George Martin

In 1971, I wrote a college paper on the use of electronic music studio techniques in popular music. The paper, one of the favorite things I did in college (having to do with a course, that is), talked in detail about how Pink Floyd, Frank Zappa and Jimi Hendrix used the tools-such as tape speed change, looping, echo, reversal, splicing, reverberation and so on-developed by the pioneering composers of the electronic medium. These techniques opened up huge new vocabularies of sound to pop musicians and created a new type of rock music that could never (well, until the advent of samplers, which was quite a ways in the future) be performed on the stage.

In my introduction to the paper, I noted, "By far the most important contributors to this new field were The Beatles, whose use of tape-manipulation techniques on such albums as Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and Magical Mystery Tour set the example for all of those to follow." My friend and fellow music fanatic Carl, when he read that paragraph, immediately opined, "That's an understatement." "Yes," I acknowledged, "but I don't know how to put it any more strongly."

Maybe today I do. How about this: What the Beatles were doing between 1966 and 1969 was so brilliant, so revolutionary, so liberating, so mind-blowing, so fall-on-the-floor-froth-at-the-mouth amazing, that almost everything else, then or since, pales in comparison. And all of the toys and techniques that we use in the recording studio today, in fact, all of our careers, are a direct result of those projects.

Of course, when it came to the studio, the Fab Four were actually five, the fifth member being the classically trained George Martin, who redefined forever the role of the record producer. Known as Sir George Martin since 1996, he recently announced his retirement, sat for an in-depth interview by Larry the O for Electronic Musician (it's in the February issue; shame on you if you missed it) and embarked on an eight-city public lecture tour, meeting fans and talking about his career, focusing especially on the creation of Sgt. Pepper.

The story of The Beatles and how they changed the recording industry has been told many times; they were perhaps the best-documented pop culture phenomenon in history. A wealth of material can he found in Martin's still-available 1979 book, All You Need Is Ears, and there are countless others, both by people who knew what they were talking about and those who didn't. But in such a complex and inspiring story, there are always more things to hear-insights, off-the-cuff remarks, little interpersonal exchanges-that can cast new light on the era and the people in it. Martin's current lecture tour (which I caught at the second stop, the sold-out Berklee Performance Center in Boston) goes over much old ground, but he also offers enough new material to keep even the most jaded of pop music journalists, as another icon of the era put it, starry-eyed and laughing.

Martin is not a charismatic public speaker; his presentational style is more suited to small-group conversation. But he had the crowd in his pocket from the moment he appeared. In fact, he garnered a standing ovation before he even made it to the stage, and throughout his 75-minute lecture and ten-minute question-and-answer period, except for the laughter and applause, you could hear a pin drop. He initially had some trouble reading from his text and coordinating with the videos that accompanied his talk, but he got more comfortable as the lecture progressed, and it wasn't long before he had the whole crowd convinced they were in his living room.

"I was known as a comedian's producer," he said, "which stood me in good stead when I met The Beatles. I started doing comedy when I started with Parlophone, since nobody else was doing it. I thought if I fell flat on my face, no one would notice." Besides his success with such seminal assemblages as The Goons and Beyond the Fringe, he had a Number One record pre-Beatles with a group called The Temperance Seven: "They were called that because there were nine of them and they drank like fish."

As to how the legendary collaboration came about in the first place, Martin said, "The Beatles were rejected by every record company, including ours, and were regarded as something of a joke in the business. When Brian Epstein was told to come see me, he knew he'd hit rock bottom."