Morphine Biography

Morphine was an alternative rock band founded by Mark Sandman and Dana Colley in 1989, located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.

Morphine was critically-acclaimed for their outstanding innovative music and unique instrumentation; their music was a combination of jazz and blues elements along with more traditional rock arrangements, giving the group a very unusual and distinctive sound. Besides that, Mark Sandman had a distinctive voice, described as deep, laid-back croon, and his songwriting featured a prominent beatnik influence.

Their unique music breaks the genres’ boundaries, being quite hard to label. Some call their music alternative rock, other say it is indie rock, but when asked by reporters to describe their music, Mark Sandman simply labeled it “Low Rock”. One critical appraisal suggests that “Morphine immediately established a minimalist, low-end sound that could have easily become a gimmick: a ‘power trio’ not built around the sound of an electric guitar. Instead, with sly intelligence, Morphine expanded its offbeat vocabulary on each album.” The sound of Morphine resides in Sandman’s fretless two-string slide bass guitar, his deep voice and Colley’s saxophones.

Band Members

Mark Sandman, 2 string slide bass, vocals,organ, tritar, guitar, piano, 1989 - 1999	Dana Colley, baritone sax, tenor sax, double sax, triangle, 1989 -1999
Jerome Deupree, various percussion, 1989 - 1993, 1998 - 1999	Billy Conway, various percussion 1993 - 1999

Morphine Biography

Morphine was one of the most original groups of the 1990’s and likewise, Sandman one of the strongest personalities of the decade. Like classical musicians, this group was successful in conveying a concept that was highly experimental (music for bass and saxophone) in a classic format: the rock song. They succeeded in creating their own genre by drawing inspiration from jazz, blues, rockabilly, new wave, etc… without ever belonging, however, exclusively to any of these. Morphine is among the few rock groups whose distinctive style and sound (muddled, dark, metaphysical) is reliant on a saxophone. Sandman, by way of his vocals, became known as a dismal and metaphysical poet in the likes of Tom Waits and Nick Cave.

Boston was the home base of one of the greatest bands of the decade, Morphine, a guitar-less trio whose style borrowed heavily from blues and jazz but shared with the Pixies the same casual, detached approach to melody.

Morphine recorded their debut album, Good, for the Boston-based Accurate/Distortion label in 1991. The album received positive reviews and established a small but devoted audience. The band subsequently signed to Rykodisc, which re-released Good under its own imprint.

Good (1992) highlighted their ability to turn ballads and rockers into metaphysical dialogues between bass and saxophone. The languid crooning of former Treat Her Right’s bassist Mark Sandman, who chiseled one of the most evocative voices of the era, added another layer of meaning, a Tom Waits-like mourner and Nick Cave-like preacher floating inside the stark, unreal, heavy fog of the music. The trio contrived melodies that offered a quiet vivisection of post-industrial anxiety. Full of dramatic tension and simultaneously indolently lacking emotion, the atmosphere remains subdued and mechanically counter pointed by the bass and sax throughout the album, an album that speaks of the emptiness that makes us all useless, crazy, and outcasts.

Cure for Pain, released in 1993, increased the band’s audience outside of New England, and singles like Thursday and Buena picked up some college radio play. “Sheila” and “In Spite of Me” were prominently featured on the soundtrack of the 1994 film Spanking the Monkey. The music video for “Buena” was featured in a 1999 episode of the hit HBO television series The Sopranos, a first for the television series.

Sandman refined the way he rode (like a surfer) the gloomy and occasionally even lugubrious lines of Dana Colley’s saxophone on Cure For Pain, a less claustrophobic and more accessible work, featuring drummer Billy Conway (also ex-Treat Her Right) in the place of Deupree. With this album, Morphine’s music evolves towards a more traditional musical composition with more full-bodied arrangements. The saxophone colors the atmosphere a pale gray, while the vocals, so fluid and mellow, tend to camouflage themselves within the chords by riding through the harshness with the elegance of a master surfer. Below the surface, however, there is always a dramatic, depressed, sinister, and gloomy side to Morphine.

The band toured extensively in support of the album in the United States, Europe, Japan and Australia, bringing an international audience to their next Ryko release in 1995, Yes. In 1996, Morphine signed with Dreamworks Records, becoming the second act signed to the new label.

Yes (1995) followed the route that seemed less congenial to the trio, by emphasizing rhythm over melody. Less depressed and distressed, it almost sounded like like a return to rock’n'roll and rhythm’n'blues of the 1950s. Above all, the songs are extremely compact making this a solid album. The catatonic swoons of the first discs, or in other words the art of playing “in an undertone”, re-emerge only here and there. They are respectful of the melodic unity that the trio had previously expanded until disintegration.

Dreamworks released their major label debut, Like Swimming, in 1997. It gained more fans for the band (even though it is considered to be mediocred compared to previous releases), but did not break the band into the domestic mainstream as had been hoped. Dreamworks released a music video for the single “Early to Bed”. Directed by Jamie Caliri and released in March of 1997, the nightmarish yet humorous video became an instant favorite among fans and was later nominated for a Grammy award.

Although Morphine was critically lauded throughout their career, it is much more difficult to measure their level of commercial success. In the United States the band was embraced and promoted by the indie rock community, including college radio stations and MTV’s 120 Minutes (which the band once guest-hosted), but received little support from commercial rock radio and other music television programs. This limited their mainstream exposure and success in their home country, while internationally they enjoyed mainstream success and support, especially in France and Australia.

After the 1997 album, Like Swimming, Morphine’s last album on which Sandman seemed short on ideas, The Night (2000), released after Sandman died of a heart attack on-stage in 1999, turned out to be both their most introspective and their most orchestrated work (piano, cello, horns, organ, choir) and becoming the band’s most critically-acclaimed album to date.

On July 3, 1999, Sandman collapsed on stage at the Giardini del Principe in Palestrina, Italy (near Rome). He was soon pronounced dead of a heart attack and Morphine immediately disbanded.

Since then, Bootleg Detroit,(2000) an “official live bootleg”, and The Best of Morphine: 1992-1995 (2003) have also been released under the Morphine name.

In 2004, the Mark Sandman box set Sandbox was released by Hi-n-Dry. It contains two CDs and a DVD of previously unreleased material spanning Sandman’s musical career. The DVD features clips from early Sandman shows, interviews from the Morphine tours, and various videos from other Sandman solo and group projects, such as Treat Her Right.

MORPHINE DISCOGRAPHY

		Morphine - Good (1992) [ tracklist and lyrics ] [ buy album ]
		Morphine - Cure for Pain (1993) [ tracklist and lyrics ]
		Morphine - Yes (1995) [ tracklist and lyrics ]
		Morphine - Like Swimming (1997) [ tracklist and lyrics ]
		Morphine - B-sides and Otherwise (1997) [ tracklist and lyrics ]
		Morphine - The Night (2000) [ tracklist and lyrics ]
		Morphine - Bootleg Detroit (2000) [ tracklist and lyrics ]
		Morphine - The Best Of Morphine (2003) [ tracklist and lyrics ]
		Mark Sandman - Sandbox (2004) [ tracklist and lyrics ]

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Tags: billy conway, dana colley, low rock, mark sandman, morphine