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.
Those of us who have chosen to make Canada our home – over the last 1 year or 5, or 20 or 40, or more – have many stories to tell. Some of those stories are soaked in tears, some in irony, some in pathos.
And some in great loss, and some in excruciating longing for the motherland we left behind.
And some, of course, in great triumph!
At the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Punjabi playwright Sarena Parmar’s play The Orchard (After Chekhov), under the direction of Ravi Jain, presents all this wide spectrum of emotions with heart-rending poignancy and quiet aplomb.
The Orchard tells the story of a Punjabi Sikh family trying to lay its roots in an orchard in the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia in the 1970s amongst people who had lived, for decades, in a cloistered world of their own, with easy, cliché-ridden images of others, of different ethnicities and faiths.
The Punjabi family comprises of children and young men and women, and there are venerated elders given to hard bone-crushing labour, all steeped in their own unquestioning and un-questioned centuries-old traditions and culture, so richly marked by rituals, symbols and ceremonies at every hour of day and night.
Each one of them, it seems, carries a world of its own inside their head
The Okanagan Valley in British Columbia in Canada and ‘the land of five rivers’, Punjab in India, are on the opposite sides of the globe; they may not seem all that far today in the age of mobile phones and internet, but in the 1970s, for a family from rural Punjab, it was truly a world apart, as though on another planet.
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Jani Lauzon as Charlie with the cast of The Orchard (After Chekhov). Photo by David Cooper.[/caption]
The Orchard, with its inspiration and an occasional reference to the celebrated Russian play, The Cherry Orchard by Chekhov, un-weaves the trials and tribulations of this Sikh family in Canada at a time when the idea of multiculturalism was just becoming, under the bold and creative leadership of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, the new creed in Canada, with all its social and political uncertainties and trepidations.
With a certain generous heart, one could say, that The Orchard is a glimpse into the greening of Canada in the past half century.
Could this Sikh family ever imagine then, that, a quarter century later, the Premier of British Columbia would be a Punjabi Sikh, and some forty years later, they would see a turbaned Sikh become the Minister of Defence of Canada under another Trudeau?
As Canada becomes home to many more people from many more lands, one may ask: “Where are we going?”
But also, “Where did we come from, and how far have we come?”
In the 1840s, in the aftermath of the devastating potato famine in Ireland, as the famished and the diseased Irish men, women and children landed in Canada, they were shunned and were treated with utmost disdain.
In the 1880s, more than 17,000 Chinese labourers worked on railroads under the harshest of conditions, linking Canada from one end to the other, and laying the foundations for the dream of Canada as a nation, and then only to be struck with an odious ‘head tax’ for decades.
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At the same time, in the mighty land south of Canada, in 1888, the great Statue of Liberty was being erected in the New York Harbor, with the ringing words of a young socialist Jewish poet, Emma Lazarus, welcoming millions to its shores from far and wide:
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
“Look at that mass of foreign ignorance and vice which has flooded that country with socialism, atheism and all other isms,” moaned the first Prime Minister of the Dominion of Canada, Sir John A. Macdonald, as he boasted with great pride of Canada’s restricted immigration policy at the time.
At the same time thousands of indigenous children of First Nations were being taken away from their homes and their cultures and shoved away in residential schools so as “to take the Indian out of the child”, perpetrating a ‘cultural genocide’ over many decades.
In these past sixty years, Canada has been generous and welcoming to immigrants and refugees from Hungry and Czechoslovakia, India and Jamaica, Uganda and Sri Lanka, Vietnam and Somalia, Haiti and Syria, and thousands of war-resistors from the USA; at each step, and every year, Canada’s face has assumed many new and here-to-unknown colours, and its hues have become ever more vibrant, and its roots have deepened.
Canada has become a ‘Rainbow Nation’, in the celebrated words of Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
As people from so many varied and ancient lands make Canada their home, with renewed self-confidence, and with well-honed skills in theatre, films, music, dance, arts and poetry, they are all re-defining and re-formulating Canadian culture, and are enriching it in a thousand different ways.
The Orchard, under the deft and imaginative direction of Ravi Jain at Jackie Maxwell Studio Theatre at the Shaw Festival, is a most welcome step in that direction.
The Shaw Festival is a major theatre festival in Canada, with well-deserved international reputation, drawing audiences from all over the world, to this most picturesque wine-country in Ontario.
I hope there will be playwrights with Chinese, Ukrainian, Korean and Irish stories and experiences to enliven the stages at Shaw and other festivals in Canada.
Next year, in 2019, the Shaw Festival is presenting the great Indian epic The Mahabharata under the direction of Ravi Jain.
So now, in The Orchard, for me to see a man, David Adams, with a flowing beard and a turban on a stage at Shaw, speaking half in English and half in Punjabi, to a host of talented multicultural performers – Shawn Ahmed, Jeff Meadows, Sanjay Talwar, Jani Lauzon, Andrew Lawrie, Krystal Kiran, Pamela Sinha and others – presented a new and vibrant face of New Canada, at once the hope of the world, and of our new century.
Bravo!
(Prof Sehdev Kumar lectures on “International Cinema and the Human Condition” at the University of Toronto. He is author of The Vision of Kabir, about the great 15th century Indian mystic-poet. His forthcoming book is, “7000 Million Degrees of Freedom”)
ALSO BY PROF SEHDEV KUMAR: Toronto celebrating great music at Soulpepper this summer
