Mix-Master to the Beatles

George Martin's new LP was out last week, and U.S. record dealers had placed orders for more than 1,000,000 copies before it was even released. So it has already been awarded the record industry's coveted gold disk--the 23rd for Martin. Of course, the album is not actually under Martin's name, although he produced it, scored all the arrangements for it, performed on several tracks, and served as its mad electronic scientist. It is called Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, and it features the group whose sound Martin has helped to create and shape since their first recording session five years ago: the Beatles.

Martin, 41, is a lean, precise Londoner with short hair and a background as second oboist in the old Sadler's Wells orchestra. He was a senior producer for England's EMI records when the then unknown Beatles--already rejected by several recording firms, including EMI --pleaded for an audition. "I didn't do any double somersaults," he recalls. "The material wasn't very good." But he liked them well enough to offer them a recording contract, and started them out with a firm hand: "I told them very much what to do."

Pillow to Pot. Things have changed considerably since then. As Beatle George Harrison puts it, "we've gained the freedom to please ourselves." What this means for Martin is that now "they place far greater demands on the studio than any other group in pop music." Where their first album, consisting of songs they had evolved on tour, was recorded in a single day, Sgt. Pepper took more than three months, with four to six sessions a week. The Beatles came in with the basic ideas and lyrics but left much of the rest to be worked out with Martin.

For A Day in the Life, a larky ditty about a mod's sally from pillow to pot*, Martin stitched together two separate songs by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, brought in a 41-piece orchestra for the instrumental passages, and concocted a closing chord by combining the Indian tamboura with the sound of his hand hitting the strings inside a piano. For the fairground-steam-organ effect requested by Lennon for Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite, he played a Hammond organ himself, recorded it at different speeds, mixed in "montages of other organ sounds overlaid with electronic echoes," then cut all the recordings up and recombined them. For the Indian-flavored Within You Without You, Martin spent four days fitting Harrison's singing and playing the sitar, tamboura and swormandel into multiple tracks of percussion and strings that had to ride smoothly over a tricky rhythmic shift between 4/4 and 5/4.

Motley Images. Counting the other Martin touches--echoes, doubled voices and guitars, background scorings of everything from the Beatles humming on paper-and-comb to a string octet with harp--about the only thing he did not have a hand in was the album cover, a sort of pop-Edwardian design by English Painter Peter Blake and his wife Jann Haworth. On it, the band-costumed Beatles are flanked by wax figures of themselves and motley images of "people we like," including Mae West, Edgar Allan Poe, Karl Marx, Johnny Weissmuller and Lawrence of Arabia.

Another figure who deserves a place in those ranks is Martin himself, who has emerged as Britain's top pop-record producer, moved to his own label, and started writing his own songs and movie scores, but who will continue to be musical father-confessor and producer of the Beatles on EMI. Where they are concerned, as he says proudly, "I make things possible."

* Which was banned by the BBC on the ground that it "could encourage a permissive attitude toward drug taking."

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