Despite feeling that the Beatles' demo tape had been "pretty lousy" and "very badly balanced" and contained "not very good songs" by "a rather raw group," Martin has recalled, "I wanted something, and I thought they were interesting enough to bring down for a test." You know what happened next: He was won over by their Liverpudlian charm. "I liked them as people apart from anything else, and I was convinced that we had the makings of a hit group," he told British music magazine Melody Maker in 1971. "But I didn't know what to do with them in terms of material."

Because Martin has a somewhat professorial demeanor, the obvious differences between him and the Beatles have always been played up, but in truth they had much more in common than it appeared. "I've been cast in the role of schoolmaster, the toff, the better-educated, and they've been the urchins that I've shaped. It's a load of poppycock, really, because our backgrounds were very similar. Paul and John went to quite good schools. I went to an elementary school, and I got a scholarship for that, and I went to Jesuit college. We didn't pay to go to school, my parents were very poor. Again, I wasn't taught music and they weren't, we taught ourselves," Martin told Billboard magazine. "As for the posh bit, you can't really go through the Royal Navy and get commissioned as an officer and fly in the Fleet Air Arm without getting a little bit posh; you can't be like a rock 'n' roll idiot throwing soup around in the wardroom."

Lennon was particularly impressed that Martin had recorded Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers from BBC Radio's "The Goon Show." "The Beatles instantly developed a rapport with George Martin," Peter Brown, former director of the Beatles' management company, writes in "The Love You Make." Martin told them they needed to lose then-drummer Pete Best, and they did. Though only 14 years older than Ringo Starr, the oldest Beatle, Martin was light-years ahead of them in technical sophistication. "The various magic tricks that Martin could perform in the control room," Brown writes, "made him seem like the Wizard of Oz behind his control panel."

In the beginning, Martin was tough on the group. "As composers, they didn't rate. They hadn't shown me that they could write anything at all," he told Melody Maker. "'Love Me Do' I thought was pretty poor, but it was the best we could do." Martin saw the kernel of something, but even he had no clue just what kind of phenomenon he was about to help unleash. "The question of them being deep minds or great new images didn't occur to me -- or to anybody, or to them, I should think."

When they laid down "Please Please Me" in February 1963, Martin told them they'd recorded their first No. 1. He quickly resolved to make a Beatles album, which he produced in a one-day session. "There can scarcely have been 585 more productive minutes in the history of recorded music," Lewisohn writes. Known as a producer of live stage recordings, Martin tried to capture the manic excitement of a Beatles performance, even briefly considering taping at the Cavern Club. He got what he was looking for, particularly in Lennon's larynx-gnashing finale, "Twist and Shout."

In March, Martin was proved right; "Please Please Me" hit No. 1 on several lists. That year Martin would go on to spend an incredible 37 weeks at No. 1 as producer of the Beatles and other acts, including Gerry and the Pacemakers and Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas. By June, Parlophone was dominating the British pop charts, just 12 months after the Beatles auditioned.

In September, Lennon and McCartney played Martin a song they'd recently written in a hotel room. Martin suggested they bring the catchy chorus -- "She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah" -- up to the front of the song. "In 'She Loves You' George Martin had been able to incorporate in magic proportions all the ingredients of the three previous singles into one ineluctably attractive song," Brown writes. "'She Loves You' didn't climb the charts, it exploded with a fury into the No. 1 position, selling faster and harder than any single ever released." It became the band's first million seller.

For the next few years, Martin and the Beatles worked nonstop, churning out hit after hit. Unhappy with his EMI salary, he formed his own production company called AIR (Associated Independent Recording) in 1964 with producers Ron Richards, John Burgess and Peter Sullivan. Though under contract to make records for EMI, the Beatles continued to be produced by Martin. In the late '60s, he oversaw the design and construction of AIR Studios in London, which became one of the most successful studios in the world.

Martin recently offered this appraisal of his job: "The producer is the person who shapes the sound. If you have a talent to work with -- a singer together with a song -- the producer's job is to say, right, you need to put a frame around this, it needs a rhythm section to do this or that and so on," he told the Irish Times in 1999. "He actually decides what the thing should sound like, and then shapes it in the studio. He may also be an arranger, in which case he may write the necessary parts ... he shapes the whole lot. It's like being the director of a firm."

His input at the time consisted of crafting song structures, organizing beginnings and endings, harmonies and solos. He suggested a string quartet for McCartney's "Yesterday," then a radical idea for a rock group, and contributed the occasional harmonium, organ or piano part, including the Elizabethan-style solo on "In My Life," which was cleverly sped up to achieve a quick, bright precision. He also wrote the orchestral scores for the Beatles movies "A Hard Day's Night" and "Help!" (and, later, "Yellow Submarine" and, with McCartney, "The Family Way" and "Live and Let Die"). His role as Beatles producer, which had long since eclipsed all his other work, was about to gain a new complexity, thanks to new studio technologies (including four-tracking) and the Beatles' desire to quit touring and devote themselves entirely to studio recording.

Recent Stories