs of a Beatles audition tape, during his last visit to London to try to get the band a recording contract. Almost every record label in England had rejected the band and, although Martin was not impressed with their demo, he was impressed enough to audition them in the studio. Martin left there satisfied with everything he had heard, except for Pete Best’s drumming, and when he offered the band a singles contract in the fall of 1962, it was with the understanding that Best would not play on the records. This was reason enough for the band to want to replace him entirely. and Ringo Starr took his place, shortly before the Beatles recorded their first single on Parlophone, ‘Love Me Do’.
Martin’s first collaboration with the Beatles was not a huge success, but her second single with him, ‘Please Please Me’, made an immediate impact and catapulted the band to national stardom in Britain. The hits continued and Martin’s name began to appear on the recordings he produced (both for The Beatles and other artists) a few months later, as the role of record producer became more recognized in the industry. It was Martin’s friendship with music publisher Dick James that resulted in the creation of Northern Songs as the Beatles’ publishing company.
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However, Martin never benefited directly from this, even from his early successes: he turned down the opportunity to become a partner at Northern Songs and, as EMI’s staff producer, received no royalties. In fact, EMI’s antiquated pay scale was one of many factors that caused Martin and several other EMI employees to resign in the mid-sixties and establish their own company AIR (Associated Independent Recording). EMI now had to hire Martin again as an independent producer for its artists, and he began receiving producer royalties on behalf of AIR.
The story of George Martin’s relationship with the Beatles has been told again and again, but perhaps the best of all is the one told by the author himself, both in radio and television specials, and in his own book ‘All You Need is Ears’, which reads both as pop history and as a kind of textbook for record producers. He has graciously answered questions about the band (sometimes as the only sober and clean participant in recording sessions) and about his own experiences time and time again, proving to be an ideal and balanced spokesperson. Many of the Beatles’ most elaborate productions, especially in their later ‘studio years’, were shaped by George Martin, who arranged their compositions to create scores and final recordings.
Throughout the Beatles’ career and beyond, Martin continued to record and produce other artists, including Shirley Bassey. Bernardo Cribbins, Flanders and Swann, and later America and Seatrain. He was also able to realize his previous dream of composing film scores, starting with his original orchestral score for The Yellow Submarine (1968), which he also produced for film and record. In the late 1970s, RSO’s Robert Stigwood approached Martin about producing the soundtrack for Sgt. Pepper (1978), a tribute to the Bee Gees’ Beatles; Despite his initial misgivings, he joined the project knowing that no one else had first-hand knowledge of his music… and the payment to come would erase many of the previous financial problems from his days at EMI.
While George Martin oversaw parts of ‘The Beatles Anthology’ in 1994 and 1995, the task of producing the new recordings included on the compilation fell to Jeff Lynne; Martin explained to the press: ‘I don’t produce anymore, because I’m too old.’ Martin recently celebrated his retirement from the music business, with the knighthood and the release of ‘In My Life’, a star-studded tribute album to the band that gave him his biggest hit.
George Martin: More than the fifth Beatle
George, producer of the entire musical career of a club rock n roll band that managed to achieve the status of musical and cultural revolutionaries, died at the age of 90. That band was The Beatles and he was the fifth member of the group.
Before the Beatles, renowned producers such as Phil Spector and Berry Gordy controlled the recording process, to define the methods and even designate the musicians who performed the songs, control that was sometimes extended to the point of writing the songs or claiming Credit to them as producers and creators. The Beatles, with the new stance of the team made up of John Lennon and Paul McCartney, became their own bosses and were one of the first rock groups to compose their own material. Inspired by their natural talent, a world of musical influences and any type of stimulant, these two were seekers of magic that cried out for new sounds. George Martin was up to the task of deciphering and articulating them for the entire world, and the Beatles should be grateful that he did.
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George Martin was too modest to call himself the “fifth Beatle”, however as Paul McCartney said “if anyone earned the title, it was George. He was a true gentleman and like a second father to me.” George Martin was the man who discovered the talent of an unknown Liverpool quartet, who recorded and produced them from the beginning, the one who took their musical ideas out of their heads to translate them onto recorded tape, no less.
Although his bearing and presence were infinitely more elegant than that of The Beatles, the truth is that George also belonged to the working class. Born in north London in 1926, the son of a carpenter, he grew up in a three-bedroom house with no kitchen, bathroom or electricity. From a young age he was recognized as a gifted musician who learned Chopin “by ear”, a musical experimenter who was delighted every time he discovered a new chord. After serving in the army in World War II he attended the Guildhall School of Music in London, where he studied composition and orchestration, with a special interest in oboe and piano playing.
Hired by EMI Division, the then humble Parlophone Records, in 1950, George Martin initially worked on classical recordings with the London Baroque Ensemble. By 1955, he was already the head of this recording division, which is why he had to work with Judy Garland, with jazz stars such as Stan Getz and with Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan of the “Goon Show”, an absurdist comedy act highly appreciated by the members of The Beatles.
In the sixties, already involved with his emblematic band but not yet exclusively, Martin produced hits by Cilla Black, Gerry and the Pacemakers, and Billy J. Kramer and the Dakota and for a period of almost 40 weeks in 1963 , one or another of his recordings topped the British charts. Over time his own talents were duly recognized: nominated for an Academy Award for producing The Beatles’ soundtrack, ‘A Hard Day’s Night’, winning six Grammy Awards, and inducted into the Beatles Hall of Fame. Rock and Roll in 1999. In addition to the Beatles, George Martin worked with Jeff Beck, Elton John, Celine Dion and on several solo albums by Paul McCartney.
From the first album worked with The Beatles in rough in 1962, for which he had only one day of recording, to the months-long production that required ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’, only five years passed. Period in which Martin would preside and help, sometimes in a complete background, the company that explains how The Beatles advanced in quantum steps as composers and sonic explorers.
The star of dozens of more traditional classics ranging from She Loves You to Hey Jude, Martin turned the recording studio into a paradise of reverse tapes, multi-tracks, overdubs, unpredictable tempos, symphonic folds and kaleidoscopic montages. Never again would it be rock music that was defined by two-minute love songs with guitar-bass-drums arrangements.
‘Once we got beyond the bubblegum stage of the first recordings, we wanted to do something more adventurous.’
Imagine what it must have been like to work in the studio with the Beatles, from that moment, the first audition (through their decision to eliminate Pete Best from the main drummer) to experiencing the wild experimentation of the aforementioned “Sgt. Pepper s… , with sound effects, animal noises and full orchestras dressed to the nines at Paul McCartney’s request included.
Martin produced some of the most endearing and recognizable songs in popular culture and albums as influential in modern times as Revolver and Abbey Road, rock LPs that elevated the perception of a collection of loose songs to a form. of art, ‘the conceptual’.
There is a reason this man is called Sir. Several in fact, for which he has earned the honorary title that was complemented by that of Knight of the British Empire awarded by the English monarchy itself. Sir George Martin certainly ranks up there as a kind of demigod in the church of the Beatles. He is the only one (perhaps with Geoff Emerick in some isolated cases) to take responsibility for several brilliant Beatles achievements in the studio. What’s more, the lives of these studio assistants and engineers are the cornerstone of the recording industry during the highly influential 1960s.
The producer was often required to carry out the impossible, and on several occasions he achieved it completely. Historic is the splicing and synchronization of different speeds for Strawberry Fields Forever, or in Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite!, for simulating an organ with keyboards, harmonica and a harmonium that Martin himself played with such intensity that it was fainted on the floor. On the other hand, he also recorded excellent keyboard performances alongside The Beatles for sections that he composed himself, the piano solo in McCartney’s Lovely Rita and a baroque reverie (recorded at half speed) as a bridge that unites the parts of Lennon’s In My Life.
The members of The Beatles did not know how to read music and therefore depended on Martin’s classical training. It could be the case that humming a melody for the producer would translate into a formal score as it did for a trumpet solo that Paul McCartney required on Penny Lane. Also in another by Macca, the ubiquitous Yesterday, it was George Martin who convinced the composer that a quartet of sad but beautiful strings would serve to accentuate the remorse that flooded the song.
Listening to George Martin recount his first-hand experiences helping The Beatles achieve the unimaginable (with some minor exceptions in any case, such as ‘Let It Be’, a recording from which he was subtracted), is the most accurate way. to understand the production process of Liverpool’s Fabulous 4, since from the start their memories are not clouded in a haze of drugs like that of other protagonists of this period, their memory tends to be more reliable – sometimes even more than the Beatles themselves- because Sir George always came to be that, a well-informed, lucid, and authentic man.
It is that a very important aspect as the most important musical group of all time is how they made the music that changed the world, theirs and ours. There are several books (including “All You Need Is Ears”) that can provide us with an inside look at George Martin – rightly called the “other George” – into his creative process, arrangements, performance and even the practical improvisation he facilitated. the path for them (The Beatles) to find their sound.
This is not intended to be an in-depth discussion of how the Beatles relied heavily on Martin, nor on what issues this British producer may have been most instrumental in achieving them. Rather a tribute to the person, the musician and engineer who, by the way, both before and after did many other things in addition to producing The Beatles. Such as having to creatively deal with the surprising changes in recording technology that occurred in a time as short as the course of a decade, the most important of his career. These included specific aspects such as studio acoustics, the ever-changing role of record producers – a role that Martin helped redefine – and methods that tended to orchestrate a record as if it were the soundtrack of a film.
Immediately striking is George’s breadth of judgment and sonic understanding, his appreciation for many types of music beyond his passion for the classical, and his curious approach to everything experimental and avant-garde. In fact, by 1970, Martin was able to predict most of the technological advances that have occurred since then, including the rise of digital recording and even compact discs.
Being a professional in the music industry today and realizing the ant job that George Martin literally had to do half a century ago is fascinating, the technology they were working with marks a milestone as profound as the move from monophonic audio to advent of stereo recording. It is something that we cannot even conceive today, only the producers of Martín’s time, recording – and converting – The Beatles in stereo was something as definitive as what the transition from analog to digital, from multitracks to recording on computer hard drives today.
It is surprising to know that Martin did not make a fortune from Beatles records. Today, producers comparable to his stature such as Glenn Ballard, Rick Rubin, Bob Ezrin and Bob Rock have pocketed tens of millions of dollars. Martin did not earn from the royalties on those records in which he was key, not only in supervision but in the performance, also refusing a participation in the publishing company created exclusively for songs by The Beatles. This probably cost him over a hundred million dollars, proof that a genius producer is possibly the worst businessman in the world we can imagine. Many people made millions with the Beatles and the one closest to them did not. It’s truly amazing.
Paul McCartney, his most outstanding student, said that with his death, “the world has lost a great man who left an indelible mark on its soul and on the history of British music.”