So ideally matched were the Beatles to their producer George Martin that their relationship often seemed written in the stars. The truth is a bit more prosaic. The Beatles did not choose George Martin, and he certainly did not choose them. Like all pop music in the early '60s, it was an arranged marriage, shepherded by the group's manager Brian Epstein and Martin's label, Parlophone. Len Wood, the head of Parlophone's parent company EMI wanted to get his hands on the copyright for John Lennon and Paul McCartney's "Like Dreamers Do" because in 1962, the real money lay in publishing. He arranged the deal without consulting Martin, assigning the group to the producer. 

The Beatles were thrilled and nervous — it was likely their last chance at a recording deal, having been rejected by both Decca and Parlophone once before — but to Martin, it was an obligation. As detailed in Mark Lewisohn's definitive 2013 Beatles biography Tune In: The Beatles: All These Years, Martin's affair with his secretary Judy Lockhart-Smith came to light within the record company early in 1962. Martin and Lockhart-Smith were no passing fling — they'd later marry and never divorce, having two children along the way, including a son named Giles who has taken over his father's Beatle business — but Wood assigned the Liverpool quartet to George possibly out of spite. 

Nobody at Parlophone took the Beatles’ session seriously. Wood wanted "Like Dreamers Do" so he could turn it over to a real recording artist, and Martin originally assigned the session to an assistant named Ron Richards. This was standard procedure. George gave anything that skewed pop to Richards or another assistant, preferring to spend his producing hours on jazz or intricately-arranged novelty records. He decided to swing by the studio to take a gander at the group anyway. To this point, Martin assumed he'd be able to shape the Beatles into a unit resembling Cliff Richard & The Shadows: a beat group with a clear leader. To his immense credit, he recognized a spark of originality in the working-class combo, sensing it not so much in their original tunes but in their chemistry: Listening to the musicians play around, Martin realized the Beatles weren't merely a band, but they were a gang. 

Martin never attempted to be part of the gang. He was a collaborator and a conspirator, a mentor and a father figure, albeit one who never patronized them. From the outset, he recognized this was a band whose value lay in their originality, so his role lay in developing their vision. He'd edit the band's songs — he told Lennon to add a high, lonesome harmonica to debut single "Love Me Do" and helped stitch together John and Paul’s separate visions for "A Day In The Life" — and he'd certainly arrange the recordings, telling the group to pick up the tempo on "Please Please Me" so it no longer resembled a stately Roy Orbison dirge. Despite all this, he never took a songwriting credit, he never thought of himself as the artist; he was a record producer. 

Superstar producers simply didn't exist in 1962, when the Beatles released "Love Me Do." Over in America, Phil Spector started to rack up hits with his signature Wall of Sound, but Spector was Martin's opposite: He imposed his style on an artist instead of encouraging musicians to find their own voice. Although this is now generally accepted to be the role of a record producer, back in the early '60s this sensibility was a radical departure. Record producers were not musicians but rather technicians that existed behind the scenes. Great Britain's recording studios functioned almost like research facilities, with all the operators at EMI's Abbey Road Studios wearing lab coats on the job. Martin belonged to this system but he also bent its rules, recognizing that a recording wasn't a replication of a performance but its own artistic entity, capable of suggesting sounds that could never exist in real life. 

A classically trained pianist and oboist, Martin cut his teeth on classical and middle-of-the-road jazz early in the '50s, but he soon gravitated toward comedy and novelty records because they allowed him a chance to play with the possibilities of sound. His first hit arrived in 1952 with Peter Ustinov's "Mock Mozart,” but a better indication of Martin's studio flair can be heard on his comedy records with Peter Sellers. Perhaps 1959's Songs For Swingin' Sellers is the best showcase for Martin's nascent skills, but the 1957 hit “Any Old Iron” is crucial to the Beatles story, for each of the Fab Four not only adores Sellers' comedy troupe (the Goons) but the single spoofed skiffle, the ragged folk craze that swept through Britain in the late '50s, inspiring legions of teenagers — including Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison — to pick up a guitar and a washboard and just play. 

As a Parlophone house producer in the '50s, Martin dabbled in both rock ‘n’ roll and skiffle, some of these singles likely making their way to the Beatles’ young ears. He cut “Maggie May” — which the Fabs later dropped onto Let It Be— with the Vipers, one of the tougher and better skiffle groups, but his attempts at rock ‘n’ roll weren't as successful, topping out with the brassy "I'm Comin' Home,” a near-hit for Paul Beattie, who played the same Cavern Club as the Beatles. So, Martin wasn't opposed to teenage music, but he didn't find it as fascinating as the kitchen-sink productions he could cobble together under the guise of novelty records. Martin spent hours crafting recordings as ephemeral as a music hall tour-de-force called "The Hole In The Ground" by actor Bernard Cribbins in 1962, and the utterly bizarre 1958 novelty "Jailbird," a 45 constructed around a talking bird called Sparkie (it reportedly sold in the vicinity of 40 copies).

With hindsight, Martin channeled his considerable skill into records that benfited from his ears but weren't quite worthy of his talent. These follies now seem like apprenticeship, a training ground for everything he'd later achieve with the Beatles. The band seized this deep reservoir of experience, letting it guide their growth. If the Beatles wanted to dabble in country or jazz, they not only had a producer who knew how to execute such styles but one who knew how to push them ever forward. Even the band's purest, simplest music was bettered from Martin's touch. He made the decision to record the bulk of their 1963 debut Please Please Me in a single session with the idea that it'd replicate the rush of their live set — a decision that demonstrates his savviness just as surely as the multi-song suite that concludes Abbey Road does. So dazzling are those latter-day Beatles records — the albums made between Revolver and Abbey Road, when the group retired from the road with idea that they'd be studio-bound — and so loudly are Martin's studio innovations celebrated that it's often easy to overlook how the records released during the peak of Beatlemania are also peerless productions. With The Beatles carries an intense wallop, while A Hard Day's Night is the first indication of the band envisioning an album as its own tangible thing: witness that opening clang of the title track and its ringing coda, sounds that were only heightened by Martin's willingness to play along with the band.

Martin also recognized and accentuated the differences between Lennon and McCartney, adjusting his style to accommodate each musician. Lennon would simply throw ideas out to Martin, letting the producer fill in the details. When Lennon left the middle eight of "In My Life" blank, he trusted that Martin would devise the right solo; the producer decided to write a composed Baroque break, mimicking the sound of a harpsichord by speeding up a piano. When Lennon wanted to sound like chanting Tibetan monks on "Tomorrow Never Knows," the producer fed vocals through a rotating amplifier, achieving an unworldly effect. McCartney operated as something of a student, puzzling-out solutions with his mentor Martin, accepting his advice that "Yesterday" would sound best accompanied by a string quartet and learning specific skills from the master. Certainly, Martin and McCartney recognized kindred spirits in each other — both were restless and voracious, interested in technique and broad strokes — but Martin adored all four Beatles equally, calling them "the boys" long after they had become men and left his care.

As for himself, Martin never devoted the entirety of his time to the Beatles, not even during the '60s. Still under contract with Parlophone, he produced a bunch of other Merseybeat artists: He turned Lennon/McCartney's "Bad To Me" into a No. 1 hit for Billy J. Kramer & The Dakotas in 1964, and also worked with Gerry & The Pacemakers and Cilla Black. In 1965, he used his leverage to begin Associated Independent Recording, becoming the first superstar freelance producer who licensed recordings to labels. During the back half of the '60s, AIR didn't do much of note that wasn't involved with the Beatles but once the band split in 1970, Martin started to branch out, dabbling in jazz fusion with Stan Getz, Paul Winter, and John McLaughlin's Mahavishnu Orchestra — all moves that laid the groundwork for a pair of landmark jazz-rock albums he made with Jeff Beck, 1975's Blow By Blow and 1976's Wired. By that point, Martin also demonstrated his facility with sunbleached soft-rock, making the London-based America feel convincingly Californian on the AM staples "Tin Man" and "Sister Golden Hair." He also helmed one of the great unheralded country-rock records of the '70s, the self-titled LP by Eric Kaz and Craig Fuller's American Flyer. Martin got a little harder at the dawn of the '80s, teaming with Beatles fanatics Cheap Trick for All Shook Up— a dream union that turned out just OK — and then inexplicably recording albums with German hard rockers UFO and synth-poppers Ultravox.  

Martin kept working until the late '90s, eventually settling on superstar projects suiting his senior stature. The Glory of Gershwin, a 1994 album constructed as a salute to Larry Adler's 80th birthday, gave him the opportunity to work with Kate Bush, Sinead O'Connor, and Elvis Costello. It was a tasteful tribute that found a garish counterpart in 1998's In My Life, a misconceived career-capper that found Robin Williams singing "Come Together" with Bobby McFerrin, and Jim Carrey clowning around to "I Am The Walrus" in unwitting call-backs to Martin’s old novelty records of the '50s. In between these two projects came Elton John's tribute to Princess Diana, the revision of "Candle in the Wind" that Martin helped turn into the biggest-selling single of all time in 1997. 

Despite this record-smashing success, the true coda to Martin's career was his reunion with Paul McCartney in the early '80s. McCartney and Martin once again found that easy chemistry, reviving the majestic pomp of latter-day Beatles on 1982's Tug of War. Martin gave McCartney his last international Top 10 hit in 1984 with the ballad "No More Lonely Nights," but what's more impressive was  "Say Say Say," the 1983 chart-topper that showed how Martin could absorb all the hallmarks of Quincy Jones' productions for Michael Jackson and create something almost indistinguishable from the real thing. It was a feat that reinforced how he was a producer without peer, but it was also a final reminder that George Martin always brought out the best in the Beatles — and that they always brought out the best in him.