Was George Martin really ‘the fifth Beatle’?

Stories on Tuesday’s death of longtime Beatles producer George Martin have refer to him as “the fifth Beatle,” a description used for him through much of his life.

But if you brought together all the people who’ve been described over the decades as “the fifth Beatle,” you’d have a small but pretty interesting community — certainly one larger than the quartet that became the Fab Four.

Who really deserves to be called “the fifth Beatle”?

For starters, there actually was a fifth Beatle, back in the days before the group found worldwide fame. Bassist Stu Sutcliffe, a Scot who also grew up in Liverpool, was there alongside John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and drummer Pete Best as they were scrapping around Liverpool and periodically trekking to Hamburg in the early 1960s trying to get some momentum going.

Sutcliffe left the group early on to pursue his passion for art, but died shortly thereafter in 1962 of a brain aneurysm. His departure reduced the band to the core quartet that it remained even after Ringo Starr took over the drums from Best in August 1962.

The “fifth Beatle” description also has been used for longtime associate Neil Aspinall, who was originally part of their road crew, helping the band members schlep gear from show to show and often driving them to far-flung gigs across Britain. Aspinall, a key member of the Beatles’ inner circle, went on to head up their Apple Corps business enterprise and record label, which he presided over until shortly before his death in 2008 from lung cancer.

George Martin himself was known on occasion to say that the honorific rightly belonged to Aspinall.

Likewise, Mal Evans was a key member of the Beatles team throughout their existence — among his higher-profile contributions to the band’s legacy is that is Evans’ voice heard counting up to eight during the rhythmic break in the Beatles’ 1968 recording of “Birthday.”

New York disc jockey Murray Kaufman, known on the air as Murray the K, often referred to himself as “the fifth Beatle” for his early support here in the U.S. of the group’s music. That support earned him an invitation from Beatles manager Brian Epstein to meet the group on its first U.S. visit in 1964, which he touted endlessly on his top-rated rock radio program. He even shared a room with Harrison when they traveled to Miami that year, and broadcast nightly from the shared suite.

Some would vote for the Beatles’ longtime publicist, Derek Taylor, whose canny marketing and contributions to shaping the group’s public image went a long way toward popularizing the band and its music to millions of fans worldwide.

Taylor first saw, and wrote about, the Beatles when they played in Manchester in 1963, his review stating, “The Liverpool Sound came to Manchester last night, and I thought it was magnificent... The spectacle of these fresh, cheeky, sharp, young entertainers in opposition to the shiny-eyed teenage idolaters is as good as a rejuvenating drug for the jaded adult.”

And even though he was on the Beatles payroll by 1964, he still showed more prescience than might be expected simply from a paid publicist when he wrote the liner notes to their “Beatles for Sale” album — at a time when most prognosticators were numbering the group’s life expectancy in terms of months, if not weeks.

“When, in a generation or so, a radio-active, cigar-smoking child, picnicking on Saturn, asks you what the Beatle affair was all about -- ‘Did you actually know them?’ -- don’t try to explain all about the long hair and the screams! Just play the child a few tracks from this album and he’ll probably understand what it was all about,” Taylor wrote.

“The kids of AD 2000 will draw from the music much the same sense of well being and warmth as we do today,” his notes continued. “For the magic of the Beatles is, I suspect, timeless and ageless. It has cut through differences in race, age and class. It is adored by the world.”

Then there is Epstein, who managed the Beatles from January 1962 until his death in 1967.

“I immediately liked Brian when I first met him in 1962, and he greatly impressed me with his passion to make the Beatles succeed,” Martin once said of Epstein, who persuaded Martin to sign them to his small Parlophone Records label after dozens of other companies had rejected the band. “It was that passion that encouraged me to meet the band, audition them and eventually to sign them.”

As Beatles historian Martin Lewis once put it, “Without their talent, [Epstein] would have had nothing to manage. But without Brian Epstein, none of us ever would have heard of the Beatles,” an argument that was at the core of Lewis’ long and eventually successful campaign to get Epstein inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Ultimately, however, it’s difficult not to finally settle on Martin, whose musical and technical skills were an integral part of the Beatles’ recorded legacy.

As much as the band was always lauded for its electrifying live performances, it is the recordings they made with Martin at the helm that secured the group’s place in profoundly shaping not just popular music of the 1960s but also the cultural landscape of the 20^th century.

The Beatles themselves were instinctual musicians with little formal training. Martin was the conduit for articulating their wishes to other professional musicians they began working with as they expanded their ambitions, as well as the executor of the many technological experiments that put the Beatles at the vanguard of the rapidly evolving art of recorded music.

“The fifth Beatle”? No less than Paul McCartney has bestowed that title on Martin.

Ultimately it doesn’t matter. It’s obvious that Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Starr benefited immeasurably from the efforts on their behalf by any number of key players.

But in terms of Martin, it’s enough to say theirs was perhaps the ultimate symbiotic musical collaboration. As Lennon once put it, “We learned a lot from him, and he probably learned a lot from us.”

The relevant point is that the world is far better off thanks to that mutual learning experience.

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