For evidence that The Beatles would have been great without George Martin in tow, one need look no further than at the band’s first LP, Please Please Me, which was recorded in a single day with few of the producer’s magic touches added and which sparkles nevertheless. “One, two, three, FOUR,” Paul McCartney screams at the outset, and from that moment they are off. Listening fifty-three years later, one is struck by the energy exploding through the valves. This was a group that was always destined for glory.

But not, perhaps for the stratosphere. That would take collaboration, and, specifically, it would take George Martin. Paul McCartney was born a master craftsman with a perfectionist’s ear, and yet it is unlikely that he would have so effortlessly channeled the baroque without Martin there by his side. John Lennon’s foray into surrealism and magic was likely foreordained—the penchant for escapism that he exhibited in his early years tells us that much—and yet to make his trips down the rabbit hole shimmer and gleam he needed Martin’s technical adventurism and smorgasbord mind. When talking about The Beatles, “serendipity” is an overused word. But there really is none other that will suffice. If the fab four were Michelangelo, Martin was the paint. Presented with some of the finest songwriting in all of human history, he made it his life’s work to weaponize the recording studio in its favor. He was, in the modern parlance, an enabler.

And how. When, in 1966, John Lennon came to him with a half-written idea that revolved around a single chord and some lyrics cribbed from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the straight-laced Martin refused to be intimidated. Instead, he hired a Leslie Speaker, screwed around with some tape loops, and let the freak flag fly. The result, Tomorrow Never Knows, is a watershed moment in musical history — the forward-looking foundation of so much that we now take for granted. Not bad for a middle-class stiff from Highbury!

In truth, there was little that fazed George Martin — except, that is, for the absence of quality. He remained sanguine through the high-as-a-kite melodia of Rubber Soul; happily navigated the drug-visions-and-circus-acts of Revolver, Sgt. Pepper, and Magical Mystery Tour; and joyfully curated the opera that is Abbey Road. With the White Album, however, he finally baulked — not at the turned-up-to-11 experimentation or the occasional outbreaks of crudity, but at what he perceived to be a shameful lack of self-respect. Whether one agrees with Martin’s view that that record should have been shorn of its weaker moments in favor of a more polished whole is by the by; that it was this worry rather than the group’s trailblazing that pushed him over the edge tells us something important: He could tolerate anything but mediocrity.

As Shakespeare left behind a vault of quotable nuggets within a library of fuller works, so Martin and the Beatles peppered the musical landscape with instantly recognizable moments: The crashing chord that opens Hard Day’s Night; the heavenly close-harmonies of Because; the nightmarish din that closes A Day in the Life; the faux-harpsichord in the middle of In my Life — these are cultural fixtures to rival Hamlet’s Soliloquy. Together, John, Paul, George, Ringo, and George did work of the highest order — beautiful, thoughtful, painstakingly constructed work that will never be repeated or matched.

Lightning struck in 1963, and, being a sensible sort, George Martin put a microphone in front of it. Rest in peace, George. Now it’s time to say Goodnight.