Sir George

The evening of Thursday May 3rd was one of those once-in-a-lifetime experiences. I saw Sir George Martin speak at Toronto’s Wintergarden Theatre. For those of you too young to remember The Beatles, and that’s most of you on myspace, George Martin was their Producer. He’s often referred to as “the 5th Beatle”. In truth I always thought “the 5th Beatle” referred to Charlie Manson – turns out no.

Imagine spending 2 rapturous hours spellbound by stories about the making of “Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”, listening to original demos for the songs that made up that landmark album (we used to call them “albums” son, now pull up your pants and straighten that ball cap”), hearing Sir George solo different parts of songs like “Strawberry Fields” and “A Day In The Life” so that he could illustrate how John Lennon double-tracked his vocal parts, or how drums and vocals were often recorded to one track because they only had 4 tracks to work with and they needed 2 for bass and guitars.

Now imagine this 81 year old, handsome, dignified master who saw The Beatles at their very best and their very worst, solemnly recalling the day his close friend, Beatle’s manager Brian Epstein, took his own life.

George Martin, with incredible technical skill and an even greater empathy for the artistic spirit, allowed The Beatles to explore musical ideas that broke all convention. When John Lennon wanted a calliope on the song “For The Benefit of Mr Kite” George Martin didn’t tell him why they couldn’t haul a steam-driven behemoth of an instrument into Abbey Road studios – instead he created John’s calliope with hundreds of bits of cut-up recording tape randomly spliced together. There was no such thing as “no”, there was only “how”.

Here are a few precious tidbits I learned that night;

- George Martin almost didn’t sign The Beatles to EMI when Brian Epstein first played him their demo tape. Martin thought the songs were terrible, and he is a man who would know these things. However when the band played live for him he signed them on the spot, if for no other reason than their spirit and charm, and their unfaltering belief that they would make it big

- when he wrote the string quartet arrangement for “Eleanor Rigby” George Martin based it on Bernard Herrman’s theme for the Hitchcock film “Psycho” – not the “screech screech screech” part from the shower scene, but the main theme with it’s staccato syncopations

- the trumpet solo for “Penny Lane” was based on Bach’s “Brandenburg Concerto”. Paul McCartney had seen a London Symphony trumpeter performing the concerto on television. George Martin wrote the part, and McCartney had that same trumpeter perform it in the song

Sir George finished the evening with a poignant tale about John Lennon and his method of counting in a song. Traditionally if a song is in 4/4 time one of the musicians will count in “1,2,3,4” and the band begins to play. However John Lennon would always count in songs with nonsense words spoken in the rhythm of the tune. So in closing, as the house lights dimmed and the large screen onstage lit up with an image of John at a microphone, his now sadly disembodied voice quietly counted in “sugarplum fai-ry, sugarplum fai-ry” – and as the opening piano chords of “A Day In The Life” filled the room, the world of rock and roll as all of us had known it changed forever.