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.
By Gurmukh Singh TORONTO: Indo-Canadian music composer Vikas Kohli is a hybrid kid who grew up imbibing both Indian and western cultures here. He armed himself with MBA and CFA degrees to become a fat corporate executive, but passion drove him to music and he ended up setting up Fatlabs Studios. Today, he creates what he calls `Canadian masala’ by mixing Punjabi/Bollywood pop and western music. If Kohli produced `Apun Ke Saath‘ for `Mission Istaanbul' and Bollywood Monster Mash-Up for the IIFA show in Toronto in 2011, he also composed the title track for the Canadian Film Centre's `Shanti Baba Ram & The Dancers of Hope’. If he co-wrote Jennifer Abadesso's chart-buster song `Did You Think’, he also produced multi-million album selling Mika Singh. Working with different genres of music, he says, has helped him sub-consciously create what can be termed be hybrid music. Sitting in his fabulous Fatlabs, the young composer says, ``The hybrid is simply the result of my many musical influences growing up watching Indian Cinema and living in Canada. I subconsciously incorporated western song structures, harmonies and various world instruments into the Bollywood and non-Bollywood songs I work on. I work on so many different musical genres that everything becomes it's own unique "Canadian Masala.’’ Having worked with international musicians of punk, jazz, hip-hop, country music, metal, and Bollywood pop, he thinks Bollywood pop is now right up there with western pop. ``Bollywood pop seems to converging with western pop in the sense that the songs are focused on getting a catchy hook upfront and Bollywood pop is using more and more the ideas of harmony and non-swing rhythms. The production of pop all around the world is similar with a strong emphasis on production quality, tempo-locked beats, and club-friendly tracks,’’ Kohli says. As an after thought, he adds quickly, "The truth is that I see similarities between punk, hip-hop and Bollywood pop and the challenge is in trying to do something unique in each of those genres of music. Perhaps I see the differences from my mathematics background. It's all about pattern recognition and the aesthetics of symmetry and proportion.’’ So does he see Bollywood pop as the next big thing on the global stage? "Oh, yeah, absolutely. Bollywood pop and pop from other countries of the world is converging to some global notion of pop. In Canada, the Bollywood CDs and DVDs sit beside the Maroon 5 and Rihanna CDs in our department stores. "When I bring a Bollywood singer to Canada to perform or work on a project, after the concert all my non-Indian friends will have the songs stuck in their heads. A good melody and a danceable beat reaches everyone.’’ According to Kohli, Kalyanji & Anandji as well as SD & RD Burman are among his idols. ``They were great at doing what Indian culture has always been great at doing - absorbing outside influences and making them into their own. At the same time, I'm equally influenced by North American music producers such as Rick Ruben and Hollywood film composers such as James Horner. I draw from all the influences that surround me, and it all finds it's way into the music I create.’’ Apart from composing `Apun Ke Saath’ in `Mission Istaanbul', Kohli created a fusion concert production called Bollywood Monster Mash-Up for the IIFA show in Toronto last year Calling it one of the high points of his career, he says, ``We had 54 performers, including Monali Thakur, members of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and over 15,000 people attended the show.’’ His fascination with an emerging India and Bollywood has led him do a double length feature documentary about the rise of mall culture in India titled "MallaMall." Not surprisingly, he has quite a few India and Bollywood-centric projects on his hands. ``Before I start composing for the trilogy film "Calcutta Taxi", I'm producing the return of Bollywood Monster Mash-Up in which we have over 80 performers, including rising Bollywood star Rajdeep Chatterjee, as well as dancers, western choirs singing Bollywood, and a nostalgic trip through Asha Bhosle's classics from the gangster films of the 70s,’’ says Kohli. Any regrets about chucking a lucrative career in corporate world? ``Only that I used to get more sleep,’’ he says with a big smile. Kohli’s family originally hails from Lahore. ``After partition, we left for Delhi. Now we are in India, Britain, the US and Canada. We are absolutely proud of our Punjabi, Indian roots,’’ he says. (This article first appeared in the Times of India)
