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.
IIFA Awards spoil Indian cinema image as audiences in the West consider Bollywood a big song-and-dance joke
By Subhash K Jha BOLLYWOOD: Honestly, everyone loves a good Bollywood song and dance. But to see Kevin Spacey doing The Lungi dance at recently concluded IIFA (India International Film Awards) event at Tampa Bay in Florida was a very painful ordeal for all concerned. It was an insult to the Lungi and to Bollywood, not necessarily in that order. I am sure it wasn’t easy for Mr Spacey either. The guy is a veritable legend on home turf. For those who came in late Spacey has won the Oscar for his performances in The Usual Suspects and American Beauty. So what was he doing tying that Lungi around his trousers and wriggling ridiculously? Trying out a bit of Bollywood, I suppose. But is this the Bollywood we want to sell to the West? I thought IIFA was supposed to promote Indian cinema in the West. Instead, over the years it has become a joyous jamboree of Bollywood stars, an annual all-expenses paid vacation in some exotic spot of the world where all that is really promoted is the a handful of Bollywood stars, never Indian cinema. And pray how can Bollywood cinema be represented without Amitabh Bachchan? A bit like selling Agra to tourists without the Taj Mahal, no? Also, when have we seen INDIAN cinema being represented at IIFA? Was there even one representative from cinema in any of the many Indian languages at Tampa Bay? Rajnikanth? Vikram Gokhale? Kamal Haasan? Prosenjit? Mohanlal? Restricting the menu purely to Bollywood entertainment-oriented cinema, IIFA and other global awards tell the West every year that we only make films where our characters sing and dance, sing and dance….and then they sing and dance some more,with or without the Lungi. Out West specially in America, Indian cinema is considered a big song-and-dance joke. Travolta thinks we make only musicals. I don’t blame him. He hasn’t been shown anything else from Bollywood. That perception of Indian cinema as monkey’s business had just begun to change with Ritesh Batra’s The Lunchbox. The film made Western audiences sit up and take notice of our cinema as being more than a mere naach-gaana circus. Now with Kavien Spacey’s embarrassing Lungi dance, we seem happy selling the touristic image of India as a land of the eternal song and infinite dancing. The Lungi dance with Kevin Spacey reiterates the image of Indian cinema as a primitive streetside taamsha, in a very American context. Whan an actor of Spacey’s stature gets into Bollywood costume, the Lungi as it happens to be, to do a joyous jig, he is very clearly saying…. Hollywood accepts Bollywood’s traditional image. Spacey’s Lungi dance is the cinematic equivalent of an American tourist donning the national costume in a barbaric Asian or African country. “No matter how wild or exotic you guys want to be, we will humour you,” said Spacey in not so many words. I’d love to know what he told his family about the IIFA show when he went home after the show. (Did he get to pack the Lungi and take it home?). Oh yes , there was John Travolta too. He said he loves Bollywood cinema and that girl from Ram Leela. Deepika Padukone wasn’t even born when Saturday Night Fever was released. This is her chance to teach Travolta the Lungi dance.
