The producer helped shape four young rock 'n' rollers into a revolution.
On a hot August afternoon in 1966, I was driving down a residential street in my hometown of Niskayuna, New York.
I was driving a demure little Ford Falcon that belonged to the mother of one of my high school friends. I had borrowed the car to run an errand and I was late getting it back, so I was, to the extent possible in a Falcon, speeding.
With no announcement, a song I had never heard before came on over the crummy AM radio:
鈥淎h,鈥� it began out of nowhere, 鈥渓ook at all the lonely people鈥︹��
I instantly recognized that it was the Beatles, of course. Late as I was, I had to pull over and listen all the way through. Funny how, half a century later, the memory is so vivid.
Weirdly, as striking and original as the song was in its entirety, the thing that impressed me most was the very last note, played by the string octet that accompanies the tune.
That last note was neither a conventional staccato 鈥渂utton,鈥� nor a classic, sustained final chord, either of which would have been standard practice. Instead, it was an ambiguous in-between note. It sounded, and still sounds to me today, like a note interrupted somehow, like the interrupted life of the lonely woman of the title, to whose funeral nobody came.
Martin was, from the beginning, an essential and indispensable component of the Beatle magic.
I鈥檓 thinking these thoughts because the man who wrote that string octet part, including its tantalizing last note, has died at age 90.
George Martin is a name that all of us who lived through the rise of the Beatles came to know only gradually. At that time, the notion of a record 鈥減roducer鈥� didn鈥檛 mean much to most listeners. The guy who fiddled with the control room levers and dials, perhaps. Or possibly the person who hired the sidemen and the professional arrangers.
Little by little, as the Beatles knocked down one stylistic door after another, and began to be spoken of seriously by critics and musicologists, Martin increasingly became part of the conversation.
We eventually came to understand that this man -- a jacket-and-tie wearing, classically trained oboist and pianist, who had been best known in his industry for having put out some cultish British comedy albums -- was, from the beginning, an essential and indispensable component of the Beatle magic.
Over the years, there has been a lot of speculation about what would have happened had the Beatles -- in 1962, still complete unknowns and already rejected by dozens of labels -- not washed up on the doorstep of Parlophone Records, and into the hands of a junior producer whose initial response was, at best, skeptical.
Would we have ever heard the mind-blowing backwards tape loop at the end of 鈥淩ain鈥�? Or the crisply speeded-up Baroque piano solo on 鈥淚n My Life鈥�? Or the jaunty piccolo trumpet on 鈥淧enny Lane,鈥� or the electronic chorus on 鈥淭omorrow Never Knows,鈥� or the subtly jazzy sax ensemble on 鈥淟ady Madonna鈥� or the brilliantly stitched-together alternate takes to form 鈥淪trawberry Fields Forever,鈥� or the deliciously Ives-like random steam organ snippets on 鈥淢r. Kite,鈥� or the apocalyptic, mellotron-infused soundworld of 鈥淚 am the Walrus鈥�?
If you鈥檙e tempted to say yes, pause and listen to Phil Spector鈥檚 gloppy, ruinous orchestrations on the 鈥淟et it Be鈥� album. Now think about a similarly conventional hand presiding over 鈥淩evolver,鈥� or 鈥淩ubber Soul,鈥� or 鈥淎bbey Road.鈥�
As Mark Lewisohn鈥檚 book (the first of a projected trilogy) makes clear, pretty much everything about the Beatles鈥� journey, and especially the early part of it, was serendipitous.
But nothing more so than their great good fortune in being paired with a modest, visionary man, almost old enough to be their father, who took the hummed and strummed musical ideas of four untrained young rock 鈥榥鈥� rollers and quietly shaped them -- sometimes with tape loops and sequencers and sometimes with manuscript paper and a pencil -- into a revolution.
Reach Steve Metcalf at spmetcalf55@gmail.com.
