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 Ajit Jain TORONTO: After his university education and research work in Canada, Dr. Ramesh Thakur took up a teaching job in Australia and then went to New Zealand. A few years ago he was the Rector of the UN Peace University in Tokyo when Jim Balsillie, co-founder of Research in Motion, makers of the Blackberry, persuaded him to take up a job with Balsillie’s Centre for International Global Innovation in Waterloo (which’s governed jointly by the University of Waterloo and Wilfrid Laurier University). Sadly for him, the relationship didn’t last long. Balsillie said to himself that if he was giving money for the international Centre, he also had the right to dictate academic policies. But that was not acceptable to Thakur and rightly so. Thakur was literally fired and the result was scathing criticism of Balsillie from the Canadian academic community, aftermath of which was seen last year when he offered to give $10-million to York University in return that he will dictate terms as to how the academic programs would function. There was a rebellion in the Canadian academic community and Balsillie had to back out. Thakur, of course, is back in Australia where he’s currently Director of Centre for Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament at Australian National University in Canberra. He was in Vancouver and Toronto recently to attend a number of seminars, including the one held at the Bill Graham Centre for Contemporary International History on Indian elections. In an interview with this writer, Thakur laughed when asked about his experience of working with Balsillie. He pointed out to what happened at York University, adding that it should be enough for him to prove that he was right all along about Balsillie’s open interfering in academic matters. Q: How do you compare relationship between India and Australia, and India and Canada? I think the potential for India-Australia relations is probably bigger because it is on the same part of the world and there can be direct steady dialogues and even military cooperation between the two countries. They are both across the Indian Ocean. If we go back to the 2004 tsunami, India, Indonesia, Australia, Japan and the United States were the coordinating countries. In all these respects there’s much more natural complementarities between India and Australia. I think Australia is starting to become a little bit vary of Canada in the strategic sense of having very close relations with China. Again there are similarities and complementary interests between India and Australia. In all these respects potentials for India-Australia relations is greater than for India-Canada relations. The other problem is Canada is next to the US, so Canada will always be under American shadow. Indian thinking about Canada is the result of that. As it is, there are more than one million Indians here in Canada which is another huge advantage that Canada has in consolidating relations with India if the government wants to do that. Canada and Australia are similar countries in many ways and it doesn’t serve any useful purpose in ranking the two countries. Canada is talking of closer relations with India, but India doesn’t seem much euphoric about Canada. In India, neither Australia nor Canada are all that important. From India’s perspective, it is the US, China, Japan to some extent and the European Union are important. In the Asian region, probably Indonesia, and of course immediate neighboring countries – Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal – can never be overlooked. In the near future, India will also be preoccupied with what would happen in Afghanistan. Canada and Australia will come after all these priority countries to Indian policy. About your academic research work, where’s it better to work – Australia or Canada? I think Canada was a better place for me to continue to work on UN issues because we are not far off from the United Nations. It is also closer to Europe from the East coast. On the other hand, other than the UN, most of my research work has been focused on Asia and the Pacific. From that point of view, it is better to be in Australia than in Canada.
