When it came to his Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction in March 1999, George was suitably chuffed to be acknowledged by his peers, proclaiming, “I am very honored to be placed in a galaxy alongside many of my own heroes.” For the august organization, feting George was a no-brainer. As his official Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum biography notes, “As a result of his work with the Beatles, George Martin played a major role in changing the face of rock and roll. He was responsible for much of the group’s sound, and he introduced many musical elements that were new to rock and roll. He also had tremendous commercial success: he is responsible for 30 Number One singles in the UK and 23 Number One singles in the US.” Paul McCartney was inducted as a solo artist during the same ceremony—with the Beatles having been honored for their achievements as a band back in 1988—making the event all the more poignant for Martin.23
With the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame having made its pronouncement, seventy-three-year-old Sir George had truly become part of the cultural firmament. In the United States, he was regularly greeted with flashbulbs and autograph requests while being commemorated at nearly every turn and, on occasion, gently lampooned in his homeland. In 1998, the BBC Two comedy troupe Big Train took aim at Sir George, poking fun at his zealous custodianship of the Beatles’ legacy, as well as his recognition as their most authoritative and perhaps most visible spokesman over the years. In a sketch devoted to George, comedic actor Kevin Eldon played the august producer as a nonstop chatterbox who can’t stop himself from delivering one anecdote after another—even as Middle Eastern terrorists kidnap him and hold him in captivity. At one point, the terrorists removed a duct-taped George from the wheel well of their truck as he prattles on about the recording session for “Can’t Buy Me Love.” The sketch’s final segment depicted a bearded Martin at his postrelease press conference as he sidesteps questions about his imprisonment in order to share a non sequitur about the Beatles smoking pot on the sly while working in the studio with him during the Sgt. Pepper years. In so doing, the Big Train team succeeded in mixing the low culture of sketch comedy with the high culture of George and the Beatles’ art. It wasn’t the first time that Martin had been skewered on British television. Years earlier, he had been depicted as record producer “Sir Archie Macaw” (played by actor Frank Williams) in All You Need Is Cash, Eric Idle and Neil Innes’s Beatles parody that premiered on BBC2 in March 1978.
When he wasn’t being roasted on national television, George was a frequent guest on British talk shows, where he would wax poetic about the Beatles’ world-beating accomplishments. To his credit, he made a rule of refusing to take credit for the many ways in which they had so dramatically altered both their musical genre and his industry. And for the occasions when he was called on to share his own thoughts about his life in music, he was unfailingly careful to include the Fab Four’s achievements not as his own but as a fortunate happenstance that gave his work meaning and afforded him with a platform for imagining a career beyond his lean, early years with Parlophone. During a November 19, 1995, episode of Desert Island Discs with commentator Sue Lawley, for example, George spoke movingly about the music that first lit the fuse of his artistic soul, including such personal touchstones as Maurice Ravel’s Daybreak from Daphnis and Chloé and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Oboe Quartet in F Major. But at the same time, he included his own productions of the Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and Peter Cook and Jonathan Miller’s “Aftermyth of War” among the discs that he would treasure if he were to be marooned on some uncharted desert isle. When asked to choose a favorite, George Martin, as hapless castaway, chose Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s Fantasy Overture from Romeo and Juliet as his favorite musical confection, suggesting that, as John Lennon had mused so many years before, “all you need is love.”
But as tenderhearted and poignant as George’s episode of Desert Island Discs truly was, he couldn’t help finishing his stint on BBC Radio without a wink in his eye and a smile in his heart. What book would he choose to take with him to while away his days in lonely exile, Lawley asked? “A book on how to build a boat to try and escape!” George countered. And as for his luxury item? Of that there was never any doubt, said George. He would be happy with a keyboard, he surmised: “Something I could make music on would be very nice, indeed.”24
Epilogue
Swan Songs
* * *
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 f
rom 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, M
artin 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.
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