The Beatles song George Martin believed was created by divine inspiration: “God was helping me”
There is no right way to create a classic song every time an artist walks into the studio. As much as people like the idea of everything going right in the studio and someone charting out the perfect song, there is usually a lot of trial and error and a little bit of magic that can turn a good tune into a masterpiece. However, for someone who had been in the music world as long as George Martin had, there was always a bit of divine intervention behind some of his greatest musical achievements.
Even with all of the great artists that Martin has worked with, it all comes back to The Beatles. That’s not to say that his work with Jeff Beck or Cheap Trick was necessarily terrible by any means, but when people talk about him centuries from now, he will forever be known as the person who helped turn those scruffy lads from Liverpool into more complex musical thinkers whenever they made a record.
Although many people have been called ‘The Fifth Beatle’, what Martin did in the studio back then could have been considered co-writing today. From his suggestion to speed up ‘Please Please Me’ to providing the orchestral arrangements on most of their later material, Martin always put more depth into their songs, with many of his best moments calling back to the days before rock and roll existed.
That didn’t mean everything he did was conventional. The whole point behind the Fab Four’s music was having a certain naivete for what traditional musical training was, and that meant Martin having to work around their visions. They couldn’t go to a mountaintop and capture John Lennon’s chanting on ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, but the next best thing was to get him to sing through a Leslie speaker to get that disembodied voice.
“You devil. You expect miracles as a standard.”
george martin
When Lennon came in for the next record with a folk song called ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, they knew that it was a breakthrough for them. The whole song would have been fine played on its own, but with Martin’s ear for production, Lennon’s insistence on making the song an amalgamation of two completely different takes is still a stroke of genius today, especially since the drastic cut between both takes is seamless.
Any other producer would be patting themselves on the back, admitting they had broken new ground for the art form, but Martin only had to thank the gods for how he brought both takes together, saying, “[John] looked at me over his specs and said, ‘I’m sure you can fix it’, and I said, ‘You devil. You expect miracles as a standard.’ I looked at it, and I thought about it, and, of course, God was helping me in a way because the faster one was also the sharper one.”
Even if the edit was one of the biggest strokes of luck that any band could have had, that doesn’t negate a lot of the ingenious moves Martin made during the recording. There was a lot yet to be done, and making everything slightly off-kilter played perfectly with the theme of psychedelia that the band had started on, practically giving fans a teaser of what Sgt Pepper would end up sounding like.
Martin might have been one of the most humble members of The Beatles’ entourage during their prime, but he seems to downplay his skills to a fault on ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’. He may attribute his work to the gods helping him, but looking at what he could accomplish when he was driven enough, this kind of watershed moment cannot simply be a happy accident.
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