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 Nehru-Edwina love affair still intrigues people. When Pandit Nehru sent her a book of photographs of erotic sculptures from teh temple of the sun in Orissa, Lady Edwina wroteback, "I am not interested in sex as sex. There must be much more to it, beauty of spirit and form and in its conception. But I think you and I are in the minority! Yet another treasured bond"
The relationship between India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and Lady Edwina Mountbatten has long been shrouded in mystery and secrecy. It’s a no-go area for the Congress which has always shielded the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty from controversies. Congressmen certainly don’t want it to become a matter of public discourse. However, the details about the Nehru-Edwina relations (Nehru-Edwina love affair) are now in public domain in the form of a book. Indian Summer by Alex Von Tunzelmann offers a vivid account of a special bond the couple shared and complex relationship between Edwina and her husband Louis Mountbatten with the latter playing a role of a willing facilitator of this relationship and furthermore encouraging it. It’s true there’s no age for falling in love, for love is timeless. All you need is two lonely people, mutual admiration, understanding, and a spiritual connection. Reason behind Nehru-Edwina love affair Jawaharlal Nehru and Edwina Mountbatten had it all in them, and yes indeed, they were smitten and in love. In Edwina’s words theirs was a ‘treasured bond’.They both felt a sense of emptiness. Nehru was a widower while Edwina shared a complicated relationship with her husband. True, Edwina had had affairs before as well, and they all were approved and facilitated by her husband. But Mountbatten ‘supported the relationship between his wife and Nehru more than any of her other affairs’, Tunzelmann says.
“The couple would regularly write letters to each other. Only after reading them one could understand the deepness of their love and the kind of spiritual relationship they shared.”
It was to her husband that Edwina entrusted her love letters from Nehru in 1952. Following a haemorrhage, she had to undergo dangerous surgery. She presented Dickie Mountbatten with a sealed letter.
"You will realise that they are a mixture of typical Jawahar (sic) letters, full of interest and facts and really historic documents”, she had written. “Some of them have no ‘personal’ remarks at all. Others are love letters in a sense, though you yourself will realise the strange relationship - most of it spiritual – which exists between us. J (Nehru) has obviously meant a very great deal in my life in these last years and I think I, in his. Our meetings have been rare and always fleeting but I think I understand him, and perhaps he me, as well as any human beings can ever understand each other.”
Nehur-Edwina love affair letters
There’s an interesting tale told by S S Pirzada, later foreign minister of Pakistan, that Jinnah had been handed a small collection of letters that had been written by Edwina to Nehru.
"Dickie will be out tonight – come after 10:00 o’clock,” said one of Edwina’s letters.
Another revealed that: "You forgot your handkerchief and before Dickie could spot it I covered it up.”
A third said: "I have fond memories of Simla – riding and your touch.”
Pirzada claimed that Jinnah discussed what to do about these letters with Fatima and his colleagues. In the end, Jinnah concluded that "Caesar’s wife should be above suspicion”, and had the letters returned.
On another occasion, when Nehru and Edwina were staying together in Nainital in the Himalayan foothills, the governor’s son was sent to summon the guests for dinner. Unwittingly, he opened the door of the prime minister’s suite, and was confronted by the sight of Nehru and Edwina in an embrace.
He tactfully retreated, and nothing was ever said about the incident. Though such stories were never made fully public, hints of them leaked out.
An anti-Nehru party in Delhi began using the slogan, "Break open (Lord) Rama’s heart, you will find Sita written on it; break open Nehru’s heart, you will find Lady Mountbatten written on it.”
So deep was Nehru’s love for Edwina that he sent her presents from wherever he was in the world; sugar from the US, cigarettes from Egypt, pressed ferns from Sikkim, and a book of photographs of erotic sculptures from the temple of the sun in Orissa.
“I must say they took my breath away for an instant”, he wrote. “There was no shame or of hiding anything.”
Edwina replied that she had found the sculptures fascinating.
“I am not interested in sex as sex”, she wrote. “There must be much more to it, beauty of spirit and form and in its conception. But I think you and I are in the minority! Yet another treasured bond.”
Alas, Edwina breathed her last on February 21, 1960. She suffered heart failure.
Still one of the world’s richest women had had no splendid possessions with her: only a pile of old letters on the bedside table. She must have been reading them when she died, for a few, having fluttered from her hands, were strewn across her bed.
They were all from Jawaharlal Nehru. (This article first appeared ion May 27, 2017, courtesy Express Tribune)
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