Interview: Cliff Martinez, film score composer, “Drive”
Cliff Martinez owns a piece of artwork, displayed in the entryway of his home/studio in the San Fernando Valley, that offers a glimpse into the storied past that led to his work as a film composer for current movies such as Nicolas Winding Refn’s “Drive.” It is the album art for Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band’s classic 1969 album, “Trout Mask Replica” — the one with Beefheart holding a fish head in front of his face.
On the poster, Beefheart inscribed the following: “Cliff, don’t jump. Gravity will be jealous.” Beefheart, aka Don Van Vliet, signed it one week before Martinez, a drummer in Los Angeles’ fertile post-punk scene, got a call to play on Beefheart’s final studio album, 1982′s “Ice Cream for Crow.”
“I pick up the phone, and I just hear, ‘What are you doin’?’ And I said, ‘I’m watching TV,’” Martinez said in a recent phone interview. Martinez said that eccentric artist behind “Lick My Decals Off, Baby” and “When Big Joan Sets Up” took a pause, then piped up again. “‘Anything good on?’” he said.
Van Vliet offered him the job. “I couldn’t have been more thrilled if I had been playing with Jimi Hendrix or Miles Davis,” Martinez said.
Nearly 30 years later, long after playing with Beefheart and serving as drummer on the first two Red Hot Chili Peppers albums, Martinez, 57, is an in-demand composer of film scores. Just this year, his work can be heard in “The Lincoln Lawyer,” “Drive” and the latest film by frequent collaborator Steven Soderbergh, “Contagion.”
“For the better part of 2010, I was just catching up on my thumb-twiddling. And then all of a sudden this happened. I’ve never done three in a year, and the year’s not even over,” Martinez said. “I guess all of that time I stood by the freeway with the “Will Score for Food” sign finally paid off.”
Martinez’ work on “Drive” recalls the gleaming, robotic pulse of Tangerine Dream’s “Risky Business” score or Giorgio Moroder’s Eurodisco compositions for “Midnight Express”: atmospheric washes and kinetic bursts of dance music for night drivers. He built his score around the core songs Refn included as references on the rough cut: new tracks such as “Nightcall” by Kavinsky & Lovefoxxx, a mid-tempo dance song with a distinctly mid-1980s sound. He said he often uses keyboards with specific sounds as core instruments in his scores, but his most prized musical instrument is a Baschet Cristal, a 1952 invention that first caught Martinez’ imagination when he was in grade school.
“I saw it as a child in 1964 or ’65 at the Museum of Modern Art,” Martinez said. “The guys who built it, the two brothers, Francois and Bernard Baschet, had an exhibit of 12 instruments they created. It was just one of those things that you see as a child that just completely reupholster your brain. And I think the Beatles happened the same year on Ed Sullivan, so I think those things are what made me want to be a musician — and not just an ordinary one, but a weird musician.
“Nobody knows what it’s supposed to sound like, so everyone assumes I know what I’m doing,” he said. “It is laid out like a piano, sort of, so in a sense it’s kind of intuitive, but I can’t think of any other instrument you play with moistened fingers on glass rods.”
It was his sense of musical adventure and discovering new sound opportunities that led Martinez into film. In the mid-1980s, when the Red Hot Chili Peppers were recording their second album, “Freaky Styley” with George Clinton, Martinez bought a sampling drum machine. It had only about five seconds of sampling memory, but Martinez would record what he refers to as “rude noises” and construct percussion loops.
His experiments with the rudimentary sampler first gained attention from “Pee Wee’s Playhouse,” but then Soderbergh, who was just starting his career as a filmmaker, chose Martinez to score 1989′s “Sex, Lies and Videotape.” Martinez spent the next several years scoring Soderbergh films, including “Traffic,” “Solaris” and “The Limey.”
“He said, ‘That stuff will be perfect for my next movie,’” Martinez said of his first collaboration with Soderbergh. “When I saw the movie, I said, ‘I don’t get it, Steven. This doesn’t sound like it will work at all,’ and he said, ‘Oh yeah, we’ll do something different.’”
For Martinez, that spirit of doing “something different” goes all the way back to his days in the L.A. underground. During the “Freaky Styley” sessions, Martinez said the Chili Peppers would be recording an instrumental track at Clinton’s Detroit studio that, to their ears, was fatally flawed. He said that Clinton set the young men straight.
“He said, ‘That’s not a mistake. That’s the funk,’” Martinez recalled. “That was a very Beefheartian thing to say.”
Video of the Day: Dierks Bentley performs Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” on “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon”
Hard to follow up MGMT’s “Lucifer Sam” on Wednesday night, but Bentley proved that Pink Floyd songs can travel over stylistic borders with ease. Beautiful pedal steel and fiddle on this one.
– Lang
Video of the Day: MGMT performs Pink Floyd’s “Lucifer Sam” on “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon”
Fans of MGMT’s second album, “Congratulations,” should not be too surprised that they chose a Syd Barrett song from “Piper at the Gates of Dawn” as their entry in Fallon’s Pink Floyd Week. Each night has been first-rate, but I personally feel that MGMT tapped into the true spirit of the band with this one. Fantastic.
Be a hip cat. Be a ship’s cat. Anywhere.
– Lang
Video of the Day: Roger Waters and Foo Fighters perform “In the Flesh?” on “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon”
Pink Floyd week continues with Waters and the Foos doing the opening track from “The Wall.” In terms of sequencing, this seems more like a Friday night installment, but apparently Pearl Jam is doing “Mother,” so all is right with the world. Foo Floyd is definitely feeling that warm thrill of confusion, that space cadet glow.
– Lang
Video of the Day: The Shins perform Pink Floyd’s “Breathe” on “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon”
Pink Floyd’s “Discovery” box set dropped today and the entire Pink Floyd catalog is being re-released with “immersion” packages, offering hugely expanded material surrounding each classic album. As part of the celebration, Jimmy Fallon is bringing on one artist each night of the week to perform a Pink Floyd classic. James Mercer and the Shins kicked things off with “Breathe” from “The Dark Side of the Moon.”
– Lang
Video of the Day: The War on Drugs, “Come to the City”
From “Slave Ambient,” The War on Drugs find that uncharted territory between U2′s “Bad” and “Damn the Torpedoes”-era Petty. But, you know, good.
– Lang
The War on Drugs - "Come to the City" (Official Music Video) from Urban Outfitters on Vimeo.
R.E.M., 1980-2011
Hard as it is to remember just what it felt like, kids in the early 1980s had few options. Because only about 1 in 4 of your friends had cable and most of the actual entertainment options on the cable stations still amounted to old movies and canceled sit-coms, you watched the same shows every night, and music was roughly the same. If you listened to rock, all of your friends were listening to the same radio station, and if you wanted to hear an entire album, you either had to buy it (I know this sounds like a “I walked 10 miles to school in the snow every day” story, but bear with me) or you had to wait until Sunday night when the local rock station played entire albums with commercial and announcement breaks between vinyl sides.
MTV in 1981 did a lot to open things up, especially for Midwestern high school students, but in Tulsa the guy who did more to open our ears to music than anyone or anything else was a guy named Mel Myers who was programming KMOD at the time, and Myers was important because he was damned sneaky. KMOD was a mainstream rock station playing metric tons of ’60s and ’70s music and a whole lot of the hard rock of that time — Rush, Triumph and all the “faceless bands” of the time like REO Speedwagon, Foreigner, Styx and Journey. But in between all that, Myers was sneaking in the Plimsouls, the Payolas, occasional pre-”Remain in Light” Talking Heads like “Take Me To the River,” and even Missing Persons’ “Words.”
But the real game changer was when KMOD played R.E.M.’s “Radio Free Europe,” because listening to this single was like having a piece of space technology fall out of the sky in the desert and not knowing what to do with it. It did not sound like any rock music I had heard, mainly because my frames of reference were still sized for Polaroids at the time. You couldn’t sing along to it much except for the chorus, and even then you didn’t know what it meant.
“Decide yourself if radio’s gonna stay. Reason: it could polish up the gray.”
There’s not much consensus on whether the first word is “decide,” “besides” or “resign,” but what Michael Stipe was mumbling about was the very thing that “Radio Free Europe” was doing at that moment. It was polishing up the gray.
For those of us who were not privy to Television (the band) or Pylon or the Feelies or the SST bands coming out of California, R.E.M. was redefining what it meant to be a rock star. They looked like the kids in your classroom and there was nothing about them that suggested rock star heroics. Peter Buck wasn’t really playing anything that sounded like a conventional guitar solo back then, and playing a Rickenbacker was something that hadn’t really been in mainstream vogue since the Byrds. This was seismic, because most of us were educated on the 1970s model of rock music which dictated that the people on stage were nothing like you, and a guitar was to be brandished like the hammer of Thor.
They were the smart kids in class — nerds in the most affectionate sense. Their words were as impenetrable as the kudzu on the cover of “Murmur,” and when you could make out a few syllables, they seemed to be about a South that you didn’t really hear about much outside of Flannery O’Connor, especially on the extraordinary “Fables of the Reconstruction/Reconstruction of the Fables.” That was the first album I bought that took me about a dozen listens to finally crack the sonic code, to truly appreciate what was being done. I mean, I labored over it, because Peter Buck’s opening guitar notes on “Feeling Gravity’s Pull” didn’t sound right to my ears for multiple listens. But their palette was opening up around this time, and Stipe was starting to sound out recognizable sentences and complete, non-oblique thoughts.
The cult of R.E.M. grew throughout the 1980s, but it blew wide open on the last album they did for I.R.S., 1987′s “Document,” when they achieved an honest-to-God hit with “The One I Love,” a perfectly constructed radio song that, at the time, we couldn’t believe was actually being accepted without reservations in the pop culture at-large. I lived in Japan at the time, and friends would send me tapes of MTV that included “The One I Love” in rotation next to Whitesnake and Debbie Gibson. When R.E.M. signed to Warner Bros. for 1988′s “Green,” the basic rules of modern rock vs. the mainstream seemed as if they were being entirely upended.
R.E.M. was the canary in the coalmine for the 1990s alt-rock revolution, proving you could sell out basketball arenas in the late-1980s without wearing a stitch of spandex. In Spring 1991, R.E.M. experienced its biggest hit with “Losing My Religion” from “Out of Time,” which was sort of the last shot of the original 1980s modern rock guard before Nirvana’s “Nevermind” and Pearl Jam’s “Ten” reset the scales. Both bands considered R.E.M. their sort of spiritual guide, showing the way for indie bands with platinum potential, and for the balance of the grunge period, R.E.M. was a megastar band alongside those groups, due in large part to the success of the band’s critical high-water mark, 1992′s “Automatic for the People.” The AV Club referred to “Automatic” as R.E.M.’s “Pet Sounds,” and that’s entirely appropriate. It was an album with a tonal through-line like none they had ever established on any previous album, and the songs were of a quality, from the writing to the performance to the arrangements by Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones, that constitutes a stone-cold classic.
Most R.E.M. fans acknowledge that the band’s output fell off after the departure of drummer Bill Berry, after which Stipe, Buck and Mike Mills carried on with drummers such as Joey Waronker and Bill Rieflin. I would argue that “Automatic” was the last indispensable R.E.M. album. “Monster” and “New Adventures in Hi-Fi” had high points but neither was as perfectly wrought as “Automatic for the People.” Berry was an important component of the band’s sound, but from 1998′s “Up” onward, the group rarely sounded like it had something important to play, sing or write.
But R.E.M., who announced their breakup on Sept. 21, put out eight classic albums between 1981 and 1992. The Rolling Stones haven’t put out an indispensable album in 30 years, but that doesn’t change how I feel about their accomplishments in their first two decades.
I don’t mourn R.E.M.’s loss. They did more than enough. For me, for you, and for them.
– Lang
Video of the Day: Wild Flag, “Romance”
Mary Timony, Janet Weiss, Carrie Brownstein and Rebecca Cole make the exact sound one expects from two-thirds of Sleater-Kinney, the leader of Helium and the drummer for the Minders — endlessly energetic — and Brownstein’s well-documented comedic skill sets the tone for this first video.
– Lang
Wild Flag - Romance from Merge Records on Vimeo.
R.E.M. Breaks Up After 31 Years
According to Rollingstone.com, R.E.M., the legendary Athens, Ga. band that helped define alternative rock in the 1980s and 1990s, has broken up after over three decades.
“During our last tour, and while making Collapse Into Now and putting together this greatest hits retrospective, we started asking ourselves, ‘what next’? Working through our music and memories from over three decades was a hell of a journey. We realized that these songs seemed to draw a natural line under the last 31 years of our working together,” said bassist Mike Mills. “We have always been a band in the truest sense of the word. Brothers who truly love, and respect, each other. We feel kind of like pioneers in this–there’s no disharmony here, no falling-outs, no lawyers squaring-off. We’ve made this decision together, amicably and with each other’s best interests at heart. The time just feels right.”
“A wise man once said–’the skill in attending a party is knowing when it’s time to leave.’ We built something extraordinary together. We did this thing. And now we’re going to walk away from it,” said Michael Stipe. “I hope our fans realize this wasn’t an easy decision; but all things must end, and we wanted to do it right, to do it our way. We have to thank all the people who helped us be R.E.M. for these 31 years; our deepest gratitude to those who allowed us to do this. It’s been amazing.”
I’ll be writing more about this tomorrow. Regardless of whether they truly knew when it was time to leave the party, their influence and our gratitude for their best work is immeasurable.
– Lang
Video of the Day: Anna Calvi, “Suzanne and I”
The just-released single “Suzanne and I,” much like “Desire,” features backing vocals from none other than Brian Eno, and Calvi continues to rock the red lipstick and everything else — like I said before, PJ Harvey made for stadiums.
– Lang
