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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.
News Grille
CECIL VICTOR. Editorial. XXVIII.I.XVIII
HAQQANI HIT
By Cecil Victor
Since December last year, there had been a series of terrorist attacks on high-value Afghanistan targets. The frequency was greater and their lethality worse. In January itself there were three strikes. The January 20 attack on the Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul killed 40 (including four Americans) and injured 22 persons. The Taliban warned Afghans not to assemble in areas frequented by foreigners. Till then, these developments showed up the US President Donald Trump’s twitter messages as just impotent chatter of a twit. (Already his own countrymen had expressed grave doubts about his mental ability to rule the US of A).
Then Donald struck. A drone aircraft fired two rockets into a house in the Khurram province of Pakistan bordering Afghanistan (south-east of Kabul). Soon an anonymous Intelligence officer let it be known that a mid-level commander of the Haqqani outfit and two companions had been executed in the attack. It was all well orchestrated to a “T”.
The identification of the dead Haqqani crony as “mid-level" indicated that he had been especially selected to send a clear message to the Haqqani outfit on the one hand and its mentor the Pakistan Army Inter-Services Intelligence which has, over the years, been accused by Afghanistan of masterminding terrorist attacks on targets in its territory (including the attack on the Indian Embassy in Kabul in 2008). The message was: We know where you are and know how to deal with you. Notable too was that this was without any help from Pakistan which had shut sharing of Intelligence with the US Central Intelligence Agency after Trump had announced a cut-off of military aid because Pakistan had not stopped providing sanctuaries and military assistance to global terrorists. Pakistan’s Army Chief Qamar Javed Bajwa had instructed the Armed Forces to shoot down US drones if they violated Pakistan’s sovereignty. The US drone that took down the Haqqani minions kept circling the strike zone for fifteen minutes apparently hoping for Pakistan to react.
Now that Donald Trump has acted, it remains to be seen how far he will go. Will he dismantle the Haqqani network piecemeal or will he decide to take out the scion Sirajuddin Haqqani now that his father Jallaluddin has retired. It needs to be recalled that the network then headed by Jallaluddin Haqqani was a favourite conduit for military equipment to fight the Soviet troops. Also, the US had long hoped that the family, the ethos of which has been purely to ensure the establishment of shariah laws and to rid Afghanistan of western influence could be persuaded to join a coalition government in Kabul preparatory to the total withdrawal of the US-led coalition forces.
After his scathing renunciation of Pakistan for not doing enough to curb the incubation of global terrorism on its soil Trump announced that nearly two billion dollars of military assistance would be withheld. There has not been any hint from US sources whether the January escalation of terrorist attacks at several places in Afghanistan with a concentration on Kabul is in any way a sign that the Pakistan Army Inter-Services Intelligence is trying to get back on Washington. But it is a possibility that cannot be ruled out. The drone strike has shown, once again, that the targets were well within Pakistani territory even though the Haqqani network professes to “feel more secure” within Afghan territory.
Now that Donald Trump has finally acted directly against the Haqqani network it is possible to discern a method in his strategy in dealing with Pakistan. The cut-off of military assistance by Washington was ameliorated to some extent by the Chinese stepping into the breach. But the American financial squeeze will persist as is evident from the decision to apply sanctions on six “financiers and facilitators” of the Taliban and the Haqqani network. Donald Trump has signaled his approval of Senator Rand Paul’s move to introduce a bill intended to divert civilian aid allocated to Pakistan by the State Department and the US AID to the construction of infrastructure within the US. This adds up to an additional two billion dollars bringing the total to about four billion dollars. It should burn a big hole in Pakistani pockets.
The Pakistani military establishment’s counter is to demand the repatriation of the Afghans who had become refugees when the US launched its blitzkrieg against the ruling Taliban in Kabul after the 9/11 attack on the US mainland. Through this ploy it hopes to be able to pump in more terrorists from the Haqqani, al Qaeda, Taliban and Islamic State remnants disguised as refugees into Afghanistan to rip up that country once again.
Now that he has a roadmap in his hand Donald Trump must accelerate the drone attacks and let the sanctions bite. Releasing the pressure on either of these actions will only prolong the pain.
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