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.
Kareena and Arjun Rampal in Heroine.[/caption]
And then you realize towards the end, that the world of the superstar Mahi Khanna traps the star, makes her a puppet of success, traps her in a web of deceit and finally throws her into a whirlwind of vaporous deceptions.
The closing moments have that gut-wrenching element which made Bhandarkar’s Chandni Bar, Page 3 and Fashion among the more sensitive dramas in recent times. We see Mahi, shattered forlorn and bereft, trapped in a car surrounded by merciless television journalists. As the haunting background score by Salim-Sulaiman builds up to a shattering crescendo, Mahi’s hands fold together in a plea of mercy. In moments such as these our hearts bleed for Mahi.
God help those who are cursed with stardom. They first have to struggle to get there. And then they must continue to fight to cling to their place. And then, as Govind Namdeo playing Mahi’s quietly faithful secretary tells her, ‘An actress’ life–span is by its very nature limited.’ Not that we haven’t heard such wisdom on the show world before.The dialogues could have been far more powerful. Instead they try to shock with a casual candour that fails to ignite the scenes.
Kareena Kapoor, in the best performance of her career so far, leads Mahi’s character through the murky labyrinth of ambition, rivalry and self-destructive tricks of survival in the rat race. Though her character is inconsistent (suffering, we are told, from bipolar disorder…or is it just the writer’s vagaries?) Kareena furnishes the heroine’s character with a rare vulnerability and an exceptional inner life. In the film’s rawest moments when the star’s mask peels off completely, Kareena’s face shows that stricken expression of naked panic and abject solitude that one last saw in the performance of Tabu in Mira Nair’s The Namesake after her husband’s sudden death.
Stardom kills you bit by bit. Kareena Kapoor bravely undertakes Mahi Khanna’s perilous journey from the top to the bottom of the star ladder. This is Kareena’s most fearless performance to date. Interestingly, this is the second film in three weeks where a desperate falling star resorts to the dirtiest of measures to retrieve her stardom. Raaz ki baat to yeh hai, ki Heroine sidesteps all the clichés of the film industry even while plonking the plot pat into those predictable places.
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Kareena - smoking hot![/caption]
So does Bhandarkar’s film exaggerate the sham that underlines the shindig of showbiz? The answer is, yes. Heroine is guilty of gross excesses. There are too many unnecessary characters, specially in the first-half bustling around in clumsily staged ramp shows, awards functions and filmy parties claiming our attention. Once Bhandarkar and his co-writers Manoj Tyagi, Nilanjan Iyenger and Anuradha Tiwary get over their look-we-know-showbiz-in-and-out fetish, the narrative finally settles down to telling us Mahi’s story vis-à-vis the two men in her life, the star Aryan Khanna (Arjun Rampal) and the cricketer Angad Pal(Randeep Hooda).
Though Rampal’s character reminded me of Arbaaz Khan in Bhandarkar’s Fashion, both are characters despite their uni-dimensionality are brought to life by two of our most interesting actors today.
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Kareena in Heroine.[/caption]
At least three other stand-out performances that burnish Bhandarkar’s flawed but fabulous film are those by Divya Dutt playing Mahi’s ruthless business manager who occasionally surprises herself by feeling real emotions for the fast-fading actress, Ranveer Shorey as the eccentric egomaniacal arthouse filmmaker from Bengal and Shahana Goswami as Mahi’s Bengali co-actor in one of the film’s finest episodes when Mahi, in a defiant attempt to show she is star who can act, has a disastrous trust with realistic cinema.
In fact, Shahana and Kareena Kapoor share some of the film’s most special moments. Bhandarkar over-juices some of the film’s sensual possibilities, under-develops some of the more engrossing characters, for example the yesteryears’ star played by Helen. The love-making scenes are done fitfully and hastily. And the dialogues (most of them sounding profound without actually meaning anything really substantial) are spoken by the actors in the tone of a radio play.
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Kareena Kapoor: Halkat Jawaani in Heroine[/caption]
But by God, Heroine still works, and works wonderfully in some places. There’s an inconsistency to the storytelling that works effectively in putting the protagonist’s deeply flawed and fractured character into a pulsating perspective wherein we can no longer distinguish between the fatal flaws of the main character and the action and reactions that have been written to define her flawed existence.
You come away from the film haunted by Kareena Kapoor who plays the disembodied diva with devastating honesty. Madhur Bhandarkar rips into the artifice of showbiz with vigor and tenderness. Like its heroine the film is flawed, but also bewildering, beguiling and yes, beautiful.
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