#4 George Martin – The Fifth Beatle and the Beatles’ Creative Translator

Steve Jobs once said the Beatles proved that great things are built by teams. But in the studio, there was a fifth partner shaping the music. His name was George Martin.

In this episode of Confidants, we explore how the classically trained producer became the Beatles’ creative translator and closest collaborator, helping to turn raw ideas from Lennon and McCartney into some of the most influential recordings ever made.

You’ll hear how Martin discovered the band, guided their early hits, and then helped them reinvent what pop music could be. From orchestral arrangements on Yesterday and Eleanor Rigby to the groundbreaking studio experiments behind Revolver and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Martin helped transform the recording studio into an instrument.

This episode is a story about creativity, experimentation, and the unseen partner who helped the Beatles change music forever.

George Martin’s memoir All You Need Is Ears, Philip Norman’s Shout, and Kenneth Womack’s Sound Pictures served as the jumping-off points for today’s episode.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Steve Jobs notoriously loved the Beatles and used them as his metaphor for business. In an interview, he once said, The Beatles were four very talented guys who kept each other's kind of negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other, and the total was greater than the sum of the parts. And that's how I see business. Great things in business are never done by one person, they're done by a team of people. Now Jobs was right about the balance and culture of the Beatles, but he miscounted the inputs that made them great, because in the studio there was a fifth Beatle, and his name was George Martin. He gave the band their first recording contract, but more importantly, he was their closest creative collaborator in all seasons of their career. Martin wasn't a typical rock and roll producer. He was classically trained, always in a suit and tie, and far removed from the band's countercultural image. When Lennon McCarty brought half-form ideas into Abbey Road, Martin helped turn them into finished records. He translated their instincts into arrangements and ambitions into sound paintings. Under his guidance, the Beatles didn't just play their instruments, they expanded beyond them. The studio became part of their identity, and their music grew richer, more layered, and more experimental than anyone expected. Today's episode draws from George Martin's memoir, All You Need Is Ears, Philip Norman's Shout, and Kenneth Womack's Sound Pictures. I'll link all three in the show notes. This is episode four of Confidance. Kenneth Wellmack took the title of his book from Martin's philosophy around songwriting and painting. Martin referred to his songs as sound pictures and described his process in his memoir, saying, Not only are we painting sound pictures, but our palette is infinite. We can, if we wish, use any sound in the universe from the sound of a whale mating to that of a Tibetan wood instrument, from the legitimate orchestra to synthesize sounds. That may be why, of all painters, my favorites are the Impressionists. Renoir, Deda, Cézanne, Monet, Van Gogh, Cili. It's really no coincidence that they seem to match so well almost as visual counterparts, the music of my favorite composers, Debusie and Ravel. Far from sampling the ocean or Tibetan instruments, Martin's own musical palette had humble beginnings on the piano bench at age six. He remembers as a child being instantly interested in the piano and would perform for his family at parties and gatherings. Piano would also serve as a critical lifeline to getting on the same page with the less technically inclined Beatles so they could both speak the same language musically. It all went back to the piano. By high school, he realized he had a real gift for music. He had perfect pitch and could play instruments by ear, and thought with a little training he could be the next Rachmannoff or at least write music for movies. His parents, however, pushed him to have more of a realistic pursuit like architecture or something mathematics related. They were a working class London family who wanted stability for their son and not the life of an artist. However, during this time, Britain was also gearing up for World War II, and Martin would join the Royal Navy as a radio airman. It wasn't exactly music, but working with radios and telegraphy kept his ears sharp and well versed in the physics of sound. He'd also play in military bands and still write music on the side. After the war, he had few job prospects lined up and decided to enroll in Guildhall School of Music to receive formal training and take that shot at being the next Rachmanioff. Here he learned the concepts and theories that would put him ahead of other future rock and roll producers. He'd studied composition, orchestral arrangements, and conducting. He learned to read and write music fluently and understand harmony, counterpoint, and the mathematics of sound. This training led to observations that he would carry with him about the limitations of classical music and why he decided to join pop music after his training. And in his memoirs, he wrote, To be fair, most composers writing contemporary classical music are in a clef stick. They can't use the styles which have already been evolved because then they're accused of being romantic or sensuous or derivative. So the only way to go is to write new sounds. And remember, even the 12-tone scale is old-fashioned now and almost regarded as romantic itself. The result is that the modern classical composer either writes stuff that most audience can't stand or reverts to writing symphonies that could have been written by Browns. And what's the point in that? So classical music becomes a one-way street, and that's where pop music has come into its own because it can be truly creative. It was that insight into the creativity of pop music that would lead him to find a job with EMI at the famous Abbey Roads Studios after his training at Guild Hall. EMI Studios, later renamed Abbey Roads Studios, would become George's home base during his years with the Beatles. EMI was a well-respected recording company with several labels under its umbrella. Parlophone Records, where George was hired, was its weakest, and had been forced to give their hitmakers to the more popular Columbia label. So George and his boss, Oscar Preyus, had a challenge. Rebuild the roster and revive Parlophone. George was a quick learner. He'd take the technical training he received at Guild Hall and combined him with the hands-on experience in the studio to learn how to shape recordings and get the best out of artists. Oscar became his mentor, and at first there was a lot of hand holding, but slowly but surely Oscar started calling in sick to recording sessions, leaving George as the point man to run them. However, there would be a point where George would make a mistake. During a jazz session, George wasn't getting quite the sound he wanted and isolated it to the bass player. He approached the bass player and told him that it sounded like he was playing with boxing gloves and that he needed to play the notes clearer. The bass player wasn't used to being talked to like this, especially from an assistant like George, and stormed out of the session. Not knowing what to do, George went to Oscar for help. And this time it was Oscar who yelled at a George and told him to get his bass player back in the studio. And if you lose Humph, that's the bass player, you've lost your job. So George went outside and found Humph wandering up and down Abbey Road and begged him to get back in the studio. And eventually George was able to convince Humph to come back and play with him. It was Martin's first lesson in understanding that the role of the producer is not only an artistic role, but also a leadership one. And he reflected on that lesson saying, musically, I was right. Diplomatically, I was wrong. Tax is tack is the siqua known of being a record producer. One has to try to fine line between, on the one hand, submitting to an artist every whim, and on the other, throwing one's own weight about. I had to learn how to get my own way without letting the performer realize what was happening. One had to lead rather than drive. I think that now and then that is probably the most important quality needed in a record producer. He also, during this apprenticeship, received experience with the business side of the music business. DJs during this era were very important ways for people to find music. And if they played your records, sales were sure to follow. Oscar sent Martin to knock on doors and slip records to DJs, and Martin soon found out that this was more of a pay-to-play scheme with DJs getting bribes from record companies to play their artists. And these sort of schemes didn't really match George's temperament and manners. And he was much more comfortable in the studio working with artists and shaping the music. And finally, he learned how to scout and sign talent. This was a skill a class at Guild Hall couldn't teach him. And he had to learn it by having to sit through auditions and late night coffee house performances to find diamonds in the rough. Martin also shared it at this point. He learned that you remember the ones you missed. Tommy Seal was an up-and-coming artist in the UK's answer to Elvis. And Martin saw him one night at a coffee shop and didn't think that he had the spark from a performance to be a number one album and decided to pass on Seal. And the very next day, he would sign with Parlophone's rival Decca, and Deka would turn Tommy Seal into a star. And I will say though, the world does have a way of balance, and Martin would have the last laugh because a few years later, Decca would pass on a scrappy young band from Liverpool, and George wouldn't miss that shot. In spite of these growing pains and hard-learned lessons, George was making a name for himself at EMI. Oscar had faded into the background, and George was running the day-to-day of the label. And in 1955, Oscar retired, handing the keys to George. He was 29 years old and was now running a significant record label. His first major mark was Parlophone's expansion into comedy records. Comedy was a unique market because it was seen more as this novelty thing rather than this artistic endeavor that music was. But George saw potential in the market and doubled down in comedy, making it his thing at EMI. He'd find success recording comedians such as Peter Sellers, but more than anything, comedy albums gave him maximum freedom to experiment inside the studio. And now this might be a good time to explain the ways in which Martin could manipulate recordings in the studio. Before digital recording, everything lived on tapes. If you wanted to change a sound, you couldn't just swap around files or drag and drop. You had to physically manipulate the tape. You could slow the machine down to lower the pitch and stretch out the tempo, doing the opposite by speeding it up, raise the pitch, and brighten the sound. To insert sounds and other elements into the tape, you had to physically use a razor blade to splice what you wanted into the tape. And then you could even thread the tape backwards so a completely new sound was created when you played it in reverse. These were just some of the tools that Martin had at his disposal. And he'd eventually use all these techniques with the Beatles. But his earliest experiments in comedy were around splicing homemade sound effects into comedy albums. When a comedian needed a door slam or anything you could really think of that would make a punchline or a joke hit harder, there were no digital libraries for that Martin could pull from. And he had to create the effects himself, record it, and then physically splice it into the tape for his comedians. Not only did working with comedians allow him to sharpen these technical skills, but it also trained him to handle the big personalities and do improv in the studio. And there were some unpredictable sessions that happened with his comedians. And these would prove invaluable experiences for Martin when he would work with the Beatles, who were famous for their own sharp wits and big personalities. His comedy records put Martin on the map at EMI, but Martin always wanted more. And he wanted to prove to the company that he wasn't just the comedy guy, but could also find pop artists to record. His day with Destiny would come in April of 1962 when he received a call from an industry friend, Sid Coleman, who talked to a chap representing a group without a recording contract and asked if George would listen to them. Martin told him, Certainly, I'm willing to listen to anything. Ask him to come and see me. Those words sealed Martin's fate because the chap who Sid was talking to was Brian Epstein and the band he represented was none other than the Beatles. The history of the Beatles come up could be its own podcast, so I just want to focus on George Martin's involvement with the band. But up until this point, the Beatles had been turned down by other EMI producers. And after two recording tests had been told no by DECA, so Parlophone was their last shot at a recording contract. The day after the call, Brian Epstein, who was the Beatles manager and another close confidant into the band, who I'm probably going to do an episode on, met with Martin to discuss his band. He played a demo for Martin. And it wasn't quite loved at first listen. Martin thought it was an interesting sound. And what he most found interesting about the band was that there was more than one person singing on the record. And it caught his attention enough that he wanted to meet the band and offer them a recording test at Abbey Road. But Martin took to them immediately when he met the band in person and noticed that each had their own distinct personalities. And they reminded him more of the comedians he'd work with rather than the musicians he'd produced prior with Oscar. They played covers for Martin and some of their own originals, including early forms of Love Me Do and P. Love You. And after the test, Martin realized two things. The first was that the original songs were not quite ready for prime time, and that if Martin was going to record them, he'd have to find the material to record. And the second thing was that their drummer Pete Bess, who was the drummer before Ringo, was not going to make it and definitely needed to be replaced. But by July 1962, Martin was comfortable enough to offer them a recording contract. His first challenge was to figure out the band dynamic and who the leader of the band should be. At this time, for bands like the Beatles, Popgirds had a lead singer, and the rest of the other members were more backing bands and didn't have much of a role. So Martin was going to follow that structure, and he gave each of the individual members of the band a recording test and noticed that there was a smoothness to Paul's voice, but John's voice was more distinct and interesting. His first instinct was to make Paul the leader of the band, but after some thought, he realized that the secret sauce to the Beatles was their group dynamic and that a leader to a band would change that. And so instead of having a lead singer and a backing band dynamic, he thought it'd be unique to just have them all be singers. And at this point, Martin was very comfortable with breaking molds. He did it in comedy records, and he thought, why not in pop music? We could have them all be singers on the record. Their first recording session together happened in September of 1962, and they insisted that they were going to record their own records. And after some back and forth with Martin, he decided that Love Me Do and PS I Love You showed the most promise and went on recording those songs. In the early days in the studio, Martin was more of their teacher, and the band would listen to whatever Martin said, and it was much more top-down. This process would evolve to go from this top-down teacher-student relationship to be more collaborative. In the early days, Martin would invite the band into the control booth at the end of sessions and give them playback of what they recorded together and show them exactly what he was doing. And there's one story that I liked which showed uh Martin's willingness to collaborate and also his earnestness while also showing the band's sense of humor. After playing them some playback, um, he said, This is what you've been doing, but you must listen to it. If there's anything you don't like, tell me and we'll try and do something about it. And George Harrison giving a cheek grin to the rest of the band said, Well, for start, I don't like your tie. And everybody fell on the floor laughing. Again, it's it's funny to say that how much older Martin is than the band. He's 10 years older than some of them, and they're just teenage, or not teenage, but they're they're kind of kids in this process. And so there was a bit of an age gap and a bit of humor, but Martin was used to it working with comedians. Also, during the Love Me Do sessions, Ringo joined the band after they fired Pete Bess. The addition of Ringo wasn't smooth sailing, and Martin had his doubts about Ringo joining the band as well. What he would do is basically he'd A B test Ringo with another session drummer that Martin much more preferred, and they both played a version of Love Me Do. And after some convincing from the band and the team in the studio, Martin finally came around on Ringo, and now the Fab 4 was firmly in place. Love Me Do was released in October of 1962, and Martin personally went out to plug it to DJs and the market. EMI offered little support, and many inside the company still saw George as this eccentric producer of comedy albums who was always experimenting with these odd sounds. And now to top it all off, he wanted to release a band called The Beatles. And even the name sounded like it could be a comedy album too. So in these AR meetings at Parlophone, some of the executives at EMI dismissed it as another one of George's gimmicks. But Martin knew there was more to the Beatles and that there were hits in this band somewhere. Let me do peaked at number 17, which was respectable to George, but not enough to break through on the national stage. He never doubted that there was something special there, but he knew that they needed a true hit. And so he started looking for stronger material. And this is where the music publishing would become critical as well. Music publishers not only just collected royalties on the music that they owned, but they could actively promote songs itself and fight for airplay. And Brian Epstein thought that Lum Me Do hadn't been pushed hard enough by EMI's publishing company. So he went searching for a publisher that would be just as hungry as he was to break the Beatles. George suggested that Epstein speak with his friend Dick James, who was just as hungry and ambitious as Brian was to break new bands. And after some negotiations, James agreed to take on the Beatles and help them become the stars that Brian knew that they could be. They formed their publishing company called Northern Songs. The structure gave 50% of the company to Dick, 50% of the company to the Beatles and Epstein. And also James would take a 10% management fee on top of his stake in the company. Dick Neiman offered a slice of the company to Martin, which he declined, citing that it would be a conflict of interest to own the publishing company for a band that he was also producing at EMI. So if the phrase, certainly I will listen to anything, was the best thing, Martin ever said creatively. This decision to sit out in Northern Songs was the worst decision he made financially. By saying no to this, he missed out on millions of dollars a selling record that he himself had heavily influenced. But George was always a gentleman and always did things above board. With their publishing in place, Martin wanted to put out more songs. He suggested the band put out a cover of a song he found called How Do You Do It? That song already sort of sounds like a Beatles song just by title alone. But the band was adamant that they wanted to record their own Beatles songs and didn't want to do covers. To which Martin asserted his position as a producer and got a little curt with the band, telling them when they could write material just as good as this song, they'd record it. But right now, this is the song we're gonna do. They followed George's advice and recorded, but never released uh a cover of How Do You Do It? Lennon and McCartney still fought for their originals. And to George's credit, he was always open with the band and would let hear them out when they had suggestions. And he asked them if they had anything new to show. And Lennon and McCartney said it wasn't uh a new song per se, but it was a revamped version of a song he'd heard before, and that song turned out to be Please Please Me. And George agreed to hear the new version and was blown away from the improvements they've made to the song, and he went to record it immediately. And after a few takes and towards the end of the session, George went on the intercom of the studio and told the band, Gentlemen, you've just made your first number one record. Please please me would be Dick James's first big test of plugging the band in the new music. And he went to work marketing the band to the UK. And he got them on the TV show Thank Your Lucky Stars, and which gave them national exposure. But more importantly, uh the TV exposure proved to EMI that the Beatles were the real deal, and George was serious about this band. So they started helping George with marketing and supporting the band when it came to promoting new music. And this combined push from Dick James and EMI pushed Please Please Me to number one, giving the Beatles their first number one single, just the way George called it in the control booth, the Dabby Road. George was never one to rest on his laurels and he knew how finicky the music industry was. And he decided they had to move fast to get the band in the studio to record more songs and put out their first full-length album. And so starting at 10 a.m. and finishing around 11 p.m., they had 14 tracks and their first album. It was a mix of covers like Twist and Shot was on that album. But also Lennon and McCartney were able to get more of their originals on the album. And with Martin's direction and coaching, Lennon and McCartney's originals took over more and more of their albums, and singing covers would become part of their past. And now I think this might be a good time to go over the mechanics of the famous Lennon McCartney writing partnership and how George helped shape both their styles and how they made music together. Paul McCartney and John Lennon. Are arguably one of the best writing duos in music history. Both their brains were wired for melodies and they had an intuitive approach to music that at first was foreign to the classically trained Martin. In the early days of their partnership, it was a very collaborative process. While one of them would start off a song, they inevitably would get stuck and would need the other to bail them out with either a middle part or an ending to a song. Whoever wrote the song took the lead singing role with the other coming in late or as a harmony. But eventually this process would become more dominant than collaborative, and each song would become more distinct. The songs would either be a John song or a Paul song. So this process rarely changed in its beginnings. Each one would take a new song and play it for Martin on an acoustic guitar to ask for feedback. And in the early days, Martin was only doing small alterations to songs and wasn't doing much arrangement. And his aim was to get them more comfortable in the studio recording their own songs. Made his memoirs, he mentioned that my role was to make sure that they made a concise commercial statement. I would make sure that the song ran for approximately two and a half minutes and that it wasn't the right key for their voices, and that it was tidy with the right proportion and form. This role though would be pretty temporary. As the band experimented with new sounds, Martin would help them make their sound more sophisticated and layered. So he would put his own stamp on the music. While both Lennon and McCartney would absorb these lessons from Martin like a sponge, the relationship with him were slightly different. Paul and him were much more collaborative as Paul was interested in music production and the technicalities of recording. He'd even learn how to play the piano so Martin and him could speak the same language musically and bounce ideas off each other more efficiently. John, on the other hand, wasn't really interested in the technicalities of music and he much more viewed it as artistic expression and left Martin to figure out how to get the sounds he heard in his head onto a record. He would prompt him with some of these weird prompts and that would kind of leave you scratching your head out of, well, how do I make that happen? And these would range from uh make me sound like the Dalai Lama to make it sound like it's the end of the world. And he would just have an attitude of, well, make it happen and walk away, leaving Martin and the engineer to figure it out. One of the stories that Martin included highlighted this. There was a time where Martin wrote a saxophone piece for one of their songs, and Lennon didn't quite think it sounded right. And so he went over to his guitar and started playing the notes that he wanted the saxophone band to hear. And he was like, Why don't you play this one? To which Martin was like, These saxophones are all in different keys, so what you're playing won't translate well to a saxophone. Um you need to write down the notes that they have to play. And he, Martin, the gentleman, finished his explanation was, Do you understand or do you do you see that? To which John said to him, Well, that's bloody silly, isn't it? And then he just gave his patent just comment and walk away. And Martin said with a bit of a grin, I s I suppose it is. But Martin had to handle the realities of making music and the limitations of sound and help the band navigate uh these sorts of constraints to get the sound that they wanted. But either way, Martin was able to play to the strengths of the partnership and help the band make hits. And in 1963, it was raining hits for Martin and the groups he produced by his own account. His productions topped the British charts for roughly 37 weeks in 1963. But there was one more mountain to climb for the Beatles, and it was breaking the band in America. America was the most important music market in the world in the 1960s. In January of 64, their song I Wanna Hold Your Hand went to number one in America and it opened up doors for Martin and the band. This was huge for not only the Beatles and Martin, but Britain in general. They were one of the first British bands to break through into America and successfully crossed over into the American market. But that success wasn't just a happenstance or an accident. And Martin had been actively pushing for it long before Beatle Mania began. Throughout 1963, while the Beatles were dominating Britain, Martin kept trying to crack America. When Please Please Me, the single, was released, he urged Capitol Records, which was EMI's American branch, to release the song, to which he was told by the president of Capitol that we don't think that the Beatles will do anything in this market. Though this was a setback that he has been kind of used to in his dealings with EMI. Martin was determined that if EMI wouldn't put up the music in America, then he'd go outside the EMI family and release it with indie labels in America. And that's exactly what he did with VJ Records and Swan Records putting out Beatles' early singles. His strategy was something was better than nothing than the American market. When the Beatles arrived in America in early 1964, Beatles Mania exploded. It was kind of an awkward reception in the beginning because Capital, after they put out I Wanna Hold Your Hand, in late 1963 and saw how successful it was, sort of took credit for the Beatles and acted as if they were on the Capitol stable of artists. And it was awkward because Martin accompanied the band on their first tour in America and he was their discoverer and producer. And so it kind of went counter-narrative to what Capital was trying to put out. And Martin was the only one who really knew that they had rejected not one but three of the singles that Martin pitched to them. But by then, none of that really mattered because the band had officially made it in America. The fans were chasing them throughout the airport and all over the city. Girls fainted at the mere sound of their name. And they went on to play the Ed Sullivan show and fill arenas around the country. And they had officially taken over America. The one person who was probably the most happy about this was Brian Epstein. He was the master of the mania of making all this happen behind the scenes. But Martin was worried about the band. Like he went back to the UK before the tour was over and he was worried about their safety. If you can remember, Kennedy had only been assassinated in November of 63, and the Beatles were right up there with Kennedy as a celebrity. And if not, maybe even Eclipse Kennedy. And so he was worried that they were going to be a target. And he could tell that the exposure and the fame was taking a toll on the band. They would return from their 64 tour and they want to make a change to their music. And in this new evolution, Martin would play an even larger role in the band. Beatle Mania, which exploded in America in 1964 and carried through to 1966, was a turning point for the band. They had their fun in 64, but even as early as 1965, they were feeling crushed by the mania and wanted to grow up and become more serious artists and not just these teeny boppers who were singing about wanting to hold your hand and please pleased me. They wanted to become more serious artists, and their early attempt at this was their album Rubber Soul. They featured songs like Norwegian Wood and Nowhere Man, which tackled higher-level subjects like rejection, loneliness, and self-doubt. And the source of a lot of their issues was the road and to shed the mania. They determined that they wanted to stop touring and become just a studio band rather than a touring one. This retreat to the studio also had practical reasons as well. The screaming and the fainting and all the mania, they lost themselves in a way. They lost themselves in the fact that they couldn't really hear themselves play and they couldn't hear each other on stage. And they started to feel like the road was making them worse musicians. And to top it all off, they felt unheard. No one was really listening to their lyrics or what they were really all about. And everyone was really just taking in the mania. And if they were going to preserve and expand their sound, the studio was going to be the only place they could do it. And for Martin, the Omania was also a turning point, too. He went from being the lucky producer who stumbled upon this band from Liverpool, and he was actually now actively shaping their music. He wasn't just recording them anymore, he was scoring them, arranging them, and leaving more of his fingerprints on their records. But the first song that really marked this shift was yesterday. It was the first song that featured musicians that wore the band, and the string quartet arranged by Martin was his direct contribution. And he would later say that was the first time he truly felt that he shaped the Beatles recording creatively. And from that point on, the studio became his laboratory. And with George as the band's translator, the sound the Beatles were putting out gotten bolder with each session. But while the music was evolving, Martin was not able to capture most of the upside that he was creating with his artists, even outside the Beatles, and wasn't given the credit for transforming Parlophone from a struggling comedy label into the pop powerhouse of the 1960s. He had discovered and nurtured the biggest band of the 60s, and EMI was still treating him like he was just this guy in a control room and a common employee. Martin was ready to leave the company, but he thought he would give them one last chance to dazzle him and give him a piece of the upside of what he was doing. And he asked for a profit-sharing commission with EMI. He negotiated with the director at EMI, Len Wood, and he made one last-ditch effort to keep Martin by offering him a 3% commission on the profits after his overhead. And during their negotiations, Len did a fateful example and walked Martin through what his numbers would have been in 1963. And he made a profit of 66,000 pounds and overhead of 55,000 pounds, and that year would have left him with a bonus around 11,000 pounds. That number kind of stunned Martin, and Martin ever so coy asked him that surely has to be revenue, not profit, right? Uh, because he did the map at his head and determined that 66,000 pounds is 3% of roughly to 2.2 million dollars. And according to ChatGPT, that's around 65 million USD in today's dollars. And so he surely thought that was revenue, not profit. To which Len said, no, no, that was the profit from the sales of your records last year. This stunned Martin. The fact that they were only gonna give him 11,000 pounds out of the 2.2 million pounds he had generated EMI in profit last year made Martin's decision for him, and he left EMI to form his own company. And the company he would form would be called Air. It'd be associated independent recordings, and it was a kind of different structure. It was a collective of top producers who would earn royalties on the records that they made with artists. And it was a major shift to give producers now more participation in better terms in the records that they were creating. And for Martin, the Beatles stayed with him, and they would be his temple client for Air. He would still have to deal with EMI and their cutting deal making. But with Air, George was free to work with whoever he wanted on a much better financial terms. And his work in the pop world with the Beatles would get around to other artists and other artists would line up to want to work with Martin. Robert Sol mentally kicked off a change in topics for what the band wanted to explore, but it changed their overall philosophy around making albums. But before albums were just seen as this collection of singles or basically marketing material for their next tour, but they wanted to push the boundaries of what an album could be and have it be its own standalone art form. With all this change happening with the band, part of Martin's big superpower here was his openness. He was always open to whatever the band wanted to collectively do. And he was also open to the changing cultural dynamics that had happened from their start in the early 60s and now we're in around 1966, and the world is changing even in that short amount of time. And Paul even clocked this uh superpower around openness, and he said, This is one thing I always gave George Martin great credit for. He was a slightly older man and we were pretty far out, but he didn't flinch at all when John played it to him, referring to a future song I'm about to talk about. He just said, Hmm, I see. Yes, hmm, hmm. He could have said, Bloody hell, it's terrible. I think George was always intrigued to see what direction we'd gone in, probably in his mind thinking, how can I make this into a record? But by that point, he was starting to trust that we must know vaguely what we were doing, but the material was really outside of his realm. And it wasn't just the material that was really outside of his realm. Each individual member of the band was, you know, pushing the boundaries of who they were creatively and growing up to an extent. Paul was immersing himself in the London avant-garde art and music scene. George Harrison was diving deeper into Eastern spirituality and Indian classical music, and John was exploring psychedelia, Timothy Leary and LSD and all that kind of the hippie things that the 60s would be known for. A lesser producer might have had to tap out at this phase and could only get the get the band through the please please me phase of the band, but Martin wasn't a conventional pop producer, and he was down to take the band where they wanted to go. The role in the studio at this point was also changing as well. The band was deferring less to Martin for everything technical, and he was losing a bit of his dictatorial leadership of the control room in the studio. And bit by bit, the band had been learning more and more about the Abbey Road machinery on each album. And so they were coming to the studio with more formed ideas of what they wanted to sound like, and the studio became more of a shared space between Martin and the band. For the next album after Rubber Soul, they wanted to capture that raw American sound that they heard on some of the American records that was coming out in the 60s. There was even talk of them ditching Abbey Road to go over to America and record there, but it was too expensive. So much Martin had to improvise with the four-track machines that they had at Abbey Road to create the sound that the Beatles wanted and push Abbey Road to its sonic limits. A part of Lennon and McCartney's creative process was called working on heat. This described the duo's need to get to the studio as fast as possible after they had a concept for their music. And in 1966, after Rubber Soul, Paul was working on Heat and came out with some compositions he wanted to explore with the rest of the band. And John, too, was working out some songs that he wanted to share. And the two songs that I wanted to talk about had very different vibes. The song that Paul was working on would become Eleanor Rigby, and the latest song that John was working on would become Tomorrow Never Knows. Both songs would show off Martin's expertise when it came to his own production and creativity, and he would be able to turn the heat of the partnership into a finished song. I'll start with Tomorrow Never Knows because it was the first song that kicked off the project. It grew out of Lennon's experiments with LSD and his reading of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. And this was a song that Paul McCartney was quoting Martin not being phased by when John auditioned it for him, and he sat through it and just thought, very interesting, John, very interesting. And so when they got into the studio, Lennon and the band did a few takes of the song, but John didn't think the voice was quite right. And one of his notorious quirks was that Lennon hated the sound of his own voice and asked what Martin could do to make it do something else. And he gave a patented prompt and walk away to Martin, and this time it was make me sound like the Dalai Lama chanting from a mountaintop. Lennon even had a few ideas to make this mountaintop effect. Then he suggested hanging himself from the ceiling in front of a microphone. Martin being the dad basically of the band was all for experimenting, but he wouldn't go so far as to have his front man hanging from the ceiling and thought he could figure something out in the studio. And so they tried a couple other ideas, but Lennon didn't think that what they came up with was quite llama enough. And so they needed something more mystical. And so they were running out of ideas to satisfy John. Jeff Emmerich had the idea of plugging Lennon's vocals into a Leslie speaker. This speaker was normally reserved to make a Hammond organ sound swirling and having that swirling vibrato sound. And so Emmerich had the idea of plugging John's vocals into this speaker to create that Dalama sound. When they played it for John, he loved it. And Paul even overheard the recording and later joked it's the Dolly Lennon. That wouldn't be the only vocal-oriented invention. And they during this project, they'd also come up with what they called automatic double tracking. Part of the Beatles' process was they would layer the vocals, meaning that the band members would have to sing the same part twice so the engineers could layer the vocals to get that richer sound. One engineer had the idea to make the process automatic and have them record the first take onto a different track and just delay it, basically creating a second copy of it so the band could manipulate the voice even more so to create that thicker and wider sound. What mattered to the band about this was that it saved them a bunch of time and now they didn't have to sing the same part twice. And it also became a signature part of the Beatles sound. Another big experiment they did for with Tomorrow Never Nose was experimenting with tape loops and flipping and reversing the track. This came directly from Martin's previous experience with comedy albums. And in for Tomorrow Never Knows, he'd take a tape of Paul McCartney laughing and speed it up to create that seagull kind of. I I thought of the book called it seagull sound. I thought it's more of a ghost, ghostly sound in the beginning of Tomorrow Never Knows. And he'd also take recordings of sitars and speed them up to create those different types of tones and textures for the song. Each loop would be on faders in the control booth, and Martin would be able to play each of these faders like they were like piano keys, making the studio more and more of an instrument for this project. And this these sessions would also be the first time where they took some of their tapes and they reversed them, making new sounds. And this was known more so on the John Song Rain, where they took the tapes and they re-threaded it through the machine backwards to create new sounds that the band loved. And after seeing the band's enthusiasm about this practice, Martin even joked that it was backwards forever after that, and they'd use the backwards effects on a lot of the overdubs for this album and the next one. That was for John's songs. For Paul and Eleanor Rigby, Martin showed off another side of his mastery and experimentation, and that was with classical music and orchestration. Basically putting that Guild Hall education to work in the world of rock and roll. And Martin worked with McCartney to write the score for Eleanor Rigby. And Paul gave him his own Lennon-esque prompt to translate, but this time was a little less obscure, and it was I want the strings to sound really biting. And Martin would get to work a scoring of the biting strings, and McCartney recalled of their collaboration saying, I thought of the backing, but it was George Martin who finished it off. I just go bash bash on the piano. He knows what I mean. Did he ever? And this was again another one of Martin's patented taking what the band and what Paul and John had in their head and translating into a finished record. Also on Rigby, we'd see Martin act as not only just the translator for what Paul wanted, but he was also the diplomat between the two worlds of music. The one hand, you had the serious classical musicians and then the wild world of rock and roll, where the Beatles worked by experimenting with sound and texture. Classical musicians worked by reading off sheet music. And if it wasn't written down, as far as they were concerned, it didn't exist. And they would often get lost in what the Beatles wanted if it was just gonna be Paul and John telling them things like I want it more biting or I want it on the dairy lama. The classical musicians were usually much older too, and we're not used to getting bossed around by a couple 20 year olds. And so Martin played diplomat refereeing the sessions to get the most out of both parties and the music that they were co creating together. All this was happening in the shadow of a competition, and that was the rivalry between the Beach Boys and the Beatles, who were very competitively. Each other for the number one spot and also being known as the pioneers of pop music. Brian Wilson was the leader of the Beach Boys and their own Martin, Paul McCartney, and John Lennon all rolled into one. And he cited Rubber Soul as his inspiration for the Beach Boys groundbreaking album Pet Sounds. And now with Revolver nearing its finale, this was going to be the Beatles clap back to Pet Sounds. And as they were nearing the end of the project, they sought the advice of another sort of friend of me that was similar to Brian Wilson, and that was Bob Dylan. And they showed Dylan a version of Tomorrow Never Knows. And after the song ended, Dylan reportedly said to them, Oh, I get it. You don't want to be cute anymore. I almost have to stop myself from saying it in a Bob Dylan accent. But I can hear him saying this. And while it was very pandering, it was very, it's very Dylan-esque. And needless to say, it was accurate for what the spirit of the project was. And Revolver would be released shortly before their final tour in 1966. But much of the album couldn't be performed live. I mean, how do you take the tape loops that they made in the studio or the Leslie speaker treated vocals or the string octet from Eleanor Rigby and put that on a stage? Almost by design, you couldn't. So the band was making this. I don't know if subconsciously or consciously was making the decision to make songs that they couldn't perform live, and so they'd have to stay in the studio and the songs would live there and live on the record. With Beatlemania fading and the studio ascending, a revolver was their proof of concept of what the band could do inside the studio and where they wanted to go. The band would be ready to go all in on being a studio band, and Martin would be there to orchestrate their boldest experiment yet. And Sgt. Pepper would transform the band and be considered Martin's Magnum Opus. After a revolver, the band had no tours on the horizon and no projects, and so took some time to relax. Paul took a trip to Kenya and on the trip had an idea for a new project where the band would assume alter egos and create an album as that alter ego band instead of the Beatles. There'd be no more Beatlemania, no more Beatles, and no more problems for them to have to deal with. The idea for the project came from him looking down at his plate and he saw salt and pepper and had the idea to make the band called Sgt. Pepper. While Team Studio, which was the band and Martin, were plotting their next move, Team Touring, which was Brian Epstein and the label, were scrambling to make sense of this idea of not touring. They figured that the Beatles were at the height of their power and that they should be doing stadiums and not studios. And from the label's perspective, they had to come to terms that they had no material for the Christmas season in 1966. And to top it all off, there had been rumors, maybe even planted by Epstein, to get them to tour, but rumors that were swirling around that the band was breaking up because of all the silence and them not putting out new material. All while the band was plotting their next move, the rock and roll world wasn't standing still. The Beach Boys already had pet sounds, but now they came out with good vibrations, and that song was dominating the charts. The Who, the Stones, the Kinks, and Eric Clapton and Cream were all putting out music in the Beatles' absence. But uh the thorn in the side for the Beatles was the Beach Boys. Uh, they were the band that they kept the tabs on the most, and good vibrations was the last straw that made them want to get off the couch and get in the studio and do a new project. They weren't gonna sit out the arms race for pop music, and they knew that they could make a better album than Pet Sounds or Vibrations. And if Revolver showed that the studio could be an instrument, a Sergeant Pepper was gonna prove that it could be the full orchestra and create sounds that audiences had never heard before. Uh to kick off the project, Martin met with the band to hear what they wanted to do next and to kick off the meeting. Lennon was the one who said, Look, it's really quite simple. We're fed up with making soft music for soft people, and we're fed up with playing for them too. But it's given us a fresh start, don't you see? We can't hear ourselves on stage anymore for all the screening. And Paul jumps in here and he says, So what's the point? We did try perform some songs off the last album, but there are so many complicated overdubs, we can't do them justice. Now we can record anything we want and it won't matter. And what we want is to raise the bar a notch to make our best album yet. This was music to Martin's ears. He would have Car Blanche in the studio to try anything and everything to create this vision for what where they wanted to go in creating new sounds. And he likened their new approach to a film production versus a play production. And reflecting on it, he Martin said, When I first started in the music business, the ultimate aim for everybody was to try and recreate on record a live performance as accurately as possible. But then he realized that we could do anything other than that. In other words, the film doesn't just recreate the stage play. So without being too pompous, we decided to go into another kind of art form where we are devising something that couldn't be done any other way. We were putting something down on tape that could only be done on tape. So that's the real spirit of Sergeant Pepper is putting things on tape that could only live on tape. And luckily for the Beatles, they were working with a producer who was a master of tape. And Sergeant Pepper would take everything that George Martin had learned prior and put that into the project. After the speech from Lennon and McCartney, Martin asked them if they had anything to show. And Lennon picked up his guitar and kicked off Sergeant Pepper with a song that wouldn't actually even be on the album, but would come out as a single to support the project. But it no less showcased the band's direction, and that's Strawberry Fields Forever. Martin really loved the song. He loved the vibe, he loved the lyrics that were very surreal and created this very cool sound picture, for lack of a better word. And they recorded the song right away, and Martin loved it from the first few takes and thought that they had it. But Lennon, of course, always the perfectionist, made him do take after take just to get it right. And they were reviewing all the takes, and Lennon told Martin that he liked the beginning of one of the takes, but he wanted them to uh use the end of another take, and he asked if they could just splice them together. Usually you could do something like this, but Martin had to be the one to break the bad news to Lennon that it'd be impossible because the first take was in one key in tempo, and the second one was in a different key in tempo, so it would be impossible to merge them together. Of course, that was no problem for John Lennon. That was a George Martin problem. And he did the patented. Yeah, but you can do something about it. I know you can fix it, George. And he walked away. Martin had his work cut out for him. They had the idea around taking one of the tapes and slowing down the take to adjust the pitch. And they were able to find a small area where they could splice the two recordings into each other to make them cohesive and on the same key and pitch. And the splice together is invisible to most listeners, but Martin mentioned in his memoir that he heard the splicing together every time. But it was something that they were proud of. And the final edit he thought was the most inventive pop song to date. Strawberry Fields wouldn't be the limit of Lennon's demands. And on the song being for the benefit of Mr. Kite, Lennon wanted to create this feeling of being in a circus. The prompt that he gave Martin was that he wanted the audience to smell the sawdust. He left George with another do what you can with it and walked away. And Martin originally thought that the Hammond organ would accomplish what he wanted, but they needed something more. And so he actually ended up overdubbing organs, a calabay, and some sound effects from the EMI archives and cut them all together and randomized the tapes by throwing them in the air and having the engineer splice hall the throwing pieces back together and even put them backwards and forwards. So randoming and flipping tapes is just now part of their studio process. And the studio was now not just recording music, it was now creating it. Meanwhile, McCartney answered Lennon's surrealist Strawberry Fields Forever with his own song, and that would be Penny Lane. Penny Lane came about after hearing a Bach concert, which featured a piccolo trumpet. And Paul asked Martin what that instrument was because he liked the sound of it. And within days, Martin had scored a trumpet solo for Penny Lane that would give it its sound. And that was an instrument that had never been used in pop music before. And now it's at center stage in a Beatles classic. Even for Paul, the more traditional songs required some invention and unique scores. When I'm 64, which was a Paul song, was dressed in the clarinet score and had a music hall charm that was orchestrated by Martin, as well as fixing a hole and lovely read up, also carried Martin's fingerprints. And so the creative rivalry between Lennon McCartney only intensified with each of these experiments around orchestration and sonics, and they each pushed each other forward. And Martin stood in between both Lennon and McCartney as the translator to complete their visions for a song. And now I bet you're asking, what about George Harrison and Ringo? And for better or for worse, they were junior partners in the band and would usually get only a song or two on each album. And for this one, Ringo would sing on with a little help from my friends, but George's songs required more of Martin's attention. His song Within You, Without You, was inspired by Indian classical music and fit with the psychedelia of the project. And Martin would arrange a string section to be overdubbed into the song to support George's vision for the Indian classical pop song. The centerpiece for the album would be the Lennon McCartney epic, A Day in a Life. And it started as a John song, low and melancholy about the state of the world. And the end would end as more of an upbeat pole song. But while each had their own impact on the song, they both agreed that the song needed a better ending. And at this time, both Lennon and McCarty were interested in the avant-garde music scene. And so John, of course, got Martin with a prompt. And the prompt for this song would be what I want to hear is a tremendous buildup from nothing up into something absolutely like the end of the world. So, in other words, he wanted Martin to score the apocalypse. Martin had now scored the Dalai Lama on a mountaintop, a Victorian circus, and so the apocalypse was nothing to him. It's just another day working for the Beatles. But the original idea was to have a 90-piece band uh play just whatever they wanted, and the band would record the chaos of what they would play, and that would be the big buildup would be the chaotic noise. But Martin, being the adult in the room, knew that A, they couldn't afford a 90-piece band to just play whatever they wanted, and B, classical musicians need organization, they don't just play whatever they want. So Martin, instead of improvising, wrote a score for all the musicians to play, and he scaled back the 90-piece band to 40-piece band. But what he would do was record them all on the four-track machine, but mix it down into one track, which would create the sonic illusion of an 160-piece band scoring the apocalypse. And the session itself became uh sort of a theater that the Beatles put on, and they made the orchestra dress up in their formal wear, wearing tails and the women wearing dresses. And they even made some put on some clown noses and psychedelic garb. The Beatles invited the friends like McJagger and friends from the London art scene to have a psychedelic ball while they watched the recordings for The Day in the Life. And even George Martin dressed up as well. So he had some fun with his band and they had some fun during that recording session. Along the way, during the production of Sgt. Pepper, in the back of Martin's head, the former record executive warning bells were going off. Was this album too avant-garde and not commercial enough? Had the band, you know, in the spirit of killing themselves musically, had they gone too far. The Beatles were a very special client to Martin and were his key client at air. So he wanted to look after them and viewed his role during this time and give them as much freedom as possible in the studio, but also make sure that they didn't come off the rails in the process. To prevent this from happening, Martin sought the opinion from a weird source, Alan Livingston, who ran Capitol Records in America. This was the same man who said the Beatles didn't stand a chance in America and who had rejected them all those times before. But if anybody was going to give it to him straight, it was going to be Alan Livingston. When Alan was in London, Martin asked him to come to the studio and listen to a recording of A Day in the Life to see if it was worth anything or if it was just too far out there. And after hearing it, Livingston was speechless to which Martin took as a good thing, as that they were on to something and that the record buying public could take this new version of the Beatles. And Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was released in May 1967. It had debuted at number one in the UK and held a top spot for 22 consecutive weeks. It told massive numbers in the U.S. as well. Critics loved it, the peers loved it. But Jimi Hendrix famously covered the title track almost after it was released. And even Brian Wilson, the rival architect of Pet Sounds, was floored by the album when he first heard it. And this was also a big coming out for Martin. And the first time the press openly credited George Martin as more than just a guy in the control room. And he was described as basically the man behind the machine. And Time magazine, even in their review, Eden said, with the help of their engineer, arranger, and record producer George Martin, they plugged into a galaxy of space age electronic effects. She apparently threw a mixture of tapes running backwards and various speeds. And they later described George Martin as the producer whose technical midwifery made Sergeant Pepper possible. So the Beatles had done it again. They created an instant classic and taking their sound and pop music to new places. And this would be a high watermark for the band, but something tragic would happen that would change the trajectory shortly after the release of Sergeant Pepper. If Sergeant Pepper was the peak of the band's unity and Martin's involvement in the studio, the following few albums expose fault lines. It started with Brian Epstein's death in 1967. Brian had been the band's external stabilizer. He discovered them, he brought them to George Martin, he shaped their image and turned the Beatles into a cultural institution. But when they decided to be more of a studio project, his role within the band diminished and there was no Beatle Mania to manage, and he drifted. There was even quiet conversations about replacing him. The band had enough. Then in August of 1967, he was found dead in his apartment, and it was ruled accidental overdose of alcohol and sleeping pills. There was some speculation if it was an accident, but the effects were undeniable on the band. They lost their manager, a buffer, and now Martin was one of the last few remaining adults in the room. With this tragedy, a cloud hung over the band for the rest of 1967. But yet, creatively, Sergeant Pepper was still fresh in everyone's mind. And at the in the music world, they had the Midas touch. And specifically with EMI, they had the freedom to work on whatever they wanted. And no one was going to tell the Beatles no after Sergeant Pepper. Paul was the one who was always restless in the band and believed that a film could unite them again. And he was inspired by Ken Keesy's Mary Pranksters in the spirit of a psychedelic road trip. He proposed a loosely scripted television show that showcased the band in new music, just them, a bus, and this psychedelic journey, and thus the magical mystery tour was born. The band kicked off the magical mystery tour like they did with any other project, demoing new songs for Martin. And from the very beginning, the vibes were a lot different than Sgt. Pepper, and they were way off. A key aspect of Martin's genius was his openness to their material. But even from the beginning, that openness could only be pushed so far. And an engineer recalled the first time he heard their new music, and he said, When John finished debuting his strange new tune, there was a moment of silence. Jeff recalled. Then Lennon looked up at George Martin expectantly, saying, That one was called I'm the Walrus. John said, So what do you think? In Jeff's memory, George looked flummox and oddly for him, speechless. Eventually the producer spoke up saying, Well, John, to be honest, I have only one question. What the hell do you expect me to do with that? So this was the first time where Martin had been stumped. This was the man who didn't bat an eye to Tomorrow Never Knows, within you, without you, or Dan to Life, but he just couldn't wrap his head around this walrus song. And he would eventually help out and get the song where it needed to be. But this album was way off from the experimental height of their creativity with Pepper. Outside the studio, things were just as crazy. The film shoot for the TV show was disorganized. There was a little direction beyond Paul's rough storyboards. And Martin heard reports and worried that they were spreading themselves way too thin. And he wanted them to focus more on the music than less on this TV show. And the TV show came out on Boxing Day in 1967, and it was a huge flop. Critics tore it apart as they said the bigger they are, the harder they fall, and what a fall it was. And McCartney even later apologized for it. 1967 had been the highest of highs with Sergeant Pepper and the lowest of lows with Epstein's death and the public flop. And the band felt unmoored. The label couldn't control them. Their manager was gone. Public opinion was shifting around them. But the one thing that remained was Martin. He was their last pillar of stability. And he even sensed that there was fractures among the band and thought that the solution would be simple, and that was to get back in the studio. In the beginning of 1968, though, the band would be licking their wounds far from the studio. They weren't even in the UK or in America, but started the year on a retreat, India. George Harrison had always been infatuated with meditations and the Maharishi and urged the band to join him on a meditation retreat in India. The band all decided it would be a good place to go and reflect. There was calm, then there was distance as reflection from the previous year. And they even came out with new songs, and songs began to pour out of each of the members while they were on the retreat. And in May of 1968, they returned to London with dozens of new tracks. Before Epstein passed away, he set up Apple Core, which was the Beatles holding company for all the merchandise, the touring, the album of the record sales. Basically, everything the Beatles sold would go through Apple Core. And this was the band's idea to have this grand vision for an entertainment empire. They would have publishing, film, records, retail. It was ambitious. It was idealistic. It was also the main driver of this was that the Beatles were making so much money that they needed to hide their income from the tax man. But that's for another story. And it's ironic that they have a song called Tax Man. But the band could barely coordinate a television special. And now they were expected to run a global entertainment empire. And they hired a lot of yes men to operate this corporation and it attracted a lot of hangers on. And one hanger on that in particular that was a Thornton Martin's side was Giannis Martis, aka Magic Alex. He started off by weasling his way into Lennon's inner circle and had his ear as an inventor and would talk to Lennon about ways that he could improve the band's sound. George usually laughed off his ideas and would insist that they get back in the studio and back to reality. There was one invention that especially annoyed George, and that was Alex's invention of the so-called 72-track machine that didn't exist and it was all basically vaporware. The band trusted in Alex to eventually build out the studio for Apple, but George knew that this was never going to be a great idea. He saw Alex as another distraction that the Beatles needed to get rid of. While George was happy that they recorded a bunch of songs, but finally got back to the studio and George picked up that the band was actually fragmenting and they were more or less four separate musicians sharing a space trying to make a record together. Martin was never really called for or needed. When he sensed that he wasn't really needed, he would retreat to the control room with a stack of newspapers and would look up only if he was needed. And there would be days where Martin would quickly burn through a full stack of newspapers waiting for somebody from the band to want to work with him. But even still on this album, and this would eventually be the white album, the tensions were high. And there was one story where Martin suggested Paul change some of the vocal lines on Ublida, Ublada, to which Paul said to him, If you think you can do better, why don't you come down here and sing it yourself? The engineer who was recalling the story said this was the one time he ever heard Martin raise his voice. And he said to Paul, Then bloody sing it again. Give up. I just don't know any better how to help you. The Sgt. Pepper days of collaboration and having fun in the studio. And these were becoming more and more high-tense situations. And it wouldn't just be Paul Ringo during this session, ended up quitting the band. And Martin lost Jeff Emmerich, who was the lead engineer down many of the Beatles projects. And Martin, too, even hit a boiling point during the middle of the session and took a vacation with his wife to Italy, leaving his assistant and protege Chris Thomas in charge to run the session. Everyone needed a break during the recording of the White Album. To top it all off, during the session, Yoko Ono and John Lennon started dating. And that was a whole another can of worms that brought different energy into the making of the white album. But Martin came back from his vacation and noticed that something kind of strange happened while he was gone. And the band seems to be a little bit more cohesive and they were playing together than he than they were when he left. And the songs were more raw and less Sergeant Peppery, but more of that live energy that they were trying to run away from on Revolver and Sergeant Pepper. The White Album was the anti-Sgtant Pepper album. Like they wanted to go back to being the Beatles. The White Album is technically called just the Beatles. So they liked the motion of where they started with the White Album playing live, and they thought that they might not need Martin as much in their productions. And they would soon learn what life was like without Martin as their producer. After the fragmentation of the White Album, the band convinced themselves that the solution to going forward as a band was to get back to their roots of playing live and becoming a band again. The new sessions where they would experiment with doing a live album would be called the Get Back Sessions. Martin thought a live album would be an interesting challenge and was excited about the project until Lennon bluntly told Martin that he didn't want any of his production tricks for the project and that he wanted an honest album. So that meant no overdubbing, no editing, no cutesy sound effects, none of that. He wanted to sink or swim as a live band, live on the record. The word honest really hung with Martin because he thought that despite them being a studio band or live band, that all the albums that they created together were honest, and that the editing and production that Martin contributed was not some decoration and was a key component of the Beatles sound. But Martin, above everything, was a gentleman and a professional. And if they wanted to produce a live album, he wouldn't force himself to fight for his sort of style and would be involved as much or as little as the band wanted him to be involved with the project. He had other clients at air to work with if they didn't really need him. And the band would bring on a new engineer named Glenn Johns to oversee the sessions. And that was kind of Martin's cue to fade away from the project, like he did with Magical Mystery Tour in White Album. And that left Johns to drive the new and improved live Beatles. And it didn't take long, though, for Cracks to show in the project. This tended to happen when Martin faded away. He was sort of the invisible glue that the band really noticed when he was gone. Or there wasn't one of Martin's guys, like Chris Thomas, to oversee the project. And the first incident popped up when Paul was discussing arrangement ideas with Johns, which caused Johns to kind of go white because he was just an engineer, not the full blown producer Martin was. And Johns assumed that Martin was going to be involved with doing those sorts of arrangements and had no idea that he was really hands-off with his project. And then beyond that, the spirit of the project was to do a live performance of new material and film a documentary that would go along with it. But the band was kind of in a rut of just playing old Beatles songs and rock and roll standards during their jams for the get back sessions. So they would play other hits from the Beatlemania era and then standards like Chuck Berry instead of the new material. And when Martin would pop in, he noticed this sort of quirk of not playing new material and was kind of half amused but also half concerned about the project. And then to top it all off, it wasn't Ringo who left the band during this session. It was actually George Harrison this time. He was sick of being treated as a second-class citizen in the Beatles partnership for songwriting. Once he left the band, Lennon and McCartney almost had the idea to replace Harrison with Eric Clapton. McClapton had played on the White Albums, and so he had a relationship with the band, but it was through George Harrison. So that would have been an interesting combo to have Eric Clapton and the Beatles. But luckily, Harrison was able to be persuaded to come back to the band. And it all it would take is that they would ditch the live show and just perform a TV live performance, and that they would leave the Twickenham studio that they uh had been playing at and they would rehearse in their own studio in on Salville Row in the Apple building. Calling back to Dr. Alex and it's a 72-track invention. He was supposed to put together the new studio at Apple on Silver Row. And when they got to the studio and saw his progress, there had been none. It was a complete disaster, and the studio was in no shape for any recording to happen. Without any resentment, George was able to call the higher-ups at EMI and secure proper recording equipment to be used at the Savile Row studio and turn Dr. Alex's nightmare into a usable studio space for them to finish the get back sessions. John's recalled during this part of the sessions that George never harbored any resentment towards him. And he said, by the time we moved to Savile Row, George, realizing I was in an awkward position, was kind enough to take me to lunch in order to put my mind at rest, saying I was doing a great job, everything was fine, and I was not stepping on his toes in any way. What a gentleman he is. So he just really wanted the best for the band and was able to save the day while not killing the vibes of the session. And in Salvo Row, they would be nearing the end of their get back project, and they were talking with the people who were shooting the documentary over where they should perform the live show. And somebody had the idea to do it on the roof of their Salvo Roe studio, and that's where they landed on having the live performance. And this would be the famous last live performance of the Beatles on top of Apple Studios. And the there'd be a limited audience for the band. And by the time they started the show, it was so noisy that the police were called and Bobby police would be on the top of the roof and they would be in the audience. Martin, on the other hand, would not be on top of the roof with the band, was down in the studio making sure that the recording was going all right. Though it was a long ways away from Shea Stadium, it was the last big spectacle of a live Beatles performance. And the they ended the performance in the cheeky way that they'd been known for. And Lennon signed off from the live show saying, I'd like to say thank you on behalf of the group and ourselves, and I hope we pass the audition. And that put an end to the get back sessions. It was a kind of a gut punch to Martin when they were going to put together everything, but they ended up doing some editing to the voices and some sounds, some dubbing went in there. And so that was kind of uh twisted. Martin, who I thought they were doing an honest record. They didn't quite get a finished product out the door at that moment. And Glenn Johns would take a sta at doing some mixes and presenting them to the band, and they weren't ever quite right. And so they the band ended up shelving the project and moving on. Uh, there was a lot of off-the-stage tension still going on in the band. Alan Klein, who's a famous rock and roll manager, had just taken over the band, and there that was not a unified decision. And Apple as a company was not doing really well. And so, on top of the shelved project and the off-the-stage issues, the honest album exposed something unintended that they couldn't recreate the past to move forward. They would have to get back in the studio and figure out what's next. Paul would make the first move to continue on with the band and had the idea of having Martin produce their next project. And so he called up Martin and asked him if he'd be open to producing another album. Martin's terms to McCartney were simple, only if you let me produce it the way it used to be, which was fine with Paul. And I think on the cake for Martin was that John was enthusiastic about doing a project together as well. So Martin moved some of his air clients around and went back to the studio with his favorite band. McCartney was always the more competitive one of the duo and was looking around at other bands and what they were doing and noticed that the Beatles were far behind in setting trends like they did during Sgt. Pepper and wanted to get back to setting trends. And Martin had more lessons to teach the duo with his bag of tricks and recommended that Paul and John study classical music and sonatas as a interesting thematic way that they could make new songs. And some of these concepts that he would teach them from sonatas came up on songs such as You Never Give Me Your Money. But this project would be uh a standout for the junior partner in the bunch, and that was George Harrison. George Harrison would create two of the most iconic Beatles songs during the during this project, and that would be Here Comes the Sun and Something. And it even astounded Martin how far George had come in songwriting from when he discovered the band to this project. As he said, especially on Here Comes the Sun, I think there was a great deal of invention. I mean, George's Here Comes the Sun was the first time he'd really come through with a brilliant composition and musical ideas. You know, the multiple odd rhythms that came through, they really became commercial for the first time on that one. Harriset and Martin would also collaborate with their interest in new tools that were coming out, and that was the synthesizer. They both wanted to experiment with the MOOC synthesizer, and it would show up on its project on songs like Maxwell's Silver Hammer. And they both were trying to push the boundaries of the project and their sound. And they saw the synthesizer as a new tool for the band to use to make a new sound and a new weapon in Martin's arsenal when it came to taking the Beatles to a new place sonically. As they were nearing the end of the project, they needed to come up with a name. And originally they were going to call it Everest and go shoot the cover of the album in the Himalayas, but that was too expensive. Everest was also a brand of cigarettes in the UK, so they didn't want that affiliation. And it was Ringo who had the idea to say, let's just shoot it outside and call it Abbey Road. And that's exactly what they did for this album. And it would be another Beatles Hits and shot to number one in the UK. George Harrison's Something was the standout song on the album, and the name served to even raise the profile of EMI's studio as well. And they'd end up changing the name from EMI Studios to Abbey Road Studios based off of the album's success. Martin was especially happy with the way the project turned out. It wasn't exactly Sgt. Pepper, but on reflecting about this project, he said, there's far more me on Abbey Road than any of their other albums. So he was deeply involved with this project and was proud of the output. Despite their success with Abbey Road, the band would end up breaking up, but their breakup would be far from a studio, and instead would happen in a boardroom. John Lennon would be the one to simply ask for a divorce from the Beatles, and that divorce ended the ban. There'd be no dramatic final sessions, no more orchestrations from Martin, no more one last ride, and there was just a quiet divorce. But on the way out, there would be a bit of a twist of the knife for Martin because without Martin's or Paul's approval, Lennon and Harrison handed the shell get back tapes over to Phil Specter to do a final production mix. And Spectre was known for his famous wall of sound production, and he added a lot of dubbing and strings onto the recordings. And the final product would be the Phil Spector produced a let it be. All that talk about honesty and production that Lennon had told Martin at the beginning of Get Back was kind of uh one big joke now. That's what Phil Spector's really overproduced a Let It Be album. And so this would be the one of the few albums that wasn't exactly produced by Martin, but it was sure close. And Martin would even joke about it being overproduced. And he said the credits should have read produced by George Martin, overproduced by Phil Spectre. But Martin's career was far from over. Unshackled from the Beatles, he became one of the most sought-after producers in pop music. And he'd work with acts like America, Elton John, Cheap Trick, Jeff Beck. And he continued to produce solo albums for Ringo and Paul. And so he would still push pop music forward, even if it wasn't with the Beatles, and he would push it so forward, kind of his hearing would gradually decline and fade towards the end of his life. And after a long recording career, he'd pass away in 2016 at the age of 90. Before I wrap up Kay's episode, I want to leave you with the three big takeaways. And the first one is that nothing in your life is ever wasted. Before he met the Beatles, Martin had what appeared to be a pretty scattered early career. There was the time in the Navy, there was his classical training at Guildhall. There was that apprenticeship with Oscar Preyus with jazz and classical musicians, and then there was producing comedy records. On the surface, there wasn't a really strong through line that pointed him to being a pop music producer. But when the Beatles arrived, all of that previous experience mattered. His classical background helped with arrangements in giving the Beatles music a deeper musical and emotional depth. His work with comedy records gave them unique sounds to play with and showed them the power of the studio. And his work with other artists with Oscar helped him act as the referee between all the different personalities within the Beatles. So it's a reminder that all your obscure hobbies and unusual experiences aren't distractions, and they may be the very inputs that can push your work and your team forward when the right moment arrives. Second big takeaway is that mastery creates freedom. George could experiment as much as he did because he had a complete understanding of the music. He was classically trained and technically fluent within the studio, but he also understood the personalities and commercial instincts outside the studio and how records actually sold. So knowing both the machinery in the marketplace allowed him to be able to make different types of music that audiences didn't even know that they wanted. His career is a reminder to not just skip the fundamentals. And if you want the freedom to innovate, you have to understand your craft backwards and forwards. And finally, the last lesson is the life of a confidant evolves. Like Roy Disney in episode three, Martin's North Star was protecting the Beatles, just like his was protecting Walt. But Martin was never just one thing to the band. In the beginning, he was their discoverer and promoter. Then he became their shaper and translator of their sound. And in the final years, he stepped back into more of a facilitator of their vision, helping where he could. He didn't cling to a single identity and he just adjusted to what the moment required. And that's the quiet discipline of a great confidant. They don't protect the title, they serve the work and the project. And over time, that means becoming different versions of themselves as the project evolves. I want to thank everyone for listening to this episode, and I'll be back in a few weeks with episode five on Amazon and Jeff Bezos. Until next time.