Yesterday . . . and Today

George Martin, the record producer whose work with the Beatles earned him knighthood in Britain, is caught off guard when asked to name the second greatest rock band of all time.

Though various people have been called the Fifth Beatle over the years, few have better claim to the title than Martin.

He not only signed the band to a record contract in 1962 after every other major label in England had turned them down, but he also was at their side in the studio during their remarkable odyssey from the simple charm of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” to the ambition and accomplishment of such albums as “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” and “Abbey Road.”

For those reasons, Martin has spent almost half of his 73 years answering questions about every detail of his lengthy relationship with the Beatles--from how he had the foresight to sign the band to whether John Lennon or Paul McCartney was more essential to the band’s excellence.

So during an interview this week in his Los Angeles hotel room, it takes a while for Martin to adjust to a question that is not about his celebrated group.

“The second best band, you say?” he responds, making sure he heard the question correctly.

Then he smiles broadly and adds, “I assume you’re granting me that the Beatles were the greatest.”

Assured of that point, the silver-haired producer casts his vote for the Rolling Stones, though he also has praise for other groups, from the Beach Boys to U2 to Radiohead.

Martin is in town to conduct the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra and a cadre of guest pop-rock musicians, including former Police drummer Stewart Copeland and the band the Bangles, in a program of Beatles music Friday at the Bowl.

For Martin, the visit will be a homecoming. He was on hand when the Beatles played the Bowl on Aug. 23, 1964. At the time, the country was already caught up in Beatlemania and the main thing Martin remembers about the band’s half-hour set was that the shrieking of the fans was so loud you couldn’t hear the vocals.

About Friday’s concert he says, “It’s lovely to be able to do this. The exciting thing for me is that I wrote all the orchestral scores for the Beatles, but fans have never got to hear them in concert.

“Whenever Beatles songs are played, it’s done with synthesizers imitating what we did in the studio. We’ll play the actual scores this time--and you’ll be able to hear it because I don’t think anyone will be shrieking just because I’m standing on stage.”

The Beatles returned to the Bowl in 1965, but Martin didn’t attend.

On the eve of this Bowl event, where the program is expected to include such tunes as “Yesterday” and “Magical Mystery Tour,” the producer, who was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame earlier this year, spoke about what he first saw inthe band and what it was like working with the Beatles until the group called it quits in 1970.

Question: So you’d nominate the Rolling Stones as the second greatest rock band, right?

Answer: That’s a difficult question because there are so many ways to approach it. Personally, I’ve always been more interested in the song than in the performance. I think that’s the key to greatness.

The Beatles, for instance, were four talented individuals who did wonderful things based on the incredible writing talents of two of them [Lennon and McCartney]. Those writing talents are among the finest popular songwriters of this century, equal in my mind to Gershwin and Cole Porter. . . .

You can also say that of Brian Wilson, but you can’t call the Beach Boys one of the best rock bands ever. So that’s why I’d say the Rolling Stones. The writing wasn’t at that absolute top level, but their stage performances were great.

Q: How about contemporary bands? What’s your feeling about U2?

A: Bono and company are very good, but there are so many others that can also make extraordinary music . . . Prodigy, Radiohead, Smashing Pumpkins. The one difference with groups today is that they really don’t have the same songwriting capabilities of the early days . . . and this is partly because the audience doesn’t want it.

Q: What do you mean?

A: The majority of young people nowadays spends half their lives in front of one screen or another. If they aren’t watching television, they are at the computer or on the Internet. They’ve become much more sensitive to visual things than to audio ones.

In the ‘60s, television was comparatively unimportant and computer screens didn’t exist, so the ear was everything. Therefore, people concentrated and listened and they appreciated what they heard on record.

Nowadays to sell a record, you’ve got to have a good image, a good video and so forth. The song is almost incidental in some ways.

Q: Let’s go back to the time you first saw the Beatles. What made you think there was any artistic merit there?

A: It wasn’t really artistic bent. I was running an English record company, Parlophone, and I didn’t have any big artists because most of the big sellers at the time were in America. When I first met the Beatles, there was no way to know they would develop as songwriters.I signed them for their character and charisma. I thought I could produce a hit with them if I could find the right song. The music they were writing in those days were things like “Love Me Do” and “One After 909”--not exactly “Summertime,” were they?

Q: What was the first time you thought of them as more than just hit-makers?

A: After they came up with “Please Please Me,” which was their first No. 1 in England. They were no longer just copying American artists, which is what they started out doing. This was something original. And the success of the record seemed to thrill them. It gave them the incentive to work harder. They studied the songs you had in America to see how they were constructed and then they created their own. The main thing about them was they didn’t stick to a formula like so many bands did. They were always looking for something different.

Q: But those early songs were still mostly cute and engaging. At what point did you sense Lennon and McCartney could go to the next level as writers?

A: “Rubber Soul” was the beginning of it and “Revolver” was another step and that led to “Pepper,” which was the first time they were allowed to spend a lot of time in the studio. That only came about as a result of their giving up touring.

The reason they wanted to stop touring was they had gone through four years of this incredible success . . . living constantly on trains and planes and on the road. It was taking its toll. They had no lives of their own. Above all, they didn’t have time to concentrate on their writing.

Q: The 1964 Bowl shows came right in the middle of that hurricane. What was it like?

A: It was terribly exciting. Eighteen thousand or whatever kids screaming their heads off. The truth is the boys weren’t singing very well, but you couldn’t tell because of all the noise. In those days, they didn’t have stage monitors like they have today, so they were just singing into a wall of screams.

Capitol Records recorded it with local technicians and not very well. I had to try and rescue the tapes years later so we could put out the live album and it was a hell of a job because on every track the screams were louder than anything else.

Q: Let’s talk about some of the songs you’ll be featuring at the Bowl. It’s surprising to see “I Want to Hold Your Hand” on the list because it’s not one of the substantial Beatles songs. Why did you choose that one?

A: It was such a terribly important song for the Beatles because it was the one that made America stand up and take notice. It’s such a good, lively, happy song. The way I do it will be purely instrumental, just to remind people of the goodness of the tune.

Q: “Eleanor Rigby” and “Yesterday” are two of the first great Beatles songs. What memories to they bring to mind?

A: “Eleanor Rigby” was the first song where there were no Beatles performing an instrument. “Rigby” was strictly strings and two voices.

Q: How did you ever talk a band into not playing on its own record?

A: It started with “Yesterday.” I thought it was a natural progression for them to use classical instruments because they were always looking for new sounds. With “Yesterday,” it was just a matter of convincing Paul, because he wrote the song. It had been around for quite a while and he asked one day what we should do with it.

I suggested he go into the studio and just sing it with his own guitar. It sounded lovely and I suggested the only thing we should add would be strings. He didn’t like the idea at all.

Q: Why not?

A: He said he didn’t want to turn it into Mantovani. He didn’t want it to be all syrupy. I said it doesn’t have to be like that if you just use a string quartet, which we did and it worked. When John heard it, he flipped. And that made it easier to use strings again on “Eleanor Rigby.”

Q: “Yellow Submarine” is not a song in that class, but it seems to charm everyone. What memories does that bring?

A: That was really just a song for Ringo, one of those silly songs with all these silly effects, just a throwaway. The animated film idea was something contracted by [the band’s manager] Brian Epstein and the Beatles hated the idea. They were contracted to write four other new songs to the film, so they gave them all the junk they could find to fill out the contract. If we had a song that didn’t work in a session, the joke was we’d send it over to “Yellow Submarine” for the movie. When the film became a huge success, of course, they started acting like it was a great film.

Q: How about giving your answer to a couple of the issues that are classic debates among Beatles fans. First, do you think “Sgt. Pepper” was the band’s best album?

A: No. “Pepper” was a hinge in their career, but my four albums are “Rubber Soul,” “Revolver,” “Abbey Road” and “Pepper.” I love “Abbey Road.” I think it has some great songs on it, and there’s also this poignancy because we all kind of knew that it was the last one.

Q: And whose band was it? Was it John’s band or Paul’s band?

A: It was neither of their bands. Those four guys formed four corners of a city. They bunched together and were impregnable. I think John and Paul were equal and more similar than most people imagine. People tend to think of John as the hard rocker and Paul as the softy. But Paul sang “Good Golly, Miss Molly” and he wrote and sang “Helter Skelter,” which is pretty hard stuff. And remember, John would write “Julia” and “Across the Universe,” which were beautiful. So, they were two sides of the same coin to me.

Q: Looking at their best work after the Beatles, such as John’s “Imagine” album and Paul’s “Band on the Run,” do you ever try to picture what they might have done if they had stayed together?

A: Of course. I believe they would have gone on to do great things. Although they wrote good songs on their own, it didn’t measure up quite to the greatness of the Beatles. The [split], however, was unavoidable. Their lifestyles were growing apart. They wanted their own lives. But I think they missed each other like mad. They missed that rivalry, that knocking against each other, which made them work even harder as writers. I think we all miss them as well, don’t we?

BE THERE

Beatles Music Celebration, with George Martin & the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, the Bangles, Trevor Rabin, Stewart Copeland, others, Friday at the Hollywood Bowl, 2301 N. Highland Ave., 8:30 p.m. $7-$75. (323) 850-2000.