‘Fifth Beatle,’ producer George Martin, dies at 90
George Martin, the Beatles’ urbane producer who quietly guided the band’s swift, historic transformation from rowdy club act to musical and cultural revolutionaries, has died, his management said Wednesday. He was 90.
Manager Adam Sharp said in a statement that Martin “passed away peacefully at home” on Tuesday evening.
Martin was too modest to call himself the “fifth Beatle,” but Paul McCartney said Wednesday that “if anyone earned the title … it was George.”
“He was a true gentleman and like a second father to me,” McCartney said.
Martin produced some of the most beloved songs and most popular and influential albums of modern times — “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” “Revolver,” “Rubber Soul,” “Abbey Road” — elevating rock LPs from ways to cash in on hit singles to art forms, “concepts.”
From a raw first album in 1962 that took a day to make, to the months-long production of “Sgt. Pepper” just five years later, Martin would preside, assist and sometimes stand aside as the Beatles advanced by quantum steps as songwriters and sonic explorers.
They composed dozens of classics, from “She Loves You” to “Hey Jude,” and turned the studio into a wonderland of backward tape loops, multi-tracking, unpredictable tempos, unfathomable segues and kaleidoscopic montages. Never again would rock music be defined by two-minute love songs or guitar-bass-drums arrangements.
“Once we got beyond the bubblegum stage, the early recordings, and they wanted to do something more adventurous, they were saying, ‘What can you give us?’” Martin told The Associated Press in 2002. “And I said, ‘I can give you anything you like.’”
His own talents were duly recognized. He was nominated for an Academy Award for producing the soundtrack to the Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night.”
He won six Grammys and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1999. Three years earlier, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II.
Besides the Beatles, Martin worked with Jeff Beck, Elton John, Celine Dion and on several solo albums by Paul McCartney.
In the 1960s, Martin produced hits by Cilla Black, Gerry and the Pacemakers and Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas and for a 37-week stretch in 1963 one or another of his recordings topped the British charts.