The entire chemistry of The Beatles wouldn’t have been possible without George Martin. The Fab Four had already been one of the finest bar bands anyone had ever seen, but it took Martin’s musical intellect to refine what they were doing and put it into one unique package whenever they got into the studio. It was never easy trying to translate what they wanted out of their songs, but when they had the right idea, Martin did feel a bit jaded that his musical pupils were able to outdo the master.
Looking back on the way the band played in their early years, they didn’t know the first thing about music theory. None of them bothered to study what they were playing, but with their incredible gift for melody, all they needed to do was follow their ear for where the song was going to figure out where the song would be going next, whether it’s the strange key changes in ‘From Me To You’ or the insanity of ‘I Am the Walrus’.
That’s not to say that the band went with everything Martin said, either. There are instances when his contributions saved a song like putting a mournful string section at the end of ‘Glass Onion’, but during The White Album sessions, there’s a good chance that Martin would have done without half of the tracks if it meant getting one cohesive album out of them rather than the hodgepodge that we were left with.
That album might have some of the finest tracks that the band ever made alongside a few duds, but it was all in the spirit of experimenting. The band knew that what they were doing needed to be a bit stronger than traditional rock and roll, and a lot of those risks had already been taken when Paul McCartney came in with the song ‘Yesterday’.
Playing a tune that wasn’t deliberately rock and roll was already risky, but the decision to add a string section was a step over the line for the group. They still wanted credit as a rock and roll band, and while McCartney eventually acquiesced and had the strings play along with his acoustic guitar, there was one piece of the arrangement that Martin thought should never have been in the final product.
Since McCartney didn’t know the first thing about arranging strings, his choice to give the players unconventional lines was something that Martin wished he had thought of first, saying, “There is one particular bit which is very much [McCartney] – and I wish I thought of it! – where the cello groans onto the seventh the second time around.” It wasn’t the root of the chord, but that’s what gives it the magic.
The whole point behind the song is about crying out in pain for someone who left McCartney out to dry, so not having the root of the chord makes it feel like something’s missing in the music as well. Is there a chance that Macca was thinking in those terms? Absolutely not, but it does make for one of the greatest moments in the background of The Beatles’ career.
Although Martin would continue to be one of the greatest musical translators for The Beatles, this is one of the few times he understood that breaking the rules wasn’t always bad. He could still be himself while thinking outside the box, and as long as it sounded good in the context of the tune, there was no reason for it not to make the final mix of the song.