Hero Worship: Cliff Martinez on Captain Beefheart

Don Glen Vliet, better known as Captain Beefheart, has been my musical idol since I was 13 or 14, and remains so to this day. Usually, your musical heroes fade as your tastes change, but his music is still a big inspiration to me. I'd like to think that in some way he has had a powerful influence on my music.

In a nutshell, he invented his own unique vocabulary for the music he made. The first thing that sucked me in was this completely new language for the drums. John 'Drumbo' French played the drums like nobody else. I don't even know where it came from, that style. I've talked to him, and he mentioned his own influences –Sandy Nelson, Ginger Baker, and some other guys, but it just didn't sound like anybody I'd ever heard before. It sounded like a completely fresh take on an instrument that millions of people play, and that millions of people have recorded – somehow he found something completely and totally new and different. A different way of thinking about it and approaching it. It was the same for the bass, same for the guitars and the other instruments. It's the same for Beefheart's composition – I don't think there's anything like it. You can't even describe his music without using the word 'Beefheart.' To this day, that's what I want to be when I grow up.

Working with Beefheart, he was really demanding – it was very hard to keep up. You had to have a tape recorder running at all times, because a lot of the things he wanted to capture would be spontaneous, improvised things that he would not be able to repeat. That might be a vocal performance, or he might sit down and get you to play the drums, giving you directions like 'Give me that thing that's meat on a plate with red asparagus dangling through the teacup,' or 'You know! Giant blue babies levitating over mountaintops.' And you were on your own! So it was really, really hard work, but it was my Gary Cooper, High Noon moment. I had a front row seat to experience his process. I don't think there will ever be another chance like that.

There was some punk spirit in his approach. He wanted that ferocity. Most people who do Dada or avant garde music approach it from a cerebral point of view – he approached it with a very primal, Neanderthal sensibility. Everything was spontaneous, never premeditated. He wanted that fury. He wanted you to play every note like it was the last note you would ever play. That was very punk rock.

When we were recording Ice Cream for Crow, his last album, one of the things in my drum set was a fire alarm. It was this really dense metal thing that you had to hit really hard to get any sound out of. He kept telling me to hit it harder and harder. I already had the biggest drumsticks made – I had 3S drumsticks, which are like parade drumsticks; they're like baseball bats. So I've got the biggest drumsticks possible, I'm hitting this thing as hard as I can, and he says, 'Hit it harder.' I hit the alarm so hard that the drumstick shattered and hit me just below the eye. It broke the skin, and my eye started bleeding. Beefheart said 'Stop the tape! Stop the tape! My music's not worth an eye.' That was the level of intensity he demanded, and that's also what appealed to me about punk rock. Whatever it is you're going to do, you have to really mean it.