The writer George Martin called the most interesting of “his lifetime”
George Martin didn’t get into the music industry to simply produce standard rock and roll tunes.
He may have seen a lot of potential in a bunch of kids from Liverpool with a dream, but The Beatles were only the start of a fantastic career of him constantly pushing the boundaries for what rock and roll could sound like with a bit more refinement to it. And while there are many artists that have done a lot more with a lot less than The Beatles, nothing could replace the musicians that seemed to embody every part of their work in the producer’s eyes.
Because when you listen to a lot of the biggest names on his resume, they’re not exactly people who were in the business for a laugh. The Mahavishnu Orchestra had made a name for themselves going well outside the boundaries of what rock and roll was supposed to be, and even if Jeff Beck is still regarded as one of the best guitarists the genre had ever seen, it’s hard to listen to an album like Blow By Blow and not hear the raw emotion in every single note of ‘Scatterbrain’ and ‘Cause We’ve Ended As Lovers’.
But Martin’s job was about more than refining what they could already do. The Beatles were never going to be one of the biggest bands in the world without his help, and even when they moved outside of the conventional structures of pop music, he was always there bringing those arrangements to ‘Eleanor Rigby’ or adding those beautiful string lines to ‘Yesterday’ when the boys couldn’t understand music notation.
Then again, who needs music notation to be a great musician? That might sound like an oxymoron, but outside of people like Elton John and Billy Joel, the biggest names in rock and roll relied on their ears more often than not. Kurt Cobain would have been the first to say that he didn’t know the first thing about music theory, but if the rest of the world was relying on instinct whenever they performed, Bob Dylan took the written word to a completely different place when he first came out.
Records like The Freewheelin Bob Dylan and The Times They Are A-Changin certainly aren’t the most hi-fi records in the world compared to Martin’s productions, but they weren’t built to be a multi-instrument extravaganza. The goal was for people to pay attention to the lyrics behind everything, and when working with Dylan when he toured in Japan, Martin realised that there was a lot more going on than reciting poetry over a couple of chords.
Even if he didn’t have the greatest voice, Martin sensed that Dylan was someone totally in control of their own artistry, saying, “A lot of people I admire enormously.. Bob Dylan – I had the pleasure of working with him in Japan recently. He’s one of the most interesting writers we’ve had in my lifetime.” And when listening to how he weaves through every song he plays live, there are pieces of his work that feel a lot closer to jazz than anything remotely rock and roll.
No, you aren’t going to hear some strange jazz chords on any of his records, but the art of improv has helped Dylan enormously over the years. There are entire verses of a song like ‘Tangled Up in Blue’ that never made the final cut, but hearing him adding a few new lines in here and there showed that he was as interested in seeing where his music was going as the audience was half the time.
Records might come out throughout Dylan’s career, but all they are is small snapshots of what he sounded like at one point in time. Because when you think about it, all of his songs are works in progress, and while there are moments that sound absolutely perfect on his records, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t something equally brilliant around the corner for him to discover.
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