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From: Kevin Wayne 
Newsgroups: rec.music.beatles.moderated,rec.music.beatles
Subject: Re: George Martin's influence on the Beatles' music.
Followup-To: rec.music.beatles.moderated
Date: Sat, 6 Aug 2005 19:06:11 +0000 (UTC)
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On 8/1/05 5:19 PM, blackburst{at}aol.com wrote:
> Clifford Golson wrote:
> 
>>[Relationship between Beatles' ideas and Martin's production]
> 
> There was a curious synergy there. The Beatles were unusually talented
> to begin with, but Martin intitally was the teacher who helped polish
> the rawness of that talent. But in later years, the Beatles became the
> "teachers", in a way, and prevailed upon Martin to push the
traditional
> envelope in new ways. Martin thought the "cello groaning down to the
> seventh" in the second bridge of "Yesterday" was wrong,
but he allowed
> it, and he later came to see its genius and wished he had thought of it
> himself.

I think "curious synergy" is a good description. It would be interesting 
to know what other groups GM produced and what effect he had on their 
sound. Certainly he gave some structure to the Beatles' more amorphous 
ideas ("10,000 Tibetan monks"), and even if the result wasn't what the 
songwriter envisioned at first, at least something concrete got recorded 
onto the tapes.

Martin also prevailed upon the Beatles to reach outside their 
rock-n-roll roots and listen to other types of music, which assuredly 
influenced their direction from, say, Rubber Soul on. (The fact that 
they gravitated toward *different* types of music made for a richer 
blend as well.) I think it also had the effect of their pulling in 
ideas, like the one you note regarding "Yesterday," that for GM were old 
cliches. (The final chord to "She Loves You" is another.) But they 
weren't old cliches within the rock/blues tradition. In fact, the 
Beatles' major contribution to rock/pop may be to have brought in 
influences from other types of music, making rock/pop more complex and 
thereby creating a wider vista of possibilities. And GM is probably, in 
some measure at least, responsible for that.

-- 
Kevin Wayne

"Art is a tremendous means by which painfully guarded individuals bare 
their souls."  --Steve Hindalong

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