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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.IX.VII.XVII
Panchtantra Monkey Among
The Sqabbling Cats
By Cecil Victor
In the Panchatantra Tales India has a compendium of episodes that have a moral message. The current frenetic series of diplomatic exchanges between leaders from different parts of the globe dealing with their respective perspectives of world order brings to the fore the episode of the monkey and the squabbling cats.
American President Donald Trump (of course, who else?) met Arab leaders in West Asia recently and he played the Panchatantra monkey to the hilt (no wonder he paid high tributes to India for giving him a truly iconic transactional mascot to emulate in his “America First” policy). He talked Saudi Arabia (the fountainhead of Wahabi Sunni Islamic fundamentalism practiced by al Qaeda and ISIS) into buying American weapons worth dollars 350 billion– to fight terrorism (of the Iranian Shia kind) – then he met the ruler of Qatar and sold him dollar 12 billion worth of F-15 fighter aircraft. Behind the scenes he had already nudged Saudi Arabia to accuse Qatar of encouraging terrorism (of the Muslim Brotherhood kind which is a product of Egypt) and hobnobbing with Shia Iran.
Before anyone could say “FIRE!” the Gulf was engulfed in a conflagration that threatens to spiral out of control and India is caught in the vortex. Tiny Qatar situated between United Arab Emirates and Bahrain in the Persian Gulf is one of the richest oil producing nations in the world. It is host to more than 6.50 lakh expatriate Indian workers (about a quarter of the total population) who send substantial portions of their earnings as valuable foreign exchange to homes in India.
Trump first took credit for starting the fire and then pretended to be “mystified” by Saudi Arabia’s role in turning Egypt and prominent members of the Gulf Cooperation Council against Qatar. The Saudi led group has set terms for revoking the sanctions and air, land and sea embargoes that no self-respecting nation in the world can accept. This is not the first time that internecine warfare has erupted among Arab nations on the peninsula. Saudi Arabia has taken a hand in the Yemeni civil war given that Iran is supporting the Houti rebels. Once again India had to evacuate by sea and air as many of 5,000 of its citizens who were employed in Yemen thereby losing out on the remittances that the expatriates would have sent home. During the first Gulf war of 1990 India had to evacuate nearly 1.12 lakh workers from Kuwait routed through Amman in Jordan. Conflicts in West Asia inflict collateral damage on India be it in the form of cost of airlift and ship passage to loss of earnings/remittances; rise in the cost of petroleum products and withdrawal of investments by non-resident Indians. Another evacuation, this time from Qatar, is staring India in the face.
Aligning with Donald Trump’s America underscores the cardinal lesson of the Panchatantra Tales –don’t be too trusting. Hoping that India’s new “strategic partner” would play fair it was disappointing to see that there are no teeth in the announcement that the head of the United Jihad Council of terrorist organizations Syed Salahuddin is a “global terrorist”. No economic sanction against the Lashkar-e-Toiba, the Jaishe Mohammad and other splinter groups that under the United Jihad Council are launching terrorist attacks on “Indian administered Kashmir” (why should a strategic partner shy away from clearly identifying Indian territorial limits?) No action also on his mentor Pakistan and its Inter-Services Intelligence that provides Syed Salahuddin with the military equipment and Intelligence inputs for attacks across the Line of Control in Jammu and Kashmir.
We asked for unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs) – those which, like the Predators used by the US along the Afghanistan-Pakistan salient, can fire missiles at targets on the ground. Instead we have had to be happy with surveillance UAVs. This means that we can watch Syed Salauddin applying henna on his hair and beard and taking an oilbath in the sun in the salubrious weather in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir but we cannot shoot him.
Yet it is not as if Donald Trump has not been a victim of his own cunning ways. In the hope of putting the brake on North Korea’s programme of creating inter-continental ballistic missiles capable of hitting the US mainland he sought the help of China to dissuade North Korea. China has long had a nexus with North Korea and Pakistan to proliferate both missiles and nuclear warhead knowhow. The network headed by Pakistan’s nuclear scientist A.Q.Khan advertised and supplied Chinese miniaturized nuclear warhead designs to Libya, Iran and the former white racist regime of South Africa. So, as was to be expected, within a few months of Trump requesting Beijing for help to stop the North Korean missile programme, Pongyang announced that it had tested a missile capable hitting any part of the globe (US included).
The Chinese monkey, unlike the Cheshire cat, does not grin. It smirks.
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