“The luckiest one could ever get”: George Martin on the most fortunate moment of The Beatles
Some of the best music The Beatles ever created didn’t come without a fair share of hardship. Even though they may have only used backwards guitar for a few seconds when working on something like ‘I’m Only Sleeping’, George Harrison had to make sure that he put in the proper time to make everything sound correct, usually working for hours at a time before getting the tone that he thought sounded right. There was some luck on their side, though, and George Martin felt that the musical gods were smiling on them when editing one particular album.
When looking at most of the Fab Four’s greatest moments, though, George Martin deserves as much credit as the rest of the band, if not more so. He was the most musically educated in the studio, so when the lads came to him with the idea for a song or what the orchestra should be playing, he was the one who took their ideas and translated them into musical magic, whether that was the strings on ‘Eleanor Rigby’ or that fanciful sped-up piano on ‘In My Life’.
By the time the band had left the road, though, they had turned the studio into their new home. The crowds could barely hear any of their music when they played live, anyway, so it was now a matter of them becoming a studio-only act, using Martin and each other to make bold new experiments whenever they ducked into Abbey Road Studios.
While no one could have anticipated what a record like Sgt Pepper would have become when they began working on it, Paul McCartney already had a central theme of an imaginary band playing together throughout the piece. The rest of his bandmates might not have been on board, but returning the title track as a reprise towards the end of the album helped give every other piece some connective tissue.
When stitching every song together, though, Martin felt it would be better to have each song leading into each other so that it would sound like one piece rather than a bunch of singles. Although songs like ‘Lovely Rita’ do have strange ways of crashing out, they all feel like carefully choreographed pieces of a stage show as Sgt Peppers’s band entertains the audience.
As soon as Martin got to ‘Good Morning Good Morning’, though, he knew that he had come up with the best edits that he could have ever imagined, saying, “I was trying to make the whole thing flow. So imagine my delight when I discovered that the sound of a chicken clucking at the end of ‘Good Morning’ was remarkably like the guitar sound at the beginning of ‘Sgt Pepper’. I was able to cut and mix the two trucks in such a way that the one actually turned into the other. That was one of the luckiest edits one could ever get.”
And listening back to the track, it is stunning to see how both parts meld seamlessly with each other. In fact, from ‘Good Morning Good Morning’ to the end of the album, there is very little let-up for the listener, transforming into the opening guitar lick of ‘Sgt Peppers (Reprise)’ before the opening chords of ‘A Day in the Life’ are overlaid as the band finishes up.
Even though not every member of The Beatles completely connected with the concept of Sgt Pepper, it’s hard not to see this kind of ingenuity as The Beatles’ absolute peak. They were certainly working at the height of their powers, but no one could have anticipated that the Summer of Love would adopt them once the counterculture started rearing its head.
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