How George Martin Changed the World
The most important day of George Martin‘s career — the day he proved himself the only genius who could have produced the Beatles — was February 11th, 1963, when they recorded their debut album, Please Please Me, in one marathon 13-hour session. It was a radical gesture of faith on his part — he let these four nowhere boys from Liverpool sing their own songs, and select their own cover versions. He let them play their own instruments and keep their working-class Northern accents. No other producer in the business would have been insane enough to just put the Beatles in front of their amps and let them play live, straight to two-track. He didn’t even have the common sense to help himself to a slice of their writing credits. But everything Martin went on to achieve with the Beatles — all the moments when he’d bring their craziest ideas to life, inventing tricks other artists would spend careers trying to imitate, earning his name as rock’s most revered producer — stem from this moment.
When George Martin discovered the Beatles, he was the expert, the pro who knew the rules of how the music business worked. But when he heard the Beatles, he had the almost unfathomable wisdom to throw out all that hard-won expertise and let the Beatles make their own music — a decision with repercussions on how the rest of the world has heard music ever since. He was the one who trusted their ideas. (Much as Brian Epstein loved the lads, he would have kept them singing “Besame Mucho.”) Everything the Beatles ever achieved was because George Martin had the visionary belief they could get away with it.
As Ringo described him, George Martin was “pure 12-inch” — a classical LP man rather than some hack grinding out rock & roll singles. The Beatles called him “Mr. Martin” — or more cheekily, “The Duke of Edinburgh,” never suspecting he was a working-class lad from North London who ditched his Cockney accent in the service during World War Two. In the Sixties, while he was helping the Beatles revolutionize the world, he still dressed like a posh schoolmaster and steered clear of drugs. “I’m not a rock & roll person,” he once admitted. “I used to like polo neck sweaters. Still do. And I’m partial to the odd blazer. But there was a conscious effort on my part not to conform, by not joining them. I didn’t grow my hair long until after the Beatles were ended.”
Countless record labels had passed on the band’s demo tape before Martin plucked it out of the pile and heard promise in these Liverpool boys; indeed, the list of record labels who rejected the Beatles seemed to grow every time Brian Epstein told the story. The demo tape was tame stuff — biased toward their corniest material, à la “Besame Mucho,” in accordance with Epstein’s taste. But Martin called them in for an audition session at Parlophone on June 6th, 1962, where the lads did a few stabs at “Besame Mucho” before wisely pushing for “Love Me Do.” When he asked them to tell him if there was anything they didn’t like, George Harrison famously said, “Well, for a start, I don’t like your tie.”
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