5 Maiores Contribuições Que George Martin Fez para os Beatles

5 great contributions George Martin made to The Beatles

Here are five of the many instances when Martin shaped the Fab Four:

1. He was partially responsible for Ringo Starr replacing Pete Best. 

Martin was impressed by The Beatles after they auditioned for him in 1962, with the exception of original drummer Pete Best. The band's manager, Brian Epstein, fired Best shortly after and he was replaced by Ringo Starr. Talking to Melody Maker magazine in 1971, Martin elaborated: "He never joined in with the others. He was always a bit quiet, almost surly. But the basic thing was that I didn't like his drumming, it wasn't solid and he didn't bind the group together. ... The boys had been thinking of getting rid of him anyway, but they wanted someone to do the dirty work for them."

2. He emphasized the importance of a catchy hook. 

Recording Can't Buy Me Love in 1964, Paul McCartney initially wanted to kick it off with the first verse (which begins "I'll buy you a diamond ring, my friend, if it makes you feel all right"). But as Martin told music blog JazzWax in 2012, "I said to Paul, 'Why don't we start with the tagline at the corners?' So I designed for him the 'can't buy me love' intro that starts the song." The strategy effectively paid off on many Beatles singles. "People bought records in those days based on radio disc jockeys, and you had to grab the listener's attention right away," Martin said. "If you could hook them, you had them."

3. He ushered strings into their music. 

McCartney originally sang 1965's Yesterday only with an acoustic guitar, but he added a string quartet to the ballad at Martin's urging. "I'd kind of resisted his suggestion, but he very cleverly or astutely said: ‘Let’s try it. I’ve got a feeling it will work, and if you don’t like it we can take it off,' " McCartney told Clash in 2009. "I just did it on my own with George Martin and the quartet thing, and when we did that I liked it." When the band recorded Eleanor Rigby for the album Revolver  a year later, McCartney and John Lennon brought it to Martin and said they wanted to do another string arrangement, only with a much larger section.

4. He helped fuse sounds and styles on the group's boundary-pushing tracks. 

Strawberry Fields Forever was recorded in sessions for the band's seminal 1967 album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, although it was instead included on Magical Mystery Tour a few months later. But the song stands out for Martin's uncanny ability to combine two very different arrangements. In his 1979 memoir All You Need Is Ears, Martin writes how the original Strawberry was a heavier rock number with drums, bass and electric guitars. A week later, Lennon came back to Martin and asked to redo the song with strings and brass, which they also recorded.

"I said, 'They're both good. But aren't we starting to split hairs?' " Martin says. "Perhaps I shouldn't have used the word 'split', because John's reply was: 'I like the beginning of the first one, and I like the end of the second one. Why don't we just join them together?' "

5. He thought outside the box. 

Some of Martin's most unusual yet influential work with the band was on Sgt. Pepper's. The track Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite! required him to create a circus atmosphere, with a chaotic mess of sounds calling to mind rifle shots and people shouting. To do so, "I got hold of old calliope tapes, playing Stars and Stripes Forever and other Sousa marches, chopped the tapes up into small sections and had (engineer) Geoff Emerick throw them up in the air, reassembling them at random," Martin said in Mark Lewisohn's The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions. "Amazingly, they came back together in almost the same order. We all expected it to sound different, but it was virtually the same as before! So we switched bits around and turned some upside down."