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.
Flat and phoney, the self-conscious realism of the small-time gender-equations in Shuddh Desi Romance leave us untouched unamused and cold
By Subhash K Jha
Film: Shuddh Desi Romance
Stars: Rishi Kapoor, Parineeti Chopra, Sushant Singh Rajput, Vaani Kapoor
Director: Maneesh Sharma
Rating: * ½(one and a half stars)
MUMBAI: While watching light-hearted love stories also known as rom-coms, there are two reactions that come to mind. ‘What next?’ And ‘Who Cares?’. This annoying film, masquerading as a modern-day parable on What Young People Want, definitely falls in the who-cares category.
The three main characters are so confused about life, sex, love and commitment(in that order) that you wonder why a film was scripted about them and their annoying lives in the first place. The ‘hero’ , if we may call him that, is not only commitment-phobic he is quite simply impervious to any kind of gravity in life .
Don’t misunderstand. He takes himself very seriously. But it’s hard to take him seriously as he vacillates between two women, both equally absurd in their libertines’ apparel borrowed straight out of some stale Julia Roberts-Susan Sarandon film which probably got shelved because the hero ran away with the cameraman.
This, then, is your Shuddh Desi Romance, so contaminated with candour that it doesn’t realize the difference between being sincerily searching and artificially scandalous.
Jaideep Sahni has written some remarkable films for Yashraj in the past. Among his best writing are Ram Gopal Varma’s Company, and Yashraj’s Chak De, Dibakar Bannerjee’s Khosla Ka Ghosla.
Sadly, Shuddh Desi Romance ranks as Sahni’s worst-written endeavour to date. The film has only three main characters, one of whom slips in and out of two women’s lives as though he had seen Yash Chopra’s Daag so many times that he knew that the tangle within the triangle would get resolved in the last reel.
Shuddh Desi Romance is not the kind of film that obtains or even seeks a decent resolution. The plot is happy to let the protagonist Raghu stew in his own orgasmic juices. The guy is plainly horny all the time. As played by the over-zealous Sushant Singh Rajput, the hero doesn’t even try to hide his hard-on. He wears his libido like a badge of honour and flaunts his carnality in front of the two ladies whom he encounters.They for reasons best known to them, seem to enjoy his company after an initial bout of demurral.
Men are often to think with their dicks. But women???!!!!
It is baffling how a protagonist as low-life and sleazy as Raghu can attract two attractive feisty free-willed women. Or why they would encourage his advances when they know he thinks only with his ...well to use a term Rishi Kapoor uses with such endearing picturesqueness...pappu in the pants.
Pappu in the pants has rollicking time. Wish we could join him...it...whatever!!! Curiously the hero and his horniness are like two different entities in the film. No bumper prizes for guessing which of the two entities gets an upper hand in the script that seems hellbent on celebrating what, for the want of a better term, we must describe as low-life libidinousness.
For all his talk of “zoron ka attraction” Raghu , as played by Rajput comes across as a wimpy womanizer, scoring brownie points with any woman who opens her mouth to let his tongue in. If the dick-head hero had been played by a more intelligent actor he would probably have been interesting. In Sushant’s hands Raghu is an irksome skirt-chaser. Nothing more.
[caption id="attachment_83733" align="alignnone" width="800"]
Parineeti and Sushant Singh Rajput: Their Shuddh Desi Romance[/caption]
The two women are more interesting (aren’t they always?). Especially Parineeti Chopra whose dumbly defiant smoking swearing character Gayatri acquires some stability through the actress’ fearless embrace of the camera space. No matter how frustratingly ill-conceived Gayatri’s rebellious attitude may be, Parineeti owns up to the character’s weaknesses like a man.
Debutant Vaani Kapoor plays her very awkwardly-written character with a mysterious smile that suggests it knows something that we don’t. Not that we care.
Both Rajput and Chopra’s characters and their grating chemistry are troubled by an uneasy sense of déjà vu. Director Maneesh Sharma makes the two characters carryovers of Ranveer Singh and Anushka Sharma in Band Baaja Baaraat.
Really, the twosome here should be put into a banned Baja Baraat. The wedding shenanigans so delectably unselfconscious in Band Baaja Baaraat here seem laboured to suit the director’s purposes of creating a sense of nonchalant sexual liberation in a smalltown where every potential voyeur can peep into his neighbour’s home without being charged with voyeuristic trespassing.
To the cinematographer Manu Anand’s credit the authentic outdoors of Jaipur do not end up mocking the inherently mockable material .Most of the principal actors barring Rishi Kapoor give over-rehearsed performance projected as a laboured casualness . Rishi Kapoor as the wedding caterer is the exception, sinking his teeth into his role even as our hearts sink to the ground at the self-defeating numbing verbosity of the three main characters.
Most of the film is like a clumsy radio play. The three main characters in this lust-triangle just speak and speak about their pathetic selflimiting world. Beyond a point we feel like reluctant eavesdroppers in an ill-managed ménage a trois.
Flat and phoney, the self-conscious realism of the small-time gender-equations in Shuddh Desi Romance leave us untouched unamused and cold.
In terms of pointless posturing this one ranks even lower than Yashraj’s Neil ‘N’ Nikki.
Live-in relationships never felt less inviting.
