I’ve had several people request that I do this band and I want to thank everyone who suggested
this topic. Morphine was a guitarless band whose career lasted a decade before a sudden tragic and
unexpected event cut the band’s career short. Today let’s explore the history of the band.
I’ve talked about a lot of bands on my channel from the 90’s and they all had one thing in
common & that was that they had guitar players. That’s where morphine set themselves apart.
I feel like the washington post perfectly summarized the band in 1995 saying and i quote
“In A rock 'n' roll world divided between guitar bands and synth bands, Morphine exists
in a no-man's zone. The Boston trio has neither guitars nor keyboards and gets by with just drums,
sax and bass. In a pop universe where every singer, guitarist and keyboardist instinctively
goes to a higher note to attract attention, Morphine stays hunkered down low they would write.
Mark Sandman was the driver of the band and principal songwriter. Growing up in Cambridge,
massachusetts a suburb of Boston, His mother was a social worker, while his dad had an electronics
store. His early influences included AC/DC & Jimi Hendrix, but he would later discover jazz and the
blues and become enamored with Prince. He would end up learning guitar in his teen years and drop
out of high school. This would be followed by him taking a job being as a cabbie in Boston,
which would see him get stabbed while working. He would also take a road trip from Brazil to Alaska,
where he would end up working on a fishing boat. And eventually he settled on becoming a
musician and returned to Boston. One of his first bands he played in was called Treat Her Right,
a group which threw in occasional pop tunes amongst their blues based setlist.
Following the group’s demise he soon started becoming more experimental with music.
Morphine would be born in 1989 when Sandman started playing with other
local musicians including saxophonist Dana Colley and drummer Jerome Dupree.
Sandman originally planned on playing one gig with these musicians, so they never
came up with a name until later on when they realized this gig was going to last years.
Originally Sandman played a one string bass guitar,
before finally adding one more string telling the LA Times
“I was also inspired by an old 45 called ‘Cherokee Dance’ that had this guy playing something called
a unitar,. “It was a bass string being played with a slide. It was so new and great, and it had never
crossed my mind before to do that" he'd say. .
Morphine would sign with local label Accurate/Distortion in 1991 who put out the
groups’s first album titled.Good . The following year they signed with a higher profile indie label
rykodisc who re-released their debut record. Sandman would tell the Chicago Tribune the key
to the band’s early success revealing “we played as much as we could, anywhere we could. When we
put out our first album we gave away a lot of copies to press and college radio just to get
the word out. And lost money doing it. ” Sandman would tell LA Times where the
musical inspiration came from saying “My songs are not necessarily about something
that’s happened to me. It could be a friend,” “The more you try to disguise your real feelings,
the more they come out. Sometimes I don’t realize it till six months after the record is out. It’s
like, ‘Wow, that is really how I felt?’ he'd say. The band tended to shy away from being overly
commercial & Morphine would turn down high profile touring offers and turn down commercials who
wanted to use their music. But strangely enough their music would appear in tv shows and movies
It had turned out that Morphine only had say over whether their music could appear in commercials.
Their label Rykodisc had the final say for whether their music could end up in hollywood productions.
Their songs would show up in films including get shorty, spanking the monkey and beautiful girls.
Sandman would tell Chicago Tribune the challenge with working with labels saying
“every label is the same, they say we want you, don’t change and you know it’s bull.
But you believe it anyway. We really like where we’re at as a band. A hit
song thing can back fire, we’ve been very successful at not having a big hit single.
I can’t say it’s intentional, but it’s certainly not our focus he would say.
It was during his time in Morphine that Sandman also found time to to play in several other
groups including the hypersonics, the country Pale Brothers and Supergroup with Chris Ballew
of Presidents of the United States of America. Side note guys i've done a whole video on that
band which i put out last november. You can check it out in the description box below.
The group’s follow up record 1993’s Cure for Pain which was recorded in just 12 days made many best
of year lists and sold at least 100,000 copies copies. They would follow it up with 1995’s Yes,
which sold over 150,000 copies.. With each subsequent release, band’s popularity grew
thanks to their hypnotic live shows, support from college radio and word of mouth.
Following the release of Yes, label Dreamworks teamed up with Rykodisc to jointly release the
band’s subsequent albums in America, while Morphine would be on Dreamwork’s roster
for international releases. Their follow up album would be 1997’s Like Swimming,
which didn’t meet the label’s expectations and critics were lukewarm to the album.
Dana Colley would tell Huffington Post “The two-string slide bass, baritone saxophone,
drum thing, oh yeah. For some reason, people were almost wanting to see the end of that, in a way.
The band’s relationship with Dreamworks didn’t fare much better than Rykodisc.
According to Sandman’s, Dreamworks viewed Morphine as a vehicle for him who they wanted to market as
the next Beck. We’ll talk more about the label’s relationship with the band later on in the video.
Morphine’s final album The Night would be recorded but not mixed or mastered
when the group's fortunes changed in 1999. Colley would recall to Huffington Post
“I remember hanging out with Mark after we finished it, having gone through an enormous
amount of pain and anguish to make a whole record — for the first time in a long time, he smiled.
“I remember Mark saying, ‘I don’t want to tour.
We’re over this. I want us to get closer as a band.’ Because we’d fragmented, I think,
in many ways from Mark’s being pulled out west by Dreamworks. We were kind of pulling
the wagons around a little bit. It was pretty intense. He went through the mill for sure.”
Ahead of the album’s release the band hit the road in the summer of 1999
and during a show as part of a music festival just outside of Rome, 3 songs into Morphine’s
set Sandman fell backwards on stage suffering an apparent heart attack in front of thousands of
fans. He would be rushed to a nearby hospital but was pronounced dead.. He was only 46 and
Sandman wasn’t believed to have any pre-existing medical conditions at the time of his death.
The band’s manager Deborah Klein would tell the associated press following the show
"We're devastated We don't even know what to say. We're all in shock."
The festival’s promoter would put out a statement to the associated press
that subsequent performances would be dedicated to Morphine's frontman..
Given the band’s name, some speculated drugs had some part to play in his death.
But those close to Sandman pointed to stress and sweltering temperatures the day of the show.
Author michael azzerad would reach out to sandman’s former girlfriend and bandmate
who both claimed Sandman didn’t use drugs.
But he did have some risk factors including the fact that he was a heavy smoker for many years
and he dealt with an enormous amount of stress being the leader of the band
and feeling the pressure of a major record label.
Sandman’s former girlfriend would tell Azzerad that there was one warning sign
ahead of the band’s final tour. She would recall sitting with him on the couch one night and the
frontman complaining of chest pains thinking it was acid reflux or indigestion. He opted not to
go to the hospital at the time, but promised to see a doctor when he came back from tour.
Following Sandman’s death, a number of bands held a tribute concert to honor the frontman. Partaking
in the event would be members of the Presidents of the United States of America and The Mighty Mighty
Bosstones. The surviving members of Morphine would end up teaming up with Presidents of the United
States of America members Chris Ballew and Billy Beard to record a tribute song called Gone Again
Gone. The song would be performed at his funeral and released under the moniker Moveable Bubble.
Sandman would die ahead of the group’s last album The Night being released by Dreamworks
who would put it out in early 2000.
As part of the album’s release the surviving members would establish the Mark Sandman Music
Education fund. Conway would tell Billboard “what is normally a joyous process is putting
out an album for public consumption is now difficult and bittersweet,
but we all worked really hard of this record and Mark would expect us to move on.
Mark would want Morphine fans to hear the music. The band’s label Dreamworks would
even release a documentary on the band that would be given to the press and media outlets
in addition to going live on the band’s website to promote their final album.
By early 2000 the surviving members of Morphine Drummer Billy Conway and saxophonist Dana Colley,
would team up with seven other musicians, some of whom had played with Morphine in the past
to form Orchestra Morphine as a way to promote the group’s final album. The surviving members
were hopeful that Dreamworks would support them to ensure the band had a proper sendoff,
but that failed to happen.. The album would prove to be a commercial disappointment and
Colley would blame the label recalling to Azzerad “They brought Billy and me in and patted us on the
back and said, ‘We know you guys are hurting, but we’re not gonna support this record. You guys want
to do this, you go right ahead, good luck. But, you know, this isn’t what we signed on for. This
isn’t who we wanted. We want Mark. We don’t want a bunch of ragamuffins from Boston he would say.
Sandman’s death opened up legal problems between the surviving members and those
who controlled the band’s old recordings and Sandman’s estate. At the time of his
death Sandman never had any written agreements with the other members
of the band and his parents who were in their 80’s controlled his estate
Colley and Conway would start an indie label Hi-N-Dry and converted Sandman’s old studio into a
workspace where other groups could record. In 2004 they tried to release a tribute box set called
Sandman but some of the old Moprhine material that was recorded during their Rykodisc years
was blocked by the label who claimed ownership to it and it resulted in a lawsuit. While the pair
won the lawsuit it was a psychologically draining endeavor & the box set would be released in 2004.
In 2009, Colley and Deupree began regularly performing Morphine songs and new material as
the group Members of Morphinewith singer, bassist and guitarist Jeremy Lyons of New Orleans.That
does it for today's video guys thanks for watching. Be sure to hit the like button
and subscribe and we'll see you again on rock n' roll true stories. Take care.