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THE RING OF ROCKETTE MORTON

by

Jeff Calder

Stomp & Stammer

Volume 7, Number 12/October, 2002

Four years ago, when John “Drumbo” French was preparing his liner notes for the 1999 Captain Beefheart and The Magic Band 5-disc set (Grow Fins: Rarities 1965-1982, Revenant), he was having difficulty locating bassist Mark Boston, known professionally as Rockette Morton. With French and guitarist Bill Harkleroad (Zoot Horn Rollo), Boston had been at the center of The Magic Band during their golden period when they created their fabulous quartet of Beefheart albums, Trout Mask Replica (1969), Lick My Decals Off, Baby (1970), Spotlight Kid (1972), and Clear Spot (1973).

Harkleroad and Boston split from Captain Beefheart in 1974. They continued under the name Mallard, which released two recordings in 1975/76 (Mallard, In A Different Climate). Afterwards, Boston vanished from public view, and it was rumored over the years that he had fallen upon hard times. John French had last heard that Boston was living somewhere in North Carolina, but the trail had long since grown cold, with the possibility of disturbing implications. In an era when New York magazine could easily pinpoint the whereabouts of Thomas Pynchon, the secretive novelist, using an on-line detection service, there was reason to believe that Rockette might have become the Ambrose Beirce of bass and left earthly orbit altogether.

In October, 2001, guitarist and Atlanta resident, Denny Walley, himself a 1970s’ alumnus of Beefheart and Frank Zappa, disclosed that Mark Boston had been uncovered in Aiken, South Carolina, where he has been living off-and-on for almost 9 years. Aiken is a small town of 24,000 inhabitants, located thirty miles east of Augusta, Georgia. In The Guilded Age, Aiken became a “Winter Colony” for wealthy Northern sportsmen of equestrian disposition; it remains a breeding and training center for race horses in the present day. James Brown was born nearby in 1933, and it was in Aiken that the highway patrol terminated their madcap 1989 chase with The Godfather, landing him in a state correctional facility for a two-year hitch.

Throughout the 1950s, in the vicinity of Aiken, an immense top-secret facility, today called The South Carolina River Site, was constructed to fabricate plutonium-239 and tritium for America’s nuclear arsenal. In the weeks following the attacks of September 11, the Department of Energy raised all such facilities to a “heightened level of security.” About five miles from this officially hardened target, Mark Boston, 52, lives a quiet life in a mobile home surrounded by his collection of alien and rocket ship models.

He remains sharp-eyed, if a bit more substantial than the youngster who used to jag about during Magic Band sets wearing a flowery suit with a hand-painted jungle scene. “I’m a Space Nut,” he claims. “I’m pro-Space.” He is still an active musician, as well, and, at his Aiken studio, he has recorded 14 new songs for his imminent solo debut. The album will feature Space themes like “Gonna Take A Rockette To The Moon,” “The Space Shuttle, You’re So Subtle,” and an instrumental, “Black Hole Boogie,” with a proposed cameo by Zoot Horn Rollo on guitar.

To be sure, without intruding, life seems to have dealt Mark more than his share of woe, evident in the now rugged quality of his features. The retractable buck knife positioned on his belt might repel some wise guys hanging around the Wal-Mart, but Boston balances a natural Stoic demeanor (“Gotta keep a roof over my head”) with the unmistakable kindness that is the stamp of true gentility. His warmth toward his guests is unfeigned. In the cadence of an old prospector, he transmits his compliments to the cook, who had recently prepared the Waffle House chili now falling in deliberate increments under the assault of Rockette Morton.

Mark Boston was raised in Salem, Illinois, which is directly west of St. Louis. Salem, says Boston, was “a little hick town. I was thirteen or so when I left there. Sometimes we had storms go through. Sounded like God stomping on the roof.” (Salem was also the birthplace of William Jennings Bryan and John T. Scopes, whom the much older Bryan coincidentally prosecuted at the notorious 1925 Scopes “Monkey Trial” in Tennessee.)

Boston describes his parents as working people. They migrated to Lancaster, California in 1963 to escape the freezing climate of the Midwest. “It was so different from where I grew up. Illinois is real green. Gentle rolling hills. Kind of like around here [Aiken]. We went to Lancaster. All these mountains all over the place. It was dry. Desert. Wide open spaces as far as you can see.”

70 miles north of Los Angeles, Lancaster is the “high-desert” town that became an unlikely Petri dish for a white R&B culture that produced Don Van Vliet (Captain Beefheart) and Frank Zappa. The area’s crop of stellar young guitarists (Alex St. Clair, Doug Moon, Bill Harkleroad) ultimately applied their understanding of Chicago and Delta blues to aesthetic objectives that were at considerable odds with boogie manifestations elsewhere in the Western World.

As an adolescent, in the Quartz Hill area near Lancaster, Boston’s situation was a good one. “I had my own special room outside. It was a great setup for a teenager. I used to listen to Spike Jones. I think, my Dad did, too.” Mark’s father was a musician who worked in a grain factory and played bass and steel guitar, which begins to explain Boston’s lifelong love of blues and country music. He took up the bass and eventually became of member of Blues In A Bottle, with John French, and B.C. & The Cavemen, with Bill Harkleroad.

In his history, Lunar Notes, Harkleroad writes:

I’d been playing with Mark since I was 14 years old—he was as soft as a teddy bear. Some of my earliest memories were playing out at Mark’s place. He had a garage that had been converted into a music room…It was definitely very Country and Western at Mark’s house. I’d come from a basically middle-class background—swimming pool in the backyard etc. Mark’s situation was definitely not middle-class, he had a much tougher life going on.

Harkleroad explains that, in 1965, the bass “was considered a ‘stupid instrument’--the guy who couldn’t play guitar would play the bass. That was not the case with Mark--he was a good bass player. He also had the equipment, and it made a big difference to the sound of the band.”

For B.C. & The Cavemen, Boston remembers, “My mother sewed fur on our vests and boots. We also covered those giant wooden spools [the kind used for heavy-duty cables] with fur. In the clubs that didn’t have stages, we’d just roll them out. You couldn’t move around on them a lot, though.”

If not a national figure by 1968, Captain Beefheart had become a major force inside Lancaster’s music community. As a vocalist, Van Vliet’s power and authenticity were without parallel in the American blues revival of the day. “We idolized Don,” says Mark Boston now. "[Bill and I] were both in a couple of bands together before we ever got invited to work with Don. Bill went in first. I used to go to their band practices, and every gig they did around the [Antelope] Valley. I wanted to be in that band so bad I could taste it. Of course, they were playing blues then.”

Captain Beefheart and The Magic Band had already released several singles on A&M Records (“Diddy Wah Diddy,” “Frying Pan”) and two albums. Safe As Milk (Buddah US/Pye International UK) had been a superb, though not unconventional recording, with production assistance from Ry Cooder; Strictly Personal (Blue Thumb US/Liberty UK) was an adventurous, if unfocused, work best described as a strange transitional effort.

Most of the early Magic Band were Don Van Vliet’s contemporaries. It soon became evident that they would not, or could not, follow him through the mirror of mercury he was about to erect down in Los Angeles. For what was to come next, Van Vliet required younger, less fully developed musicians. Their sense of awe would allow him to reshape their sensibilities and discharge the artistic feat known now as Trout Mask Replica. When Mark Boston got the call for his audition, he had no clue how his personal history was about to change.

“I thought they were going to be playing the stuff from Safe As Milk. They said, ‘Play along with this.’ I think it was ‘Steal Softly Thru Snow.’ I just started strumming along. When we finished, Don said, ‘You’re hired. You’re the only guy to get from the beginning to the end.’”

As the new material came to life, Boston assumed an additional role as Van Vliet’s typist, transcribing the poems and song lyrics, often at the moment of inspiration. “I’d taken 3 years of typing. I was the only one who could keep up with him. Don was the only person I had ever met who opened his mouth and poetry came out.” From a long list of names, Boston chose “Rockette Morton” for his own. “I think Don came up with that one, and I liked it.”

According to John French’s various accounts and Bill Harkleroad’s memoir, the new Magic Band spent more than six months in a small house making up Trout Mask Replica, with Van Vliet guiding the process. When the band wasn’t practicing together through a single Silvertone amplifier, they slept in corners of a room. There was little food, and almost no money. “Our parents kept us alive,” Boston says today.

To execute the contorted Beefheart bass parts, Mark Boston used three metal fingerpicks in combination with a standard flatpick. This was, and is, a highly unusual approach for an electric bassist, and it left deep gouges in wood surrounding the pickup mounts. With his left hand continuously zooming up and down the fretboard, and the unorthodox multi-plectrum technique in full motion, Boston attacked chordal patterns in a fashion which, to the uninitiated, appeared to be completely at random. Taken as a whole, Rockette Morton’s elaborate system seems to have had no prior instance in the history of rock & roll bass playing; upon display, it made him a favorite Magic Band figure in concert.

In his biography, Captain Beefheart, Mike Barnes offers the following description: “The instrument’s sound is flat and woody and it is clawed, strummed, it’s neck wrung.” By way of demonstration, Rockette reaches across the Aiken Waffle House dinette and, above the salt and pepper, cups his right hand as if he were displaying a knuckle-ball grip. “I had to develop that style just to play that stuff. The round wound strings hurt my fingers, then I switched to half-round. The flat wounds don’t have the tone.” When Boston shifted to guitar during the later Clear Spot period-- after Roy Estrada took over on bass-- he simply applied the same rhythmic procedure to his Fender Telecaster.

Boston’s Danelectro double-neck bass, something of a signature, has long since disappeared. Also lost, or missing, is the electric toaster which he used to wear as hat when he opened the Beefheart set, proposing “a toast,” before launching into his introductory bass solo. “It was a Procter Toaster,” Boston recalls. “Kind of heavy. Had a little strap. I just wore it on the one song.”

In the years after he left The Ma g ic Band and Mallard, Mark Boston drifted around. “I ended up back down in Lancaster for a little bit. I was just kind of bouncin g back and forth in little local bands. Down around Fresno and Porterville , California . Fresno is a real armpit. People there are terrible, the ones that I had to deal with. Lot of backstabbers and jealous-type people.”

Boston reconnected with an old friend from Lancaster, drummer Michael Trailer. “We had a band called Duck. We played mostly Top 40. Nevada. Up and down California. Went on a USA tour in 1980. Went over to Korea, Guam, Okinawa, Diego Garcia. [Diego Garcia has emerged as a staging area in the American-Afghan conflict.] I imagine that place is pretty busy. It’s just a little itty-bitty wishbone island out in the middle of the Indian Ocean.”

At some point in the early 90s, Boston and Trailer moved to Nashville. It was a predictable experience: “Nashville is pretty sewn up. A real closed circuit. You’ve gotta be a real devout Christian. They’d see ‘Captain Beefheart’ on my resume, and it sometimes worked against me. Did a few sessions. One was with a movie actor. I can’t remember his name. He’d been on M.A.S.H. and various movies. Some white-haired guy. If I could have found some work around there, I might have stayed.”

Through Trailer, he hooked up with Leon Everette, whose Country hits include “Hurricaine” and “Don’t Feel Like the Lone Ranger.” Everette’s hometown was Aiken, which was how Mark ended up there in the 1990s. When his tenure with Everette came to an end, Boston relocated to Santa Rosa, California for two years in order to care for his mother until her death, after which he returned to South Carolina. Once on the West Coast, however, he placed a phone call to John French down in Lancaster, and, for the first time, he learned about the Revenant CD box set, Grow Fins, and that French and others had been trying to track him down.

In September, 2001, smoke signals from high in the Mojave indicated the possibility of a Magic Band reformation—minus Captain Beefheart--for public appearances at UCLA and in London later in 2002. In anticipation, Boston regenerated his trade mark mustache, with the waxed peaks like Salvador Dali’s. He also set about re-conquering the obtuse arrangements of “Hair Pie, Bake 2” and, once more, “Steal Softly.” He confides, “I practice a little in the morning and a little at night. I had to go out and buy some new metal fingerpicks. I haven’t played with them since 1974.”

But don’t for a minute think that this middle-aged Country Man has forgotten the flair that made him Rockette Morton. He is still wearing a sterling ring in the shape of an outsize bottle fly that he acquired on tour in England in the early Seventies. At an Aiken flea market, he purchased a fiberglass “German-style bucket-helmet,” with air-brushed skulls. He plans to modify it in the event that Magic Band shows someday materialize. “I’m thinking about putting LED lights in the skeleton eyes,” he says, “and I’m looking for two antennas to mount right now--just to make it a little different. You know, like My Favorite Martian. The kind that came up out of his head.”

Boston seems pleased to have been celebrated by the British Avant-garde group, Nurse With Wound on “Rockette Morton (Parts One and Two),” a tribute from their 1989 compilation, A Sucked Orange (United Diaries UD 032). He is reading “The Power of Myth” by Joseph Campbell. He drives a 1980 Dodge van with over two hundred thousand miles, filled with camping equipment and a fat white telescope tube--being a Space Nut, and all that. In the daytime, he “pulls wires,” installing alarms for a security firm run by his collaborator, Les Kitchings, who, Boston says, has shown him “the true meaning of Southern hospitality.” The two have finished building their recording studio, Bomark, which is open to the public, and which Boston helped to finance with the “nice little chunk” he received from Revenent Records after the reasonable success of the Grow Fins box.

He is anxious to get his two musical projects underway. First, there is that collection of original compositions with Space themes, on which he’ll play bass and guitar. “It’s like Delta blues and country. I learned a little ‘bottle’ [slide] from Lowell George and Ry Cooder. The vocals are a cross between the Beach Boys and Gene Autrey. It’s not like Beefheart, but I hope the previous fans will like it.” (Mark adds that his singing debut came on a tribute entitled “The Magic Band,” written by Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull; though recorded during the Mallard sessions in the mid-Seventies, which Anderson facilitated, the track has yet to surface.)

Mark’s other project will be a full-length miscellany of his uncommon bass playing, for which he hopes John French will contribute his equally extraordinary drumming. Boston is also piling up original drawings for the coloring book he would like to publish someday, having dabbled in a related artistic medium in the past. “On the road, I used to do a lot of placemat art. I’d drop stains on them on purpose, and I’d take the placemat back to my room and work on it some more.”

Earlier in the day, prior to his rendezvous at the Waffle House, Boston had stopped by Aiken’s annual Atomic Festival to check out a scheduled performance by Soul Brother No. 1. Mark relates that, “James Brown played about five minutes and left the stage. He let the band finish the set.”

Today, the length of a continent away, the painter Don Van Vliet, 61, gazes into the Far East of the West, imagining who-knows-what geologic poetic. Suffering, it is said, from Multiple Sclerosis, he, too, is probably happy to let the band finish the set. Those who made it with him through the liquid looking glass, when he was Captain Beefheart, have never quite been the same again. John French has released a disc of his drumming, O Solo Drumbo, and a more recent disc of his songs, Waiting On The Flame; he prepares his memoir, Beefheart: Through The Eyes of Magic. After all these years, the great Bill Harkleroad has finally released his debut disc, We Saw A Bozo Under The Sea. (“Bill’s not lost his touch,” Boston observes.) Given the ghastly tales of psychological torment undergone by both men, as related in their written commentaries, Mark Boston’s lack of bitterness is as astonishing as his legacy. Despite three decades of hardship and isolation, he has fond memories of his years as Rockette Morton in Captain Beefheart and The Magic Band, when Zoot, Drumbo and he created the Cleopatra’s Needle of American Pop. Perhaps, at some point, they will restore the obelisk, yet again.

In October, 2001, Ma g ic Band sessions were held in Lancaster at John French’s g ara g e studio, with Zoot Horn Rollo and Atlanta’s Denny Walley on g uitars. Boston reports, “Just enou g h room to g et all four of us in there. It came to g ether really well. It was fun playin g that stuff a g ain, cause it was a kick in the butt. We’d pick a son g , and someone said, ‘How do you want to start it off?’ And I said to John, ‘Well, you always used to say, “And!” So he said, ‘Okay. “And!”’ and we jumped ri g ht into it.”

The material for the proposed dates was to concentrate primarily on Trout Mask Replica and Lick My Decals Off, Baby. However, in the months following The Magic Band pow-wow in Lancaster, discussions between the group, their promoters and UCLA became entangled in a turnaround of contractual confusion, finally collapsing in June, 2002, when The Magic Band withdrew from the negotiating table. Nonetheless, the group sustains some optimism for future concerts and has begun to parley with a new group of organizers for shows in London. As part of a prepared statement released at www.beefheart.com, John French writes:

If there is a legitimate agent out there reading this, who would wishto contact us re g arding LEGITIMATE and STRAIGHTFORWARD offers for a couple of reunion concerts, I will gladly share any legitimate offers with other Magic Band members. Who knows?

Looking back, in transport, Mark Boston concludes, “Some of my best memories are out under that desert sky [in Lancaster] at night, in the summer. You have those hot summer days, then it cools down at night, but it stays warm enough. We used to have parties out in the desert, everybody running around naked and having fun. The desert is just a magical, spiritual kind of place.”

He recalls that John French’s mom did not like Don Van Vliet. She was “spooky, religious and burned candles around the house.” Because Van Vliet always laughed at her admonitions, she called him Laughing Boy. Boston remembers, “Don had a closet full of shoes.” But, he wonders, given the group’s perpetual poverty, “How did Don get that Stingray?”

“When [The Magic Band] lived up in Eureka, in Northern California, we rented a big old farmhouse on the edge of the Redwoods. I used to read Indian and Cowboy stories to Don. When he would do his action painting, I would help keep the paints supplied and mixed, and I would keep the appropriate brushes clean. He used to run at his easel, screaming, and hit it [with a brush]. One time Don broke the easel into little pieces, so I held up the painting for him. He ran at it again, screaming, and hit it and knocked me on my ass and said, ‘That’s it! Don’t touch a thing!’”

On percussionist Art Tripp, who replaced John French on drums for a time: “He added a lot of color. He went to Julliard, I think, but he didn’t act like he had anything to prove. [When he joined The Magic Band] he made us ‘official.’ ”

In a vivid recollection, Rockette Morton cites a mysterious photograph of guitarist Winged Eel Fingerling (Elliot Ingber) during a show when his feet were not touching the stage floor. “I’d go over to Elliot’s house. He’d make a yoga tea and chant over it. I used to love going to Johnny Weissmuller’s Restaurant [in Hollywood], too. They had a great sandwich with tuna and a little mayonnaise, alfalfa sprouts, and cream cheese. I guess the young people don’t even know who Johnny Weissmuller is anymore. They don’t even know who Paul McCartney is. I still make that sandwich sometimes, though.”

Jeff Calder

Atlanta

September, 2002