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.
TORONTO: Soulpepper continues to be the premier theatre company, not only in Toronto, but all across Canada.
Now, increasingly, its choices of plays and its directors and actors are representing the multicultural face of Canada, as well as the new emerging ethos of the 21st century: a place of dignity for everyone on the banquet table of history.
Two plays that mark this new ethos at Soulpepper this summer are: Judith Thompson’s After the Blackout and August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.
The first play, After the Blackout, directed by the creator of the play herself, explores the world of the disabled – both physically and mentally – and its humanity and its poignancy. It is not a make-believe world; it is a world presented by those who are disabled: a leg is missing; a face is marred; another has had severe mental breakdown; another has sent years in dungeons of a prison, depressed and devastated.
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After the Blackout Ensemble. Photo by Elias Campbell[/caption]
It is the gift and imagination of the playwright Thompson that she takes their world – their pain and suffering, their moments of exasperation and occasion rapture, their yearnings and their hopes – and makes it even more real than real. She takes one ‘dreadful’ after another in the lives of several people, and through estrangement, discovers a certain illumination. As she puts it: “We can climb mountains with no legs, cycle with no vision, do algebra with brain damage, find our way in the dark with no hearing, but can we fix the calamities that befall so many human relationships?”
After the Blackout is an endlessly seething play; it is presented with great verve and commitment by a slew of very accomplished actors: Prince Ampnsah, Tamyka Bullen, Yousef Kadoura, Mary Beth Rubens, Malanie Lepp, Catherine Jeell Mackinnon.
But above all, the shining star of this show is the director and the playwright herself: Judith Thompson.
The second play, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, is partly based on the trials and tribulations of Blues singer Ma Rainey, and through her of the Afro-Americans over many decades and centuries.
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Marcel Stewart, Diego Matamoros, Alex Poch-Goldin, Beau Dixon, Neville Edwards, and Alana Bridgewater seen in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Photo by Cylla von Tiedemann[/caption]
Slavery is the original sin of America as a nation; it is a sin that seems to know no end. It was – is – a sin that has been committed not only in the tobacco and cotton fields, or in the trenches and the dungeons, but also in music halls, where the birth of Blues took place, and where some extraordinary music was created. Its vocal style descended from southern work songs, and was in many ways was a critical step in the transformation of slaves in America from Africans to African-Americans. As Ma says, the blues is “life’s way of talking.”
The play exposes the underbelly – the bottom, if you wish – of that creative surge among the blacks and its endless exploitation by the white folks in hundred insidious ways.
The playwright, August Wilson, has a certain mastery of the rhythmic, pungent language spoken by the Afro-American in 1920s, and also of the seething pain that marked their lives at every turn.
Through a brilliant cast, the director Mumbi Tindyebwa Otu, presents Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom as a poignant expose of the original sin that has marked the ‘exceptionalism’ of America over many centuries.
(Dr. Sehdev Kumar lectures on ‘International Films and the Human Condition’ at the School of Continuing Studies at the University of Toronto)
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