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 Subhash K Jha MUMBAI: They were to Bengali cinema what Rajesh Khanna and Hrishikesh Mukherjee were to Hindi cinema. Plus a lot more. Rituparno Ghosh and Prosenjit Chatterjee did 7 unforgettable Bengali films together. Off screen they were very close friends who often fought over trivial and not so trivial matters. And now on Rituparno’s death, the grief-stricken Prosenjit plans a film on Ritu. “I should write a book on him. But that is not my domain. So I will do something on screen. Yes, I am planning a film on Ritu now. Of course, I’ll preserve and restore his 19 films. But I’ll also make a film on him.” Lately Prosenjit and Ritu had grown distant because of the latter’s insistence on undergoing potentially life-threatening hormonal operations. Prosenjit warned Ritu not to mess around with his body. But the director adamant on changing his gender, wouldn’t listen. This issue created a rift between the two life-long friends. Rituparno also insisted on making gay-centric films which further distanced Prosenjit professionally and personally from the filmmaker who changed the career and life-course of Bangla cinema’s biggest superstar since Uttam Kumar. Exclaims Prosenjit, “But look at the irony, Ritu finally did a non-gay film Satyanweshi after three years, where my wife Arpita plays the main female lead. So I was connected to Ritu in what we didn’t know would be his final work. Arpita and Raima Sen were like daughter to Ritu. My wife is not just an actress but also a wonderful singer. Ritu smsed me when I was in Cairo saying, ‘After a long time I got to work with a singing actress.’ For Arpita Rituda was a teacher . She’s lucky to have worked in his last film. Regetttably, I didn’t get time to visit the sets if Satyanveshi. But my wife would constantly BBM pictures from the locations.” Sighs Prosenjeet, “I am sure my wife would look lovely in Satyanveshi. He could make any actress look beautiful.” Prosenjeet was unable to work in any of Rituparno’s films since 2009 because the director’s work gravitated towards an expression of his homosexuality. “Not that I minded playing a character,” clarifies Prosenjit. “But those films were about Ritu’s character. They were made to express his viewpoint and anguish. I felt I had no place in them, although he and the director Kabeer Kaushik offered me his lover’s role in Arektir Premer Golpo. But that was a film about his character. I had nothing to gain as an actor.People started gossiping about my refusal to play a homosexual character. But if I get to do a film like Tootsie or Brokeback Mountain I’d happily play gay. I’ve taken risks during my career.” Recalling their long association fondly, Prosenjit said, “So many memories flood me. We fought like any two very old friends over childish issues. When Ritu decided to take on the editorship of a Bangla magazine, I fought with him because I thought he was unnecessarily deflecting attention from his true vocation.We also fought over a television serial that I produced and he acted in. But today I know we made something that would be remembered 20 years ago. Even Mamta Bannerjee liked our serial.” Prosenjeet had warned Ritu against undergoing gender-transformation surgeries. “I told him not to do anything that would jeopardize his health. We all needed him.B ut he didn’t listen. My fights with him were on this issue. He was taking health risks that would suit a 20-year old. He went through operations that affected his health. I tried my best to dissuade him. But he didn’t listen. Now I regret it. All of us his friends should have tied him up bodily and prevented him from doing this to himself. He would’ve been making path-breaking films for the next 25 years. The good thing was, during recent months he had snapped out of the homo-centric cinema and was making a film that had nothing to do with sexuality.” Recalling his abiding association with Rituparno, Prosenjit says, “I feel sorry for today’s young actors in Bengal who would now have no opportunity to work with Ritu. They’ll never know what they’ve missed. Ritu tapped the other more serious actor within me. He put me in touch with emotions that I didn’t know existed within me. Do you know, he even wanted to cast me in the very first film that he made, the children’s film Hirer Angti. Ritu regretted not casting me in that film as well. He was new and at that time everyone scoffed at his ambitions. ‘Are you mad? How can you cast Prosenjit in a children’s film? He’s a big commercial star. He wouldn’t even meet you.’ That’s what Ritu did to me and many other mainstream actors. He took us out of the commercial zone and placed us in this other world altogether. You see, Ritu used a refined aesthetic language. But he had the mainstream audience interested in that cinema. He got big stars from Mumbai and Kolkata into his cinema. He made actor reinvent themselves. Look at what he did to Raima Sen. Today’s she is accepted as a sensible actress in Kolkata. Ritu’s contribution to cinema is tremendous. Everyone who saw me in Ritu’s Doshor and Sob Charitra Kalpunik wondered what I had done in these films. But it was a magic created by Ritu. When I did my first film Unneshi April with him, I had just two scenes. I had a very difficult love-making scene with Debashree Roy where I had to be with her but my mind was somewhere else. Ritu left it to me to convey this. When I did the scene he was very pleased. In Sab Charitra Kalpunik where my character dies, I had to be decorated with chandan, etc. Ritu was very disturbed doing this. He didn’t like decorating me as I played dead. Then Bipasha Basu also intervened.We forced him to do it. Ritu was very emotional on and off screen. When he was shooting Khela, he wanted me to use my own clothes to play a film star because we didn’t have budget. He dug into impossible resources to make his cinema happen. He’d go to any lengths to get that perfect shot. I enjoyed every moment of my screen work with Ritu. He was my mentor.” Pondering over the loss, Prosenjit says, “I used to tell my wife if something happens to me she should immediately go to Rituda to guide her. Now he’s gone. We had our share of fights. But we were always there for one another. Our friendship went far beyond work. I will be grateful to him all my life. It will take me a long time to get over the loss.”
Shaumadip Saha: I love Rituparna Ghosh. He isa good person.He is a best filmmaker.
laura choda: o moha boka choda
sarimul: Hello friend how are you
ankita poddar: R kichu bolar nei onar bappar e....he is just awsome ...his personality ,behavior, attitude, and his addiction on his film is just out of word..!!...many people sayany comments ..he just don't care...; ). He is actually a true man a true friend ..and he was born to produve our good best and better film always. It god mercy that he came on d world...!!!
shreyasi saha: I respected Rituparno. He was doing a great job for gay people. I am very sorry that he died. He was very talented. He should not have messed around with his body.
shreyasi saha: I respected Rituparno. He was gooding a great job for gay people. I am very sorry that he died. He was very talented. He should not have done mess around with his body. 
