Those that really know their Beatles history knows that their manager had been offering them to everyone... only to be rejected by label after label. Look up the famous Decca Studio harsh rejection of the Beatles- "
Guitar groups are on their way out"- to get a sense of what they were dealing with:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beatles'_Decca_audition By this point they had already been together for YEARS. They were not making much money. They felt trapped in a loop of low-paying gigs requiring very hard work and were losing hope of it becoming anything more. The whole experience was becoming mundane. They desperately needed a "next step" as they were all under various pressures to give up the whole idea of it and get good,
dependable jobs. One of them was facing the weight of fatherhood against this backdrop.
The Beatles are known for recording on EMI but even EMI didn't want them then. Their chances of being signed were thinning out, rejections were consistently harsh and they finally got an audition with a fledgling EMI subsidiary known for comedy albums, some classical music & novelty recordings- a far cry for any mainstream label recording rock or pop music.
It was this guy- George Martin- who chose to sign them to that label- Parlophone- when pretty much nobody else wanted them. Even he wasn't that impressed with their music at the time, famously quoted that they sounded "rather unpromising" but he liked what he heard enough to give them a chance, faux signing them more on their manager's enthusiasm before he'd even met them or seen them play in person. That was faux because he didn't sign the contract himself until later when he did get to conduct an in-person audition with them. The session did not go that well but he was won over more on their wit & charm instead of their musical prowess at the time.
Now think about that... how easy might it have been for him to do what pretty much the rest had already done- rejected them on the merits that the music wasn't that great (yet). Parlophone did not have budget to burn; it was regularly on the chopping block as a business unit itself. How many more rejections would it have taken for any one of the Beatles to give up and get respectable, dependable jobs? If there are parallel universes, there's going to be a bunch of them where that's exactly what happens and they have no Beatles at all. But George is the one who gave them a chance in OUR universe.
Their original version of Please Please Me was a slow ballad instead of the version we know today. George was the one who pressed them to speed it up or else record a faster song that he considered a more likely pop hit called "How Do You Do It?" written by someone else. That influence- that soft pressure and their own ambitions- made Lennon & McCartney work one of their overnight miracles to turn a slow ballad into their first original #1
uptempo hit, spurring on many other hook-loaded pop & rock hits to follow. George drove that.
If you read up on their recording sessions, you would learn just how much this man contributed to the end result. They would often bring in ideas & imagination and George would figure out how to turn concepts- sometimes wild, crazy concepts- into actual recorded music. He
collaborated with them. He
played instruments on some of their recordings. He
arranged music when their ideas got ahead of what they could arrange themselves. His role was HUGE all throughout their careers and it's heard in pretty much every song you know by them and many other popular artists.
Anyone who is a true Beatles fan should feel like this is losing any one of the four members of the group. Based on what I've read about his contributions, he was very much the fifth Beatle who, by choosing to give them a chance when nobody else wanted them, might have played the most crucial role to there being a Beatles in our own history.
So I say: Thanks George. I enjoy your contributions to music pretty much every day or week. I can't shuffle play my favorites folder for more than maybe an hour without hearing something that you helped bring out in a polished, classic form. Talent like yours will be missed... always... but thanks for leaving so much of your excellent work behind for all future generation to discover and enjoy for many decades to come. We should all wish that our own work could have a comparable legacy and broad, positive impact like that.
