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.
The is the biggest Indian Army loss in any India-China face-off Agencies NEW DELHI: Chinese soldiers of the People Liberation Army (PLA) used nail-studded iron rods to to ambush and kill 20 Indian soldiers in on the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in the Galwan Valley in Ladakh on June 15. Former Indian Army colonel and noted defence and strategic affairs writer Ajai Shukla posted on Twitter this picture of the deadly iron rods used by the PLA soldiers used. He wrote, "The nail-studded rods — captured by Indian soldiers from the Galwan Valley encounter site — with which Chinese soldiers attacked an Indian Army patrol and killed 20 Indian soldiers. Such barbarism must be condemned. This is thuggery, not soldiering." Furious hand-to-hand fighting between soldiers of the two countries raged across the Galwan river valley for over eight hours on Monday night, as PLA assault teams armed with iron rods as well as batons wrapped in barbed wire hunted down and slaughtered troops of Indian Army's 16 Bihar Regiment, reports News18. “Even unarmed men who fled into the hillsides were hunted down and killed. The dead include men who jumped into the Galwan river in a desperate effort to escape,'' the report quoted an Indian Army officer as saying on the latest on the India-China face-off. Led by 16 Bihar’s commanding officer, Colonel Santosh Babu, a patrol party of Indian soldiers came face to face with Chinese troops in a steep section of the mountainous region they believed the PLA soldiers had retreated from, in line with a June 6 disengagement agreement, according to The Guardian. The killings are the worst losses for the Indian Army since the 1999 Kargil war with Pakistan. It is also the worst toll between India and China since 1967, when 88 Indian soldiers and over 340 PLA soldiers were killed in fighting near the Nathu La and Cho La passes in the Chumbi Valley. India and China share a 3,488-km border and there are three broad areas of dispute. In the western sector of the border, India claims China is in illegal occupation of 43,000 square km of its territory in Ladakh, including 5,180 square km in the Shaksgam Valley which was ceded by Pakistan to China in 1963. In the central sector where Indian states of Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand share border with Tibet, there is a dispute around Shipki La and Kaurik areas in Himachal and Pulam, Thag La, Barahori, Kungri Bingri La, Lapthal and Sangha areas around Uttarakhand. In the western sector, China claims the whole area of 90,000 square km of Arunachal Pradesh state, calling it South Tibet. The current India-China face-off is the worst between the two countries in the past 40 years.
