Peter's music has been heard on hundreds of radio stations and has been on SiriusXM rotation for over a decade. As a multi-award winning artist, Peter's music has also topped Billboard's Classical and Crossover charts.
For Captain Beefheart, a maverick-artist-musician, who was not just a complicated man but highly demanding and by most accounts very difficult to deal with. It was appropriate that Beefheart's Magic Band was to prominently feature a bassist as accomplished, bold and adventurous as Mark Boston, a.k.a Rockette Morton.
Born on July 14, 1949, Mark began life in the small town of Salem, Illinois before his family moved out to Lancaster, California when he was 13. With a bassist and steel player for a father, Mark gained a great appreciation for country and bluegrass along with the R&B and rock’n’roll that was on the rise. Within a year of the Boston clan moving out to Lancaster, Mark befriended a young guitarist by the name of Bill Harkleroad.
At a time when the bass guitar was seen as the dummy’s instrument, Mark left quite an impression on Bill with his talent and equipment, leading to the two joining forces to form BC And The Cavemen. With Mark’s mother sewing some outfits for them, the band developed a decent reputation, and the two would also play in a band with Jeff Cotton and John French known as Blues In A Bottle. And then a local hero came calling. Or perhaps screaming and howling!
In that same Lancaster scene, Captain Beefheart And His Magic Band were making a big splash as a top flight blues rock outfit, with 'Safe As Milk' having made a strong impression and 'Strictly Personal' being a strong record as well. But even with a sound that was speaking to people, one that perhaps would have been a more pragmatic one as far as a career goes, Don Van Vliet just wasn’t meant for conventional norms.
The Captain had all these ideas, ideas far too out for many, including early members. He needed new musicians, younger and more impressionable ones that wouldn’t object to his ideas. Already having John and Jeff in the band, now 'Drumbo' and Antennae Jimmy Semens, he then recruited Bill, dubbed Zoot Horn Rollo. And on bass, he found Mark Boston, who took the name Rockette Morton due to his love of outer space. And the classic Magic Band was born.
Trout Mask Replica (TMR) wasn’t an easy album to make. Yet even with all the bizarre ideas and the difficulty in preparing those ideas into music, Mark was a total champ through it all. The Beefheart sound is one of great dichotomy, and Mark can capture all of it. He’s so tight and precise, and yet there’s this raw grit and dirt. He’s highly intelligent and sophisticated in his playing, and yet there remains this childlike sense of wonder and curiosity.
He takes after all the great traditional American music, yet out into a whole other realm of time and space. The bass traditionally serves the role of grounding the harmony while locking in with the drums to provide a foundation, yet Mark’s playing often serves as another melody line in the music. In a lot of ways, he’s like a third guitarist that just happens to be playing bass.
The TMR on its own is a legacy few can compete with, and yet Mark contributed to more classic records like "Lick My Decals Off, Baby", "The Spotlight Kid", and "Clear Spot". There on Decals, you get the equivalent of Godfather II. With Mother Art Tripp on marimba and drums rather Jeff on guitar, you get an album that captures a great deal of TMR's brilliance while being brilliant in its own unique way.
Then you get to 'The Spotlight Kid', with bass godliness on cuts like “When It Blows Its Stack”, resulting in a bass solo that often opened shows, yet Mark proves himself just as talented on traditional in-the-pocket styles as demonstrated on cuts like “I’m Gonna Booglarize You Baby”. And that thing about bassists being failed guitarists? In the 'Clear Spot', with Mark taking guitar and the rhythm section now being a mini Mothers reunion of Art and Roy Estrada, yet nobody missed a beat. Throughout the record, Bill and Mark’s kinship really shines, their weaving right there with what Bill and Jeff had done, or what was done with Alex St Clair early on.
Of course, dealing with Don was quite a task of its own, so it’s inevitable that Mark and the others would all end up departing by 1974. He and Bill soon formed a group of their own called Mallard. For two albums, the first with Art and having some writing help from John French 'Drumbo', Mallard showed itself a pretty decent blues rock outfit. And giving that it was Mark who finally had a chance to create something that was truly his own rather than helping some achieve their vision, it’s understandably the work that he takes pride in. And over time, he’d end up making a solo record and create some cool artwork of his own, as well as performing with 'Drumbo' in the reformed Magic Band, allowing the music to live and breathe on stage again.
If you’re a Beefheart fan, how can you not love Rockette Morton? Not only a uniquely talented bass player but such a great stage presence full of joy, along with a lovably quirky personality and such a sweet guy. Easily one of my favorites from Magic Band members, you can’t help but smile when thinking about Mark. He’s been through some rough weather, including his health scares, and yet he’s still the same Mark we’ve known and loved all the years.
Happy birthday Mark! Thank you for all you have given us and look forward to more.
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Patrick Moore is a freehand drawing artist and freelance music writer.
Amrita Sher-Gil husband painting shows her Hungarian husband – who was also her cousin – in uniform and was painted in 1939
MUMBAI: Renowned Indian painter Amrita Sher-Gil’s painting of her Hungarian husband Victor Egan has been sold for a whopping Rs 10.86 crore (about 110 million rupees) at an online auction by Indian art house AstaGuru.
Famous Indian art collector Manoj Israni snapped up the portrait.
Victor Egan was a Hungarian-born doctor who was also Amrita’s cousin.
The portrait shows him in his uniform and this painting was Amrita’ parting gift to his family when the couple decided to move to India from Hungary in 1939
AstaGuru said there was impressive bidding for the Amrita Sher-Gil husband painting at its ‘Modern Indian Art’ online sale.
"They (Amrita and her husband) shared a spiritual bond, which inspired her to capture his presence in glory,” AstaGuru said.
"The rare artwork without a doubt showcases her proficiency as a portraiture artist, and elucidates Amrita Sher-Gil’s academic training,” the auction house said.
Known for her insatiable sexual appetite, Amrita Sher-Gil was born in Budapest in Hungary in January 1913. Her mother was Jewish opera singer Marie Antoniette Gottesmann and her father was Sikh aristocrat Umrao Singh Sher-Gil who was known for his scholarly interest in Sanskrit and astronomy. The two had met in Lahore in 1912. Amrita died in Lahore in December 1941 at the young age of 28. Referred to as ‘the Indian Frida Kahlo’ — after the famous Mexican painter known for her self-portraits — Amrita had hordes of suitors in Lahore. But she married her first cousin Dr Victor Egan who had moved from Budapest to Lahore in 1939. According to legendary Indian writer Khushwant Singh, who knew Amrita from Lahore, "She had countless lovers (in Lahore): her ravenous appetite for sex was legendary. She did not waste time in preliminaries. If her lover took too long to make the first move, she simply stripped and lay down on the carpet, naked. Badruddin Tyabjee gave a vivid description of his encounter with her one winter's night in Simla.’’ Khushwant wrote in 2006 that sex was all that mattered to Amrita. In fact, "Amrita had threatened to seduce me just to teach my wife a lesson, but she couldn’t carry out this threat because she died a few months later,'' wrote Khushwant Singh in his 2006 article in Outlook magazine. Khushwant wrote that Amrita had reportedly married her first cousin Dr Victor Egan on the condition that she "would be free to have affairs with other men." READ NEXT: Amrita Sher-Gil self-protrait fetches £1.7 million in London auction
