Morphine

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Morphine

Rock band

For the Record…

“This Is Different”

Dark, Sexy Themes

Continued Success with yes

Selected discography

Sources

With “sheer originality, slow-burning intensity, excellence of songcraft, and pure fun,” ventured Billboard’s Chris Morris, “Morphine is at the head of the pack among alternative rock bands. “The moody, evocative sound of the Boston group has inspired rock critics to try to outdo one another in describing it: words like “noir” suggest its vibe, while “smoky” is usually the adjective of choice for bassist-singer Mark Sandman’s voice. Inevitable references to the narcotic properties of the trio’s music usually follow.

Morphine’s striking aesthetic—so unlike the assaultive directness of most rock—derives from its unique instrumentation. Sandman’s bass has usually sported only two strings, and he often plays with a slide; saxophonist Dana Colley generally plays a baritone, and drummer Billy Conway leaves lots of space for the music to breathe. With no guitar, apart from subtle touches in the studio, Morphine creates a spacious and surprisingly heavy musical environment. Their 1995 album yes saw them turning the cult success of the group’s previous effort, Cure for Pain, into a prolonged stay on the charts.

For the Record…

Members include Dana Colley, baritone saxophone Billy Conway (joined group 1993), drums; Jerome Deupree (left group 1993), drums; and Mark Sandman, bass, vocals.

Formed in Boston, MA, c. 1992; released debut album, Good, Accurate/Distortion, 1992; signed with Rykodisc and released Cure for Pain, 1993; appeared on soundtrack of film Spanking the Monkey, 1993.

Selected Awards: Good named Independent Album of the Year at Boston Music Awards, 1992.

Addresses: Record company —Rykodisc, 27 Congress St., Salem, MA 01970.

Sandman, a native of Newton, Massachusetts, grew up “a normal kid” listening to “adolescent cock rock,” as he told Option. Yet he also revealed that his adult experience was somewhat more offbeat, including tuna fishing in the Aleutian islands, construction work in the Rocky Mountains, driving a Boston taxi, and gadding around Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He and Conway formed part of the sultry blues-rock band Treat Her Right; Yale University alumnus Colley played with the group Three Colors.

“This Is Different”

Treat Her Right disbanded in 1990. Sandman then embarked on a period of musical experimentation, inviting various musicians to jam with him and looking for new sonic opportunities outside the overworked repertoire of guitar rock. Influenced by the ambitious soundscapes of jazz bassist and composer Charles Mingus, the single-string expressiveness of Middle Eastern music, the gritty intensity of Mississippi Delta blues, the bleak themes of classic country music, and the atmospheric pop of groups like the Police, he began to hone in on the Morphine concept. “I listen to a lot of tapes I pick up at ethnic grocery stores,” he informed Steve Morse of the Boston Globe. “I like things that aren’t necessarily coming from Western sources, that have phrasings that don’t begin and end where you expect them to.”

But it wasn’t until Sandman played a one-stringed bass with a slide—inspired in part by seeing a bassist in a club do the same—against Colley’s saxophone that the concept began to gel. “It wasn’t like’Eureka!’ or anything like that,” he insisted to Billboard’s Morris. “It was, ’This is different—let’s try a gig and see if it flies.’” And, he remarked to Morse, “If the band didn’t work, it would have been no great matter. We would have just tried something else another day.”

Jazz-rock drummer Jerome Deupree originally rounded out the trio. Their maiden gig was well received, encouraging them to carry on. In 1992 Morphine recorded their debut album, Good, on the independent Accurate/Distortion label. It quickly became clear that the group’s sound, which allows the confluence of saxophone and slide bass to work within the space normally filled by guitar, had found an audience. “It just seems like the guitars are there,” Sandman mused in Pulse! “They’re just sort of imaginary.” Of the saxophone—usually relegated to brief solos in pop music—Colley noted in an interview with Randee Dawn Cohen of Alternative Press that he “always felt it had a lot more potential than that and could succeed in becoming part of the music, part of the rhythm and bass. “Pulse! called Good a ” surprisingly accessible” effort that “transcends petty genre distinctions in favor of timeless emotional truths.” It was named “Independent Album of the Year” at the 1992 Boston Music Awards.

Dark, Sexy Themes

Sandman’s lyrics and vocals evoked for many listeners the dark, jaded narratives of noir or “pulp” fiction and film—stories of crime, obsession, and betrayal. Reading off a list of his thematic preoccupations to Option’s Bob Gulla, he cited “perseverance, disadvantage, lust, despair, international love, self-delusion.” At the same time, of course, these often seedy tales are dangerously sexy, lending credence to Sandman’s description of Morphine—solicited by Patrick Bryant of Detroit’s Metro Times —as “f—rock.”

Nonetheless, Sandman has argued that the noir element in his songwriting has been exaggerated. “I mean, I read a lot of those books,” he admitted in SF Weekly, referring to such standards of the genre as the novels of Raymond Chandler, “but I don’t read them over and over.” Indeed, as he remarked to Alternative Press contributor Cohen, his compositions “are probably autobiographical, but it’s hard to tell.” In fact, he lamented not having “disguised” these elements as well as he’d intended.

The promise displayed by Good prompted the Rykodisc label, another independent, to sign Morphine and re-release the album. In the meanwhile, the trio set to work on a follow-up; during this period Deupree left the group and Conway took his place. Cure for Pain came out in 1993 and was a hit with both critics and underground music fans. “Morphine evoke the zonked swing of lounge jazz and the grind of dirty blues while maintaining rock & roll convictions,’ asserted Rolling Stone reviewer Arion Berger, who felt that Sandman displayed “no imagination” as a singer but conceded, “If his vocals can be faulted,” his “songwriting can’t.” Songs like “Thursday,” a tense story of lust and peril, the rocking “Mary Won’t You Call My Name,” and the plaintive, grooving title track—on which Sandman deadpans, “Someday there’ll be a cure for pain/That’s the day I’ll throw my drugs away” —took the record’s sales far beyond expectations. Five tracks from the album appeared on the soundtrack for the acclaimed independent film Spanking the Monkey.

Morphine toured relentlessly in support of Cure for Pain; Colley’s tour diary—excerpts from which appeared in Raygun— preserved some of the immediacy of their international travels. After experiencing the massive earthquake in Los Angeles in January of 1994, the group broke the citywide curfew and played a show there the next night. Colley also wrote of the “surprise and terror” of a packed gig in Brest, a town in the French countryside: “By the time’Mary won’t you call my name’ begins, all hell breaks loose. People are flying back and forth in one group of twisted limbs and bobbing heads. The monitors are the first to go, followed by mike stands, speaker stacks and light rigs. “The hapless soundman was pinned against a wall, unable to improve the mix—which was being broadcast on the radio.”

Continued Success with yes

Morphine’s next release was 1995’s yes. Rykodisc confidently issued the leadoff track, “Honey White,” as a single, and the trio promptly hit the road again. The record earned more rave reviews— Billboard deemed it “one of the year’s best releases, “while USA Today gave the album 31/2 stars out of four and called it the group’s “best album to date” —as did the band’s now well-honed live act. “Morphine has developed from a surprisingly strong unit into a unique force in modern rock music,” marveled Phil Gallo of Daily Variety. “There’s no compromise within Morphine’s daringly original songs that challenge notions of rhythm, melody and even the use of instrumentation as the band bounces off tuneful skeletons from the closets of rockabilly, improvisational jazz, punk and blues.”

yes also demonstrated significant, if not truly mainstream, commercial viability, debuting at the top of the Billboard Heatseekers chart and, despite losing some ground, remaining on the chart for months. As a Los Angeles record retailer told Billboard,” It’s a rock thing, but it’s not a rock thing—it’s a moody rock thing, and there always seems to be a market for that stuff.” Sandman expressed an eagerness to do “residencies” in the band’s favorite cities—several gigs at the same small venue, rather than one in a larger space—as a way of offsetting the wear of nonstop touring. “It’s a way to not have to travel every single day, and a way to get to see some of the cities we’re interested in.”

The members of Morphine have also had a hand in other projects—Sandman has played with the Pale Brothers, Hypnosonics, Supergroup, and Candybar, for example—and this freedom has allowed them, as Colley told Alternative Press, “to keep our chops up” and try different things. Resisting formula is a top priority for the band, as Sandman pointed out in SF Weekly: ” We’re trying to keep the definition of’what’s a Morphine song’ pretty flexible. Pretty soon it’s going to be just about anything. We’ve been holding back a lot of the stranger things. We’re feeling braver now. It’s a big cosmos out there.”