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 ancestral Raj Kapoor Haveli in Peshawar, which is valued to be worth Rs 5 crore (50 million), once again faces demolition as its current owner Haji Muhammad Israr, who is a famous jeweller in the city, wants to convert it into a commercial complex. Israr says, "I have sufficient money to cater to my needs. I supply around three to four maund (120kg to 160kg) gold a week to the Peshawar biggest jewellery market." The Raj kapoor haveli, as per a 2018 decision of the Pakistan government, was to be converted into a museum. But today it is in a dilapidated condition because of the neglect
From Aurangzeb Khan PESHAWAR: They say they still wear the traditional Peshawari pagri on festive occasions, the Kapoors of Bollywood. And a gold medal from Prithvi Raj’s acting days in theatres of Peshawar — and Lyallpur, now Faisalabad — is a family heirloom left by the Kapoor patriarch. They lived here in Dhakki, right by Peshawar’s Qissa Khwani Bazaar. How appropriate for a family of celebrated thespians to have roots in the street of storytellers. The air inside their old haveli is still, the gloom in the empty rooms is like time mourning its own passage, a surrender to dust, to dampness and to death. It is the indifference of a terminal patient to a visitor who brings no hope but stands by the bed. I have entered the empty building in Peshawar’s old city through a hole in the back wall. The wind wants to know why I am here. It whispers through the abandoned house, stirs itself when I open the door to another room. The creak of rusty hinges tear through the silence. Somewhere in the house, a pigeon is startled by the sound, the frantic beating of its wings fades as it leaves the house. An omen? Unsuspecting, I enter a room that is a cat’s lair, the scene of a bird’s massacre with pigeon feathers piled on the floor. The cat, a plump ginger tabby, is curled on a shelf inside a wooden cabinet. It glares, not moving. I withdraw. Raj Kapoor haveli condition In a room where sunlight bursts through the windowpanes with their broken stained glass, I try and imagine the Kapoor family living in the house. All I conjure up is little Raj Kapoor, the Charlie Chaplin of Indian cinema, up to his antics again, in the house he was born. Last I saw him, he was serenading a Bollywood beauty from a treetop on screen. Now he runs ahead of me, a little boy with a stick to dislodge a wasp’s nest embedded in the dark, narrow staircase, to give me safe passage to the floors above. I tread carefully as rubble falls from the roof, wary of breaking a mold-infested floorboard and go down to the dark basement where the building may collapse on itself one day if not saved soon. It will add to the debris under Dhakki, the old city neighbourhood built over a mound of rubble beneath which lie many lost civilisations. Another day in Andher Sheher. Smoke tendrils from a joss stick has the Zia Printing Press, in Peshawar’s Jhangi Mohalla, smelling of shrines. In a way, the place is a shrine, a monument to memory and nostalgia, to Peshawar’s past. The owner of the Raj Kapoor haveli Ibraheem Zia shows me his book, Peshawar kay fankaar, about actors and artists from Peshawar who joined Indian cinema in its infancy. The book is dedicated to Gul Hamid, as young and handsome as James Dean, and just like him dying at a young age — 36. Zia takes me to Dilip Kumar’s ancestral house in Feelkhana Nawab Nasir Khan — the street where the last Mughal governor Nasir Khan maintained an elephant shed. The house recently made news when Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was said to have declared it a national heritage. The three-storey house, with a vertical narrow facade, is crumbling. Through a grille above the locked front door, one can see a collapsed roof. Next to the house is a concrete building, its grey face growing a rash of electricity meters. Small shops crowd the streets, aglow with glittering trinkets, walls covered with imitation jewellery and garments. “It is a good thing that the memory of Dilip Kumar is preserved for the people here,” says Sher Khan, who owns a garment store in the street where the house is. He has read in newspapers that the government is turning the house into a museum. And no, he hasn’t seen any of Dilip Kumar’s films but his father has. Next on the trail of ancestral homes of famous Bollywood actors from Peshawar is Shah Rukh Khan’s. His cousin Maqsood Ahmad, a frail laconic man, fills us in on family history. Shah Rukh’s father, Taj Mohammad Khan, and his brother Ghulam Mohammad Gama, were staunch supporters of Congress. Partition saw Taj Mohammad leaving Pakistan to escape arrest. His brother Gama was imprisoned for seven years. We walk through a damp labyrinth of streets redolent with the scent of incense and through the open community yard by the shrine of Saint Shah Wali Qataal where children throw mud balls at each other. We arrive at Dhakki where the Kapoors’ mansion is. We stand and look in awe at its magnificent façade, ornate jharokas fit for a royal palace in some princely state. The haveli stands silent, crumbling. People walk by, indifferent to the building or its significance. It is a heritage we have long ignored, inherited from a time before Partition. It is a history we refuse to own. Pakistan would rather be 60 years young than thousands of years old, casting its claim to civilizations back into the Indus from where it sprang. (This article first appeared on July 20, 2014, courtesy Dawn)
