It takes a while but you get there. The first thing is always the music and, depending on how young you are when you hear it, you taste the sugar first, the cream and the crunch, the tunes, the voices, the singability, everything that reaches out from the speakers and leaps around in the air. And at some point, after you've sung along with every chorus, perhaps learned a few guitar licks you learn about what record producers do.
In a case like The Beatles the notion that they weren't completely responsible for every audible idea of their output is difficult, like committing to tearing off the band aid. There's a photo of the band in paisley jackets around the time of Sgt Pepper all with brass instruments as Brian Epstein grins off to one side. I saw that and genuinely believed this meant they'd played all the trumpets and horns and tubas and saxes etc on Penny Lane. I was twelve. It was the seventies.
My brother cleared this up when he told me about session musicians (I pretended I'd known all along) but that still left me wondering about how they knew what to play. Piece by piece I assembled a picture of a whole production crew like on a film set, a cast of instrumentalists gathered in orchestral formation around The Beatles (always imagined in their Sgt Pepper style) but now, standing at the apex of the mountain of responsibility was a tall figure who finally had a name and a face. George Martin, tall, pale and aristocratic, looking like his tone of voice never exceeded the speed limit because it never had to, had transformed from a Windsor-knotted guide to the tightly maintained EMI battle order to the one who listened to their ideas and arranged to realise them. When the faith-creating event that was the speeding, slowing and splicing of two very different recordings of Strawberry Fields Forever is understood we can understand what George Martin brought to the records. The song's author, John Lennon, sent Martin the task with a shoulder punching: "You can do it, George." And so he did.
Martin was the accessory. His string arrangements didn't sound corny (Eleanor Rigby's was inspired by Bernard Hermann's score for Psycho). He turned the thrown-in notion of a musical orgasm into a tense and massive orchestral swell in A Day in the Life. It was he who realised a wish from an appealing accident into the backwards guitars and tapeloops of the mighty Revolver album. If his piano extensions to early Beatles tracks sound a little showbiz to us today it's worth recalling that a lot of the early songwriting was informed by the Broadway standards that taught Lennon and MacCartney volumes about putting songs together and also that they all audibly progressed together. A listen to any Beatles compilation will reveal the growing sophistication resulting from this mutual influence. Too much of the more recent commentary on these recordings has fallen on either side with Martin depicted as a mere facilitator or The Beatles' vague ideas need Martin's scholarship to form them. But hear the simple but effective brass chords in the fade of Hey Jude (strengthening restraint from temptation by Martin) it is audibly collaborative.
Do you like the string arrangement in She's Leaving Home? So do I. It's poignant and dramatic, supporting the aching beauty of the melody, lyric and vocal performance. It's by Mike Leander, not George Martin. MacCartney, too impatient to wait for Martin went to another arranger. Martin's credit, here, is the humility to ensure the arrangement's full delivery to our ears for as much of eternity as we can imagine.
That's important. As George Martin thought as much beyond his time as he did with it. Apartfrom them, he was responsible for some very kitsch moments in albums like the Hollywood Bowl live record and the Anthology sets. The band themselves without each other or their youth were left similarly weakened. But the closer he and the Beatles collaborated the stronger the result now stands as music as such, not sixties music. I love hearing The Electric Prunes or Syd's Pink Floyd but I enjoy them through the filter of their time and then, maybe, after that I might think I like the production sounds or chord progressions. George Martin and the Beatles increasingly kept the music as music of itself before it was of its time. For this I thank and mourn him.
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