Sound Pictures
Page 68
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 yea
rs 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.