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: In a multicultural and multiethnic world, such as exists in Canada, what should Juliet look like? Or Cinderella? Or Eliza Doolittle in Bernard Shaw’s much celebrated play, Pygmalion?
Why can’t she be someone of Chinese origin? Or of African origin? Or a Punjabi woman? Well, she is now a young vivacious Punjabi actress Harveen Sandhu, gloriously playing the role of Eliza Doolittle in a sumptuous production of Pygmalion at the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake.
Pygmalion, later, in its various incarnations, became one of the most loved musicals and a film, My Fair Lady, and became a classic parable for transformation, from a flower girl into a duchess, all through the demanding and rigorous efforts of Professor Henry Higgins by his training in ‘accent’ development.
Shaw was a thorn in the flesh of class-ridden England for over many decades. His plays are forever satirizing and ridiculing the middle class morality and the obsessions with proper accent of the English society. It is by judging the accent and speech of the speaker you place him or her on a certain rung on the social ladder, and then choose to make contact or not. Shaw observed famously: “It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman despise him.”
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Harveen Sandhu as Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion. Photo by Emily Cooper[/caption]
In the preface to Pygmalion, Shaw wrote: “many thousands of men and women … have sloughed off their native dialects and acquired a new tongue,” though few admit it. “Voice adaptation is still the original British sin. Monitoring and exposing such citizens is a national pastime, as popular as sex scandals and libel cases,” wrote Zadie Smith.
Eliza Doolittle is a lowly flower girl in the play Pygmalion. And thus she is at the very lowest rung of the social ladder. Can the Professor refine her accent? Can he pass her off as a ‘lady’, even as a duchess at a garden party of the Establishment?
Can he turn a rough stone into a diamond?
That’s the wager, and the Professor succeeds gloriously. Played with imagination and verve, Harveen Sandhu enacts Eliza both a lowly, inconsequential flower girl as well as a confident duchess. With Patrick McManus as the Professor, Sandhu’s slow, often grudging, but nevertheless certain transformation is charming and most credible.
This transformation has become over the last 100 years since the play was first presented something of a parable. Eliza is ‘transformed’; the Professor has won the wager. But what now? Can the ‘duchess’ Eliza now go back to the gutters as a flower girl? Does she have any place in the heart of the Professor? Was she merely ‘an interesting experiment’? How is she now to be treated: a flower girl or a duchess?
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Harveen Sandhu as Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion. Photo by Emily Cooper[/caption]
The moral of the play, if it can so called, is uttered by Eliza herself: “What makes a flower girl a ‘lady’ is not how she is behaves, but how she is treated.”
George Bernard Shaw was a very important presence on the cultural and theatre scene in England over many decades. But he was also a socialist and a philanderer, and a satirist. He combined all these interests and obsessions in his various plays.
The other play that draws all this at the Shaw Festival is ‘You Never Can Tell’. Shaw talked about it as a play about love as ecstasy and as terror. The play, directed deftly by Jim Mezon, presents a ‘the duel of sex’. Ahead of his times, Shaw explores the equality of sexes, the liberation and freedom of women, the joys and agonies of the institution of marriage, and the unequal power of men and women, as lovers and as parents. Shaw does this through a comedy of manners
Both of Shaw’s plays, Pygmalion and You Never Can Tell at the Festival reveal the excellence of theatre productions at the Shaw Festival.
(Prof. Sehdev Kumar lectures on “International Films and the Human Condition” at the University of Toronto. His forthcoming book is “7000 Million Degrees of Freedom”)
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