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.
By Prof Sehdev Kumar
AUROVILLE (India): For a millennia, in every corner of the earth, in one manner or another, we humans have dreamt of ‘the City on the Hill’ – a place where the earth could touch the heavens, however fleetingly. And where we could live with others in harmony, in true brotherhood, with generosity and with a sense of celebration.
Such “Intentional Communities” are sometimes inspired by a certain religious vision or by a charismatic teacher; by a commitment to a political ideology or by an indignant rejection of the seemingly mundane and the meaningless.
During the turbulent decade of the 1960s, when the ‘East’ – India specifically – began to stir the spirit and the imagination of many young people in the West, one such community began to rise on the south-east coast of India, near the former French colony of Pondicherry.
Inspired by the vision of Integral Yoga of the great poet-philosopher-sage, Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950), this community, known as Auroville, is certainly very unique and extraordinary.
With some 3200 men, women and children, from over 60 countries and from every continent, for the past 52 years, Auroville has been, and continues to be, a most inspiring experiment in human unity, beyond all distinctions of nations, religions, races, classes and ideologies.
What was once, in the 1960s, an arid and denuded piece of land, without any hint of greenery anywhere, over the years and decades, through the effort and commitment of thousands of ‘spiritual seekers’ from all around the world, Auroville has now become one of the most sumptuously cultivated forest in the world.
It is also evolved into a place of true welcome to all those who seek a different relationship with each other, with the earth, and with their own beings, in all its vastness.
The idea and vision of Auroville was conceived by a French artist-mystic, Mirra Alfassa (1878-1973), hailed as ‘The Mother’.
She had traveled to India more than fifty years earlier, at the beginning of the First World War, in 1914, and had become, over the years, a spiritual associate of Sri Aurobindo, and a true instrument of his vision.
On February 28, 1968, at the founding of Auroville, as 5,000 people gathered around a banyan tree, representatives from 124 nations, and from all states of India, placed soil from their homelands in a lotus-shaped urn, signifying human unity in a universal township.
On this occasion, The Auroville Charter, written and enunciated by The Mother, was read in 16 languages. It stated, in part:
Auroville belongs to nobody in particular. Auroville belongs to humanity as a whole.
But to live in Auroville one must be a willing servitor of the Divine Consciousness.
Auroville will be a site of material and spiritual research for a living embodiment of an actual human unity.
Indeed, as one cineaste and photographer of Italian origin puts it: “I can feel my humanity blossoming here every day. Here I feel less and less Italian and more and more human, without borders, at all times.”
On a visit from Canada, I first discovered Auroville, quite by chance, six years ago. Since then it has become increasingly a true home for my wandering spirit and feet.
Dotted with numerous pieces of innovative architecture, with places to create and share music and dance, pottery and sculpture, poetry and drama, and to learn about all aspects of the mysteries of our lives, inner and outer, Auroville as a place and a community is endlessly intriguing and enchanting. In its 145-seat Cinema Paradiso, for instance, there are over 380 films from 100 countries that are shown every year, without any entry fee.
As someone who has taught International Films at the University of Toronto for years, this cinema itself is reason enough to be drawn to Auroville.
It is thus Auroville and its unique experiment in human unity is supported by UNESCO, and by the Indian government and by the others.
Because of Covid-19, most unexpectedly I have now been in Auroville staying in a guesthouse, for a year. But I feel truly blessed to be ‘stranded’ in such a splendid place – a primordial forest, with a truly international family, caring and loving in every conceivable way, and celebrating life in all its abundance.
(Prof Sehdev Kumar has lectured on `International Cinema and Human Condition' at the University of Toronto)
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