Legendary ‘5th Beatle’ played crucial role in band’s music
George Martin, the wellconnected producer and talent scout who helped bring the Beatles out of obscurity in the early ’60s and was regarded as “the fifth Beatle,” died Wednesday at age 90.
“Thank you for all your love and kindness, George. Peace and love,” Beatles drummer Ringo Starr said on Twitter.
Martin, a classically trained musician and producer who was born in London in 1926, worked on a number of hit records in the 1950s by comics such as Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan and had turned around the fortunes of his employer, Parlophone Records, a subsidiary of the powerhouse label EMI. But he did not have any major successes in pop music and was eager to break the label into the burgeoning rock ’n’ roll market in the early ’60s.
After just about everyone who was anyone in the British music industry took a pass on the Beatles, Martin played a hunch. At the time the Beatles were, in Martin’s words, “the joke of the business.” Martin, on the other hand, was a producer of joke albums, including the Goon Show troupe. The Beatles were Goon Show fans. Martin was charmed by the Beatles’ “wacky sense of humor.” From that tenuous beginning, one of the most successful partnerships of the rock era was forged.
In September 1962, the Beatles rerecorded their song “Love Me Do,” after Martin replaced Starr with session drummer Andy White. Though Starr felt burned, the song cracked the top 20. Martin then coaxed the band into speeding up another one of its originals, “Please Please Me,” and was so pleased with the results that he confidently told his young accomplices, “Gentlemen, you have just made your first No. 1 record.”
Martin would play a crucial role in fleshing out the Beatles’ arrangements and helping them morph from a powerful rock combo into an art-pop band that used the studio as an in- strument. He would often play keyboards and layer orchestral instrumentation around melodies composed by John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison.
It was Martin who suggested that McCartney add strings to augment “Yesterday.” The songwriter was reluctant to indulge in any “Mantovani rubbish,” but Martin’s microphone placements helped bring out the attack and texture in the classical instruments and underlined the song’s air of sadness, verging on despair. He composed the harpsichord part and played piano on “In My Life,” arranged the string section to “Eleanor Rigby” and the walloping orchestral finale of “A Day in the Life,” transposed McCartney’s whistled melody line to a trumpet solo in “Penny Lane” and facilitated the Beatles’ experimentation with backward and vari-speed tape loops and other avant-garde touches in the experimental era that produced the landmark “Revolver” album and the celebrated “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”
Martin’s willingness to adapt and encourage the band made for one of the strongest band-producer partnerships in rock history, despite lingering social differences.
“I knew they smoked marijuana, but they never did it in front of me,” Martin insisted in the 1990s. “The drug thing was blown out of proportion. … The brilliance of ‘Sgt. Pepper’ was because of the Beatles, and it came in spite of the drugs, not because of it.”
But in a Tribune Newspapers interview a few years later, McCartney contradicted that assertion. “Aww, noooo,” McCartney said. “George is sweet, but … it’s not true. … But to give him the benefit of the doubt, (the drug use) wasn’t in his face. He was a grown-up, and you didn’t do that sort of thing in front of the grown-ups.”
Martin was, indeed, a grown-up, a sophisticated musician who at the same time appreciated and enabled his students-turnedmasters in their mission to remake popular music. After the Beatles broke up, he would go on to produce albums by a wide range of artists, including Jeff Beck, Cheap Trick, Dire Straits, America, Ultravox, Aerosmith and the Mahavishnu Orchestra. But his name will always be most closely linked to the Beatles.
“George Martin made us what we were in the studio,” Lennon once said. “He helped us develop a language to talk to other musicians.”
Greg Kot is a Tribune Newspapers critic.