“I was impressed”: the producers George Martin called miles better than him
Any good producer knows not to get a big ego about themselves when they hit the grand stage. As much as the royalty checks might be enticing to look at once the records start selling in droves, any producer is usually only as good as the people that they have surrounding them, and it usually takes a little while for everything to start clicking. While that transition period into classic territory happened remarkably fast when George Martin worked with The Beatles, he never acted like he was some god-like arranger behind the scenes.
For someone who had been so essential to the band’s career, though, it’s strange to think that Martin never received the kind of co-writes he probably deserved. Nowadays, listening to the arrangements he did on tracks like ‘In My Life’ or ‘Eleanor Rigby’ could be considered a part of the musical composition, but Martin felt that it was better for him to leave money on the table and focus on what made each Fab song work.
Then again, when Martin first started working with the band, everything about rock and roll was fairly new to him. He could play what he heard in his head every time he got behind the piano, but considering this was someone who studied the ins and outs of music in school, he didn’t have to spend a lot of time trying to get his mind around something like ‘Twist and Shout’ or ‘Love Me Do’ in their early days.
In fact, Martin was far more well-versed in the comedy category when The Beatles came in. He had added every sound effect he could think of into the mix when working with the comedy troupe The Goons, and when looking at the kind of melodies they came up with, he was veering slowly into the realm of pop. But at the time, pop looked much different from the scruffy-haired kids walking into Abbey Road Studios every day.
“They were so much better than we were.”
George Martin
Rock and roll was a relatively new genre, and everyone getting acclimatised to the charts usually had to shuffle through easy listening before getting to a rock song. Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley were certainly nice ways to let loose, but that also meant having to sit through whatever was going on with Bing Crosby or Pat Boone around the same time.
Even though most rockers wanted nothing to do with that kind of music, Martin took everything as a learning experience when he came face-to-face with the producers behind Frank Sinatra’s best work in a pre-Beatles world, saying, “I had a hit with Ron Goodwin called ‘Skiffling Strings’ in the era of hit instrumentals. In America, it was issued as ‘Swinging Sweethearts’, and it entered the charts. So Ron had to go and promote it, and I went with him. I went to many studios, including Capitol, of course, and to a Frank Sinatra session. I was enormously impressed. They were so much better than we were.”
And no matter how many times The Beatles found their way onto the charts, there was always room for ‘Ol’ Blue Eyes’ in the mix. Even the band themselves had tried their hand at that kind of music, and looking at the way that Paul McCartney eventually adapted to that softer approach to music on Kisses on the Bottom, it was clear that it took a lot of work for musicians to make something that sounded that breezy.
So while there are a lot of ways to make rock and roll sound dangerous, that doesn’t mean that some of the softer stuff is necessarily less difficult by comparison. Most people wear their emotions on their sleeves when they play music, and yet something as smooth as Sinatra was the perfect way of being deceptively simple.
