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From the start, George Martin trusted the Beatles' instincts and helped them to realize
their wildest musical dreams.
The most important day of George Martin's career the day he proved himself the only
genius who could have produced the Beatles was February 11th, 1963, when they
recorded their debut album, Please Please Me, in one marathon 13-hour session. It was a
radical gesture of faith on his part he let these four nowhere boys from Liverpool sing
their own songs, and select their own cover versions. He let them play their own instruments
and keep their working-class Northern accents. No other producer in the business would
have been insane enough to just put the Beatles in front of their amps and let them play live,
straight to two-track. He didn't even have the common sense to help himself to a slice of
their writing credits. But everything Martin went on to achieve with the Beatles all the
moments when he'd bring their craziest ideas to life, inventing tricks other artists would
spend careers trying to imitate, earning his name as rock's most revered producer stem
from this moment.
George Martin was a man who was often wrong. He was wrong thinking Ringo couldn't
drum. He was wrong thinking "How Do You Do It?" was the song they should record. He
was wrong proposing the Beatles call their first album Off the Beatle Track. (A title he liked
so much, he used it for his own album, featuring orchestral remakes of the lads' songs). The
really decisive element of Martin's genius is how swiftly he changed his mind when he
recognized he was wrong. In all these cases, Martin's thinking was solidly in line with the
realities of the music business. ("How Do You Do It?" was the hit he thought it was; just
wrong for this band.) He had an amazingly agile ability to adapt his thinking to the Beatles'
skill set, which was beyond anything a producer could have been trained to expect, but also
their increasing demands in the studio, when they began routinely asking him to create
sounds that had never come out of any recording studio before.
Every record he made with the band was a document of his brilliance as well as theirs. But
letting the Beatles write their own songs is the wisest decision George Martin ever made.
(And without cutting himself in on the credits, which would have been standard practice at
the time. The failure of George Martin to rip them off remains one of the inexplicable
elements of their story.)
It's all there in Please Please Me. You can hear that the Beatles have winter colds, but
Martin calculates their voices should hold up for 10 hours. They spend the session sucking
cough drops and chain-smoking. First thing in the morning, they do "There's a Place" and "I
Saw Her Standing There," which they're still calling "Seventeen." At lunch time, the studio
staff knocks off to the pub for a pie and a pint. But to their surprise, the Beatles don't join
them they tell Mr. Martin they'd rather stay in the studio and rehearse, drinking milk.
"We couldn't believe it," engineer Richard Langham says later. "We had never seen a group
work right through their lunch break before." There's no time to waste tomorrow it's back
to the road with two gigs in one night, one in Sheffield and another 40 miles away in
Oldham. Ringo does the Shirelles "Boys" in one take it's the first time he's ever sung in a
recording studio in his life, but that's the version on the album, complete with his "all right,
George!" into the guitar solo.
The clock is nearing 10 closing time, according to the strict rules at EMI Studios but
when everyone confers over coffee at the Abbey Road canteen, John reports he still has
enough left in his voice for one song. He gargles with milk and takes his shirt off. The band
rips into "Twist and Shout," as John shreds what's left of his vocal cords, one "come on" at a
time. Mr. Martin makes them play it a second time, but John's voice is gone. Everybody
listens to the playback, then the Beatles surprise the staff by asking to hear it again, forcing
them to stay past closing time. They have now made an album. It goes to the top of the U.K.
charts and stays at Number One for 30 weeks. Then it gets replaced by With the Beatles,
which stays at Number One for the next 22 weeks.
If a bulldozer had crashed through the Abbey Road wall at 11 a.m. and wiped out all four
Beatles along with George Martin, leaving only the tape machine rolling, and "There's a
Place" had been the last song they committed to tape that day, it would still be an historic
peak for rock & roll as a way of communicating, a way of feeling, a way of life. It would be
astonishing that the Beatles even got this far. They already had a new sound, so enormous
the world would have to bend and stretch to make room for it. George Martin was the only
one in the music business who thought an album like this was possible. That's why he's the
only producer who could have made it possible. And that's why the world will always be
grateful to George Martin.