George Martin
Whilst (heh) unsuccessfully searching for pictures of 1950 British family life to augment my Eric the Half a Bee post, I ran across the allmusic biography of George Martin. First, I'll share an excerpt regarding Martin's early musical training and 1950s studio experience:
George Martin was born in 1926 in London. Although his family wasn't especially musically oriented, Martin became interested in the piano before the age of eight, and taught himself a good deal about the instrument....
[After the war] Martin was in uniform for another year, at the end of which, after passing through a clerk's job, he entered the Guildhall School of Music, studying composition, conducting, orchestration, and theory, and taking up the oboe as a second principal instrument.
In the fall of 1950...Martin received the offer of a job as assistant to Oscar Preuss, the head of Parlophone Records. The Parlophone label in those days was part of the EMI organization, but it was a poor relation to such labels as Columbia (the British imprint, no relation to the American company of that name) and HMV Records....For the next six years, as Preuss' assistant, he learned about the recording process and how to manage it, and how to work effectively with artists ranging from solo pianists and dance bands to symphony orchestras....
The label eked out a profit working around the edges of low production budgets and emaciated promotional budgets, when compared to its rivals HMV and Columbia U.K.; it only seemed to have a leg-up on Regal Zonophone, the EMI imprint that, by the mid- to late '50s, had been given over entirely to Salvation Army Band recordings.
Martin joined the record industry just as it was going through a vast technological transition, from 78s to LPs and 45s — a process that EMI, owing to a certain ossified quality in its management, was slow to join — and to magnetic tape as a means of recording. He was quicker than many of his colleagues to grasp the importance of these innovations, especially magnetic tape, and what they could mean to the recording process. As early as 1955, he had recorded Peter Ustinov in a series of overdubbed recordings of his own voice and instruments, in a satirical piece called Mock Mozart....
In 1955, when Preuss retired, Martin was selected to succeed him as the head of Parlophone Records, at 29 the youngest label chief in the company's history. Within the constraints of his budgets, he was able to start putting his own mark on the label. Outbid for most of the top music talent in the country...he concentrated on non-musical performers and tapped into a small but profitable niche in comedy records. Ustinov was one of his successes, but his real star was Peter Sellers, then an up-and-coming comic performer and would-be actor. Sellers, who was then best known as a member of the Goons, a popular comedy team, became a mainstay of Parlophone's stable of acts during the second half of the 1950s. Martin also added to the company's roster the talents of the Temperence Seven, a trad-jazz/nostalgia outfit who ultimately gave the producer his first number one hit on the U.K. charts with "You're Driving Me Crazy" in 1961; future Broadway star Jim Dale; and Rolf Harris, the Australian singer.
During the early rock & roll boom of 1956-1958, Martin missed a chance to sign Tommy Steele, but did get the band that accompanied him, the Vipers Skiffle Group, led by Wally Whytton, who enjoyed a Top Ten hit with "Don't You Rock Me, Daddy-O" and cut numerous successful records (even getting a release of their work in the United States) between 1957 and 1961. He didn't see much in the way of youth-oriented acts, however, until the spring of 1962....
Why was George Martin so important?
[H]e chose to communicate with and understand his artists — those years of nurturing Parlophone's rather threadbare roster of performers served him in good stead, where other producers, even at EMI, retained much more formal and distant relations with their artists; he recognized their songwriting talent early, and only worked to polish the resulting records and move the abilities of John Lennon and Paul McCartney (and later George Harrison and Ringo Starr) in more commercial and productive directions. What's more, he never tried to make them sound like something they weren't. His colleague Walter J. Ridley, at HMV, would communicate with acts of his such as Johnny Kidd & the Pirates by memo, and hardly ever see them, and get the hard R&B-oriented group to record absurd pop songs such as "The Birds & the Bees"....Martin always had his performers sound like who they were, just optimizing the recording.
And he was sensitive to the band's concern that they play on their own records. It was common practice in those days, with studio time expensive and teenage audiences perceived as unconcerned who backed up the singer on a record, to bring in professional session players to play on recording sessions, and leave it to the band to handle concert work (Herman's Hermits was the extreme example of this).
Incidentally, Jimmy Page and John Baldwin (John Paul Jones) met in the English studios of the 1960s. Back to Martin:
Martin only did this once, on the Beatles' earliest sessions, calling in drummer Andy White, and only because he was unsure at the time about the abilities of new member Ringo Starr.
Most importantly, by working with the group, and not simply working on their recordings, as was the custom of many producers, Martin educated them and started an evolutionary process in their thinking and writing....The band as a whole, and Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison as composers, rose to the occasion, and soon they were writing more elaborate songs, and thinking in more sophisticated sounds, and writing music that allowed for more sophisticated embellishment.
So how did Parlophone reward him? They didn't, so he left.
Most onlookers, who saw Martin's name attached to the Beatles' albums up through Abbey Road, were not aware, however, that Martin had disassociated himself from Parlophone and EMI Records after 1965. Amazingly, given his success over the previous two years, Martin had seen no increase in his ridiculously small salary of 3,000 pounds (about 7,000 dollars) a year, which had been established when Parlophone was a small, modestly profitable part of the EMI group. Worse still, the corporate management had contrived, through some arcane interpretation of its rules, to deny him a Christmas bonus; and when it was time to renegotiate his contract, and he had wanted a small producer's royalty (a standard industry practice), they'd come up with a formula that could easily have ended up reducing his compensation. With Ron Richards, another EMI producer named John Burgess, and a former EMI producer named Peter Sullivan, Martin co-founded AIR (Associated Independent Recording), their own production company.
AIR could have been a record label as well — the collective experience of its four founders was more than most record companies have started with — but for the fact that it was under-capitalized. None of its founders had earned huge amounts of money, and while they could probably have attracted well-heeled backers (today, the venture would have been considered the musical equivalent of Dreamworks as a film studio, and drawn would-be investors and stock underwriters by the thousands), the decision was made to build the business gradually from the ground up....
The breakup of the Beatles freed Martin from the last vestige of his former relationship with EMI, and his career and the range of music that he worked with blossomed during the 1970s. He worked with acts ranging from America and Jimmy Webb to Jeff Beck and the Mahavishnu Orchestra. His relationship with the Beatles after their breakup was limited — John Lennon and George Harrison used other producers as soon as the group was defunct, but Ringo Starr chose Martin to work on his album of '30s pop standards, Sentimental Journey, and Paul McCartney reunited with Martin to work on the soundtrack Live and Let Die from the James Bond movie....
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