AS THE NEW CENTURY UNFOLDED, George Martin found himself spending more and more time at the Old Rectory, the Oxfordshire estate that he shared with his wife, Judy. By this period, he had lapsed into what would pass, for George, at least, as the semblance of retirement. The couple’s spacious National Trust home was a far cry from the luxurious manse that one might expect from a pop-music legend, save for the array of gold and platinum discs arrayed in a downstairs bathroom. When he wasn’t working in the city at AIR Lyndhurst, more often than not George could be found in his shed behind the Old Rectory, its ceiling pocked with model airplanes hanging from the rafters and a snooker table beckoning nearby. His passion for aeronautics dated back to his teen years and eventually to his years in the Fleet Air Arm. As usual, George’s life was never static. In 2000, his renewed zeal for airplanes was even showcased in an episode of Airshow World with host Alain de Cadenet, who interviewed the former airman about his experiences with the Royal Navy torpedo bomber the Fairey Swordfish.
During that same period, George experienced another recurring blast from his past in the form of those four lads from Liverpool. Indeed, by the summer of 2001, the Beatles were all the rage again. In November 2000, the folks at Apple had released 1, a compilation album featuring the Beatles’ twenty-seven chart-topping UK and US hits, to mark thirty years since the group’s disbandment. For his part, George had penned a foreword for the booklet that accompanied the CD’s release. Like the 1987 CD releases and the Anthology project, 1 was spearheaded by shrewd, event-driven marketing. The compilation wildly exceeded industry expectations—including George’s—and topped the charts in thirty-five countries, turning over more than thirty million units in the process. By that point, as always, George was already looking ahead, working away on the next big thing. But those who knew him well weren’t really surprised by the speed from which he went from one project to the next. As his son Giles, then thirty-two and a producer in his own right, pointed out, his father “didn’t look back. It wasn’t really in his nature.” For George, the next big thing involved a CD and documentary extravaganza to be titled Produced by George Martin, an all-encompassing career retrospective that would see him rifling through the EMI vaults yet again.1
By this juncture, the idea of producing new work held discernible pitfalls for George. While he acknowledged his 1999 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction as one of the great highlights of his career, he had swiftly come to realize that being installed in that particular institution, with its highly specific focus, made him feel significantly more detached from the music that had comprised the majority of his life’s work. “As I got older and older,” he remarked, “I realized that I was becoming less and less attuned to being a rock ’n’ roll producer,” even going so far as to say that “old men shouldn’t be in the rock ’n’ roll business.” This realization was compounded by his rapidly deteriorating hearing loss, which made working with electric guitar–laden sounds even more taxing on his fading senses. For George, admittedly competitive to a fault, the mantle of being the fastest gun in the West simply no longer held its appeal as he approached his midseventies.2
With the release of his In My Life project back in October 1998, George self-consciously began preparing to bid farewell to the musical stage. It had been nearly fifty years since the day in September 1950 when he rode his bike across the city in his Fleet Air Arm great coat and made his way up the steps of 3 Abbey Road, where Oscar Preuss offered him a job as his assistant A&R man. When it came time to call it a career, George eschewed the familiar confines of St. John’s Wood for the sterling new facilities of AIR Lyndhurst. Recorded from March to August 1997, In My Life featured a host of present-day celebrities trying their hand at covering Beatles songs, including Robin Williams and Bobby McFerrin singing a duet for “A Hard Day’s Night,” while Jeff Beck turned in a searing take on “Come Together.” Céline Dion chipped in a cover of “Here, There, and Everywhere,” while John Williams performed a classical guitar rendition of “Here Comes the Sun.” At one point, George even flew out to Austin, Texas, to record Goldie Hawn singing “A Hard Day’s Night.” He took particular care in producing Phil Collins’s performance of the Abbey Road medley, including bravura orchestration from the producer’s original score. As for his own contribution, George conducted a new arrangement of “The Pepperland Suite” from Yellow Submarine. In the album’s oddest moments, Jim Carrey performed “I Am the Walrus,” with Sean Connery closing out the LP with a spoken-word rendition of “In My Life.” The reviews, not surprisingly given the nature of their collaborations, were generally discouraging, with critics often taking issue with the album’s inherent sense of whimsy. As PopMatters’ Sarah Zupko opined, Martin “has chosen to go out with a whimper instead of a bang,” adding, “I don’t really have to tell you that Goldie Hawn impersonating a chanteuse on ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ or Sean Connery literally reading ‘In My Life’ is an embarrassing display, do I?”3
With Produced by George Martin, George would stick to the original music that had made his name before, during, and after the Fab Four. If nothing else, Zupko’s commentary was mindful of the high critical bar for Beatles cover versions. Compiled by Beatles historian Mark Lewisohn, the music of Produced by George Martin provided a fascinating overview of a career that had been endlessly variegated from the producer’s early days through his very last productions. Knowing this, Lewisohn sagely divided up the six-CD box set thematically, with selections devoted to “Crazy Rhythms”; “Transports of Delight”; “That Was the Decade That Was”; “Gold Fingers”; “Smiles of the Beyond”; and “Nice Work.” In so doing, the inherently quirky nature of George’s musical pursuits came shining through. With more than 150 tracks, Produced by George Martin provided a thoroughgoing retrospective of George’s unusual, albeit unique, career in the annals of twentieth-century popular music. The project wasn’t a whimper in the slightest, and neither was the documentary, which was released in April 2011. Directed by Francis Hanly, Produced by George Martin was carefully crafted, featuring cameos from Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Giles Martin, and a host of living witnesses, including the likes of Bernard Cribbins, Rolf Harris, Cilla Black, and Jeff Beck, to the remarkable contours of George’s life and work. Far more exacting and significant, the Produced by George Martin box set and ensuing documentary succeeded where In My Life came up short by aiming to capture the sheer volume of George’s achievement.
In 2002, George’s place as rock music’s elder statesman was venerated yet again when he was tapped to serve as creative consultant for the Party at the Palace, a gala concert to be held on the grounds of Buckingham Palace on June 3 in honor of Queen Elizabeth II’s golden jubilee. With twelve thousand fans having earned their place in the audience through a national lottery, the concert would be broadcast on gigantic television screens to a million visitors gathered around the Mall and the Queen Victoria Memorial, along with some two hundred million viewers watching at home.
For George, it would be a monumental undertaking to stage the event’s artists and repertoire. In the end, he managed to gather rock’s most vaunted living performers—without benefit of a fee, no less—and keep their egos in check as they marked the queen’s longevity. With Michael Kamen having agreed to conduct the Royal Academy of Music Symphony Orchestra, Giles Martin lent a hand by rehearsing the house band, which featured Phil Palmer on guitar, Pino Palladino on bass, Paul “Wix” Wickens on keyboards, Eric Robinson on saxophone, Phil Collins on drums, and Ray Cooper on percussion. Sam Brown, Margo Buchanan, and Claudia Fontaine lent their talents as backing vocals for the makeshift group, which was charged with learning the set list for the bravura event. To his credit, George was able to call in a number of favors in assembling a roster that included the likes of Paul McCartney, Queen, Eric Clapton, Rod Stewart, Cliff Richard, Brian Wilson, Shirley Bassey, and Ozzy Osbourne, among a host of other music luminaries.
In the end, the concert came off without a hitch. Fittingly, George kicked off the event by staging Queen’s Brian May perched high above the grounds, where he played a sterling guitar rendition of “God Save the Queen” atop the roof of Buckingham Palace. The three-hour celebration came to a close with McCartney’s set, which included all-star performances of “All You Need Is Love,” “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” and “Hey Jude.” At one point, Paul even chipped in an impromptu version of “Her Majesty.” After the grand finale, the queen herself took the stage, escorted by none other than Sir George. For the producer, the Party at the Palace was a moment of exquisite validation. He had been called into action by the monarchy, and he had delivered in spades. Standing on the stage that night as the whole joyous celebration came to fruition, George basked in the well-earned glory of a job well done. “It cheered me up no end!” he later recalled, as the fireworks burst overhead on that special night.4
While the Party at the Palace was a great tribute to George’s standing in his industry, he knew full well that many, if not all, of his personal achievements as a music professional would always be eclipsed by his collaboration with the Beatles. It was with this modest spirit that he compiled Playback, a limited-edition memoir in which he shared photographs and memories from his interwoven personal and professional lives. Published in a signed edition of two thousand copies by Genesis Publications in 2002, in many ways Playback: An Illustrated Memoir came into being as George’s last, albeit highly selective, word on his life in music. A genial look back across his eight decades on the planet, Martin’s memoir presented a largely sunny depiction of life in the record industry, as well as a fairly sanitized version of his personal life that was, in reality, at times riven by turmoil and intrigue. “I wasn’t going to write anymore,” George explained to Allan Kozinn, “except I’m at the end of my life now. And do you know what tipped the scales for me? The fact that it would be such a good thing for my family, my children and grandchildren. It would be like a family heirloom, or a photograph album.” With this goal firmly in mind, George commissioned his old friend Staffan Olander to act as his amanuensis as the producer took one last amiable stroll down memory lane. Writing in the Guardian, Phil Hogan described Playback as “an agreeable impression of Martin’s adventures with ‘the boys’ . . . in the form of anecdotes told over a page or so, brevity being relied upon perhaps too much as the soul of wit.” Hogan concluded that “anyone looking for dirt will be out of luck.” Just as Martin had intended, Playback “is a gentle, affectionate memoir, written for the most part without rancor or regret.”5
For George, the new millennium had already begun with plenty in the way of rancor and regret, including a series of losses on an international and personal scale. On September 12, 2001, he contemplated the horrific events of 9/11 in the company of John Kurlander. In the midst of tragedy, they took time to reminisce about days gone by. For Kurlander, it had been some thirty-three years since his first session with Martin and the bandmates, when the producer asked him to share the first playbacks of “Hey Jude,” which he and the Beatles listened to for hours as they marveled at their latest creation. On a personal level, the year continued its awful slide into November, when George Harrison, having suffered from a lengthy battle with cancer, died at age fifty-eight. Martin admired Harrison’s spirit in the face of his fate, remarking in late November, only days before the Beatle’s death, that “he has an indomitable spirit, but he knows that is going to die soon, and he is accepting that.”6
With his death on November 29, 2001, Harrison left behind his wife, Olivia, and twenty-four-year-old son, Dhani. And while he admired the younger man’s resolve, Martin felt the loss acutely. During the 1990s, Martin had suffered his own battle with cancer. In 1995, he was aghast to discover a lump in his groin. “I became rather ill and had a series of operations which left me low for a while,” Martin later wrote. “Hearing I was under the weather, George [Harrison] rang up and suggested he come over one afternoon. He had a huge bunch of flowers and a small, beautifully carved wooden statue of the Hindu god Ganesh. ‘Keep him by your side,’ he told me. ‘He will look after you.’ I must say, so far he has. It was typical of George to show he cared. His faith never wavered.” In one of his last great moments of inspiration, since 1999 Harrison had been working with his friend Guy Laliberté on the concept of bringing the Beatles’ music to life through the interpretive theatrics of Cirque du Soleil, the famed troupe of acrobats and aerial performers. Founded in Montreal in 1984, Cirque du Soleil had been the brainchild of Laliberté and his partner Gilles Ste-Croix, who cut their teeth as street performers.7
With Harrison’s passing, the project entered a protracted period of negotiations between Cirque du Soleil and Apple Corps, resulting in an agreement to launch the ensuing production, to be titled Love, at Las Vegas’s Mirage resort and casino in the summer of 2006. With Cirque du Soleil conceiving a host of breathtaking acrobatics as accompaniment to the Beatles’ music, the Mirage constructed a custom theatrical space to stage the show. The creation of French artist Jean Rabasse, the Love theater cost more than $100 million and was designed to treat more than two thousand patrons to 360-degree views of the production. In order to accommodate the Cirque du Soleil performers, the space was rigged with numerous tracks and pulleys, along with twenty-three digital projections and four translucent screens to partition the theater throughout the production. Most importantly, each of the auditorium’s seats was fitted out with a trio of personal speakers, including two in the headrest, in order to maximize the patrons’ experience of the Beatles’ music, which was the undeniable star of the show. Working with his youngest son—whom he described as “his ears” on the project—George Martin threw himself into the production, which Giles had begun to imagine as a series of innovative “mash-ups” of existing Beatles tracks.
At first, George was loath to work from his son’s approach, preferring to sidestep altogether what some listeners might perceive as a kind of sacrilege. After all, during this same period American DJ Danger Mouse had masterminded The Grey Album, a controversial mash-up of The White Album and rapper Jay-Z’s The Black Album. For his part, Giles understood his father’s concerns, recognizing that a large swath of Beatles audiophiles—“the socks and sandals brigade,” in the younger producer’s words—were die-hard purists and considered the Beatles’ music to be untouchable. Giles finally earned his father’s acquiescence for the innovative concept after providing him with a sample of what he had in mind. “At the beginning of the project,” said Giles, “I knew that no one would ever hear my mistakes as we’d been secretively shut away, so I thought I’d start by trying to combine a few tracks to see what the result would be. Feeling like I was painting a moustache on The Mona Lisa, I started work mixing the bass and drums of ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ with George [Harrison]’s track ‘Within You, Without You.’” For his part, George was enchanted by the results, particularly in terms of the elasticity of the Beatles’ songs, as the younger producer grafted various tracks together from across the band’s career. But like his son, George recognized the gravity of what they were doing in the studio:
We agonized over the inclusion of “Yesterday” in the show. It is such a famous song, the icon of an era, but had it been heard too much? The story of the addition of the original string quartet is well known, however few people know how limited the recording was technically, and so the case for not including it was strong, but how could anyone ignore such a marvelous work? We introduce it with some of Paul’s guitar work from “Blackbird” and hearing it now, I know that I was right to include it. Its simplicity is so direct; it tugs at the heartstrings.
Working at Abbey Road, father and son toiled away at the task, finding intriguing and inventive means of blending the Beatles’ tracks together. As Giles explained, they assembled fragments from “the original four tracks, eight tracks and two tracks and used this palette of sounds and music to create a soundbed.” In the end, the Martins sampled 120 songs in the creation of twenty-seven discrete musical segments. For Giles, the painstaking process was a joyful, albeit transfixing, one. At one point, he admitted to feeling like his father was actually “producing” him, given that Giles was working from the vantage point of an author of sorts in cahoots with George’s original vision and production of the Beatles’ tracks.8
For George, the production activities associated with Love culminated in an emotional spate of sessions in the spring of 2006. In April, he and Giles convened an orchestra at AIR Lyndhurst to record George’s orchestral score for “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” For the eighty-year-old producer, it made for an incredible moment, as he recorded a string arrangement for Harrison’s original demo that they recorded together back in July 1968. “My responsibility in adding music to it weighed very heavily on me.” Working in the cavernous main studio at Lyndhurst, Martin conducted the players as they performed his haunting, tenderhearted score. Knowing that he intended that day at Lyndhurst to be his final orchestral session, the musicians presented him with a bouquet of flowers. George was overcome by the significance of the moment, remarking, “‘Yesterday’ was the first score I had written for a Beatle song way back in 1965, and this score, 41 years later, is the last. It wraps up an incredible period of my life with those four amazing men who changed the world.” Later that day, George joined Giles and David Stark in the control booth to complete their work on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” Stark would never forget the moment when George gently turned the master fader down and said, “That’s it for me.” As Stark later recalled, “It was a truly priceless moment.”9
With production work for Love having been completed in London, George and Giles traveled to the Mirage, temporarily ensconcing themselves in Las Vegas in order to carry out postproduction work. Meanwhile, Cirque du Soleil rehearsed in advance of the show’s previews, which were scheduled to begin that June. George’s reliance on Giles by this point had grown considerably. In 2005, his hearing had eroded dramatically, taking a “nose-dive” and leaving him “profoundly deaf,” he later remarked. Together, father and son debuted their Love mash-ups in the Mirage theater’s revolutionary sound system. During the month-long previews, Cirque du Soleil welcomed a number of guests, including Beatles Brunch personality Joe Johnson. After the show, Johnson saw Martin at an after party in one of the Mirage’s nightclubs. Echoing a similar moment nearly thirty years earlier with George A. Martin during the making of Robert Stigwood’s Sgt. Pepper, the producer promptly asked Johnson what he thought about Love. For his part, Johnson was ebullient, telling Martin that it was “spectacular and amazing” and that he “loved the mash-up mixes.” To his surprise, George seemed relieved, replying, “I’m so glad. I was worried.” Finally, on June 30, the Mirage held a gala premiere for Love with George, Judy, and Giles in attendance, along with one of the largest gatherings of the Beatles’ extended family in the years since their disbandment. Along with Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, the friends and family included Yoko Ono, Cynthia Lennon, Julian Lennon, Olivia Harrison, and Dhani Harrison. At the conclusion of the performance, as Cirque du Soleil took their curtain calls, Paul, Ringo, Olivia, Yoko, and George ascended the stage—the surviving Beatles, Harrison’s and Lennon’s widows, and the producer who never lost faith in the legacy that they had created all those years ago. And that’s when Paul, caught up in the spirit of the moment, asked for “just one special round of applause for John and George!”10
For his part, Giles would never forget the gala event, especially as he watched his father trade stories with his old friends and their families in a jovial mood on the occasion of the Beatles and Cirque du Soleil’s joint triumph. At one point, Yoko walked over beside Giles and said, “It’s funny. John’s just a voice to me now.” With Love, George and Giles had succeeded, in their own way, in affording new sounds and textures to the Beatles’ timeless music. In November 2006, the Love soundtrack was released to great fanfare, notching top-five showings in the UK and US marketplaces alike, proving that the Beatles were evergreen, through and through. Writing in Pitchfork, Mark Richardson pointed out that “what seems to consume people most about this record is the sound of the thing, just how beautifully the original material was recorded and how great it comes over on a purely sonic level.” For Richardson, the Love soundtrack’s finest moments occur when it creates a sense of intergenerational community. In so doing, the LP transforms “everyone into an audiophile,” Richardson reasoned, in that coming to understand and revel in the Beatles’ music makes “young people a little older. And it’s also a mash-up remix, which means it’s making older people a little younger.” Sure, “they were just a pop band,” Richardson concluded, “but if anyone can bring all these music fans together under one tent, it’s the Beatles. Which is what Love is ultimately about.”11
The Beatles, along with George and Giles, were recognized at the Fiftieth Annual Grammy Awards for Best Compilation Soundtrack Album for Motion Picture, Television, or Other Visual Media and Best Surround-Sound Album. But not everyone was pleased, of course. Geoff Emerick, for one, could scarcely fathom the notion of tampering with the Beatles’ recordings, which he considered to be sacrosanct. “I won’t listen to it,” he later remarked. “Look, the four artists were present when we did the mono mixes of the original records. And the recordings were fresh in our minds when we did the stereo mixes: even if the Beatles weren’t present, they were involved. It’s their record—and now it’s been messed around with. The original records are iconic, they’re pieces of art. Would you go and repaint the Sistine Chapel?” If George registered Geoff’s disdain for Love, he never gave it any credence. As Giles had observed, his father may have had a healthy reverence for history, but he wasn’t really the type to look backward. After Love, George took on scant few projects, although he spent his last several years completing a documentary on the craft of studio artistry. Titled Soundbreaking: Stories from the Cutting Edge of Recorded Music, the TV documentary was conceived in the same vein as The Rhythm of Life, George’s three-part BBC documentary series, broadcast in the late 1990s, in which he explored concepts associated with musical composition with the likes of Billy Joel, Brian Wilson, and Céline Dion. Produced in collaboration with PBS and directed by veteran filmmakers Jeff Dupre and Maro Chermayeff, Soundbreaking explored the history and art of music production and recording.12
With Love, George had finally seemed to come full circle in the industry that he happened upon, as if by accident, so long ago at the behest of his fairy godfather Sidney Harrison, the beloved mentor who talked him into interviewing for the job as Oscar Preuss’s assistant. In their later years, George and Judy socialized with their wide circle of friends, sharing in the trials and tribulations of growing older. In 1999, they were by Cilla Black’s side at the funeral of her husband, Bobby Willis. George eulogized him as Cilla’s “guardian angel” before reciting Joyce Grenfell’s moving poem about human loss and the need for renewal in the face of death:
If I should go before the rest of you
Break not a flower nor inscribe a stone,
Nor when I’m gone speak in a Sunday voice
But be the usual selves that I have known.
Weep if you must,
Parting is hell,
But life goes on,
So sing as well.
But George and Judy celebrated, too, marking Cilla’s sixtieth birthday a few years later in fine style. For George, it must have seemed like old home week, with the likes of Cynthia Lennon, Mike McCartney, Roger McGough, Pattie Boyd, and the Fourmost’s Dave Lovelady in attendance. And they celebrated again in March 2004, when George was granted his own coat of arms by Great Britain’s august College of Arms. For the appointments on his shield, George chose the image of three beetles along with a bird—a house martin, no less—clutching a recorder. For his Latin motto, George selected amore solum opus est. All you need is love.13
In his last years, when George mostly kept to the Old Rectory, he would describe himself as being “in the waiting room.” With his hearing having failed him utterly, he often connected with friends and family through email. His eldest son, Gregory, couldn’t help but smile when he saw his father’s familiar handle appear in his inbox. No stranger to nostalgia, George adopted “Tumpy,” the name of his family’s Jack Russell terrier, as his email address. By that point, given the wages of living into old age, George had seen plenty of his most cherished friends pass on before him. In 2008, George and the Beatles’ first engineer, Norman “Normal” Smith, died at the ripe old age of eighty-five. In the 1970s, he had recast himself as “Hurricane Smith” and tried his hand at the hit parade. In 2009, Capitol president Alan Livingston and AIR’s Ron Richards had passed on, as did Sheena, George’s first wife, in 2014. That same year, the British tabloids were awhirl with the salacious story of eighty-four-year-old Rolf Harris, who was tried and convicted of indecent exposure. In possibly the strangest moment in the trial, George’s 1965 production of “Jake the Peg” was entered into evidence. In two of the more tragic instances in George’s final years, Cynthia Lennon died in April 2015 at age seventy-five in Majorca. Just four months later, Cilla perished in August 2015 at age seventy-two after an accident in her Spanish villa. In the wake of her untimely loss, The Very Best of Cilla Black, chock-full of Cilla’s hits with George, topped the UK charts, marking the singer’s first number-one LP.14
By the time of his death, at age ninety, on the night of March 8, 2016, George had outlived almost everyone in his circle, save for Judy, now eighty-seven. George died in his sleep at home at the Old Rectory. He had ultimately died from complications associated with stomach cancer. Word went out to the masses via Twitter, courtesy of Ringo Starr. “God bless George Martin,” he tweeted. “George will be missed.” Paul McCartney followed suit shortly thereafter. “I have so many wonderful memories of this great man that will be with me forever,” he wrote. “He was a true gentleman and like a second father to me. He guided the career of the Beatles with such skill and good humor that he became a true friend to me and my family. If anyone earned the title of the Fifth Beatle it was George. From the day that he gave the Beatles our first recording contract to the last time I saw him, he was the most generous, intelligent and musical person I’ve ever had the pleasure to know.”15
On March 14, 2016, after a private funeral at the All Saints parish church attended by family and friends, George was interred at the nearby cemetery on King’s Hill, a quiet resting place in the village—and mere steps away from the Old Rectory. On May 11, a memorial service was held at St. Martin-in-the-Fields church on the edge of Trafalgar Square. As with the Love premiere a decade earlier, the Beatles’ extended family and friends were on hand to celebrate his life and work. A congregation of six hundred strong was in attendance, including McCartney, Starr, and their families; Yoko, Sean, and Julian Lennon; Olivia and Dhani Harrison; and such pop luminaries as Elton John and James Bay. So, too, were George’s old friends from Abbey Road, including Geoff Emerick, Ken Scott, and Ken Townsend, who came into EMI’s employ back in September 1950 during the very same month that George met Judy and assumed his role as Preuss’s assistant. For his part, Scott felt transported during the memorial, especially as the hymns in St. Martin-in-the-Fields reached a great swell, washing over the attendees with the sound of music, which possesses the awesome power to inspire—just as it surely felt for fifteen-year-old George Martin as he experienced the first measures of the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s rendition of Claude Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune in 1941. George fell in love with music that day at the Bromley County School when he discovered the amazing sounds that humans could make. And he never looked back.16
Within the year, Lady Judy would take up George and the Beatles’ legacy and become a patron of the Strawberry Field Trust, a movement spearheaded by the Salvation Army to transform the site of John Lennon’s childhood inspiration into a public cultural space. And in short order, George would be memorialized, time and time again, on McCartney’s subsequent concert tours as the ex-Beatle performed “Love Me Do” for stadiums filled with adoring fans, young and old. Brimming with emotion, Paul would rest his hands on his guitar and hearken back to the band’s very first, tentative recording of the song with George back in June 1962. But Paul and the other Beatles hadn’t been the only ones trying to find their way forward on that fateful day. George may have had more than a decade on them in years, but he was just as green—greener, even—than the Beatles when it came to rock ’n’ roll. “We taught each other what was required, the Beatles and I,” he later wrote. “We groped our way jointly towards an exciting sound.” But as for the hoopla, the pomp and circumstance about his central role in their legend, George unfailingly pointed to their gifts as the heart of the matter. “Whatever I did shouldn’t be stressed too much,” he once remarked. “I was merely the bloke who interpreted their ideas. The fact that they couldn’t read or write music, and I could, has absolutely nothing to do with it. Music isn’t something which is written down on paper. Music is stuff you hear. It’s sound and they thought of those notes. I was purely an interpreter, rather like a Chinese interpreter at the League of Nations. Certainly I taught them all I could in terms of recording techniques and brought an influence of classical music to their work. But the genius was theirs, no doubt about that.”17
Modest to a fault, George also recognized that the bandmates were always the sum of their parts, that the post-Beatles rancor, the lawsuits, the name-calling, was unrelated to the nature and quality of their achievement. In Playback, George observed that “the Beatles themselves all went on working individually, but none of them I think quite achieved the greatness that they achieved when they were together. Someone once said that a fist is stronger than five fingers, and something like that is true with the Beatles. The four of them together were stronger than the four individuals.” The same could easily be said for George, who, like the Fab Four, never reached the same heights as he enjoyed during their heady days together during the 1960s. Their collective genius was in working together and sustaining their partnership as long and as far as they possibly could.18
For the Beatles, George proved to be the perfect producer to interpret and make manifest their art in the studio because he implicitly understood that the act of production should be invisible. In its finest instances, the act of record production should be so effective and evocative that the artist no longer even remembers that the producer is somewhere in the background of the recording, behind the curtain, bringing the whole effort into tantalizing Technicolor and real life. For all of his accolades, a Phil Spector production was always inalienably by Spector. Whether it involved the Beatles or the Chiffons, the echo chamber was right there, front and center, reminding us who was standing behind the control board. But a George Martin production was both less and more. It was decidedly less because George’s identity in the music was latent—he had guided the artist to the moment in which the art came to fruition without noise or fanfare. But it was also more because he was able to facilitate the release of the magical germ inside the artist’s head over and over—so much so, in fact, that George’s skills as a producer emerged as a kind of fifth instrument for the Beatles: it was always there for the playing, for making the track brighter and, more often than not, better. And with George Martin and the Beatles, brighter and better invariably translated into a new classic for the ages.
But for George, beyond the music, the fanfare, and an enduring legacy that had already passed among the generations, the Beatles would always be “the boys,” a nickname that he had inherited from Brian Epstein. For George, they had been frozen in time as the “four fascinating, impossible, enormously talented, infuriating, adorable young men who changed all our lives.” Gifted and frustrating in the same breath, they were still the boys. For the bandmates, he was Big George in the studio. And in John, Paul, George, and Ringo’s more mischievous moments—when they would poke fun at the older gentleman with the posh voice and the prim and proper ways—he was the Duke of Edinburgh. But beyond that, in those instances when it really mattered, George Martin was the Beatles’ most steadfast and devoted friend.19