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Martin was very important but he was the producer. He wasn't the arranger, nor composer, although he did write some of the piano pieces in songs like "In My Life" and "Eleanor Rigby". But, even Martin himself acknowledged it was Lennon and McCartney who approached him about bringing a classical element.
They certainly learnt a lot from him, but let's not overblow his influence.
The difficulty nowadays is to try and imagine hearing the music when it was first released to appreciate how innovative some of it was !
I was in a music lesson in 1990. We asked our music teacher what he liked. He said The Beatles. We poked fun of him for that lesson and the next doing the "oooohs" and shaking our heads. Third lesson, he walked in with Sergeant Pepper. That was the awakening for me. Up to then it was bands like Queen that my mates liked, after that I realised Queen were utter crap and totally pretentious. It turned me on to Bowie, Hendrix, Pet Sounds.
He finished the lesson with "And that's not even their best album". He was right. He won a few of us around that day and that was some 20 years after Pepper was released. I hadn't heard it before, but it didn't sound anything like what I was expecting, and it didn't sound much like anything I had heard up to then.
Having worked with the likes of Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan and Michael Bentine, George Martin was hardly a nobody in the music world before he teamed up with the Beatles, but his reputation, such as it was, was in comedy and novelty records pre Beatles. Four months before Love Me Do was released in 1962, Martin was involved in the production of Right Said Fred by Bernard Cribbins - if the Beatles needed George Martin, it’s probably true to say he needed them more.