Morphine

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 traditional 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 defining style is the sound (muddled, dark, metaphysical) of a saxophone. Sandman, for his part, became a bleak and metaphysical poet in the vein of Tom Waits e Nick Cave.

Treat Her Right were a group from the Massachusetts underground playing an eccentric fusion of blues and rock, similar to the musical fusion for which the Violent Femmes became famous. Flanking frontman David Champagne, was young singer/bassist Mark Sandman. Treat Her Right (Soul Selects, 1986) boasts the drawling I Think She Likes Me and the sinister You Don’t Need Money (both by Sandman), overflowing with swamp-like pathos, next to Champagne’s more vibrant I Got A Gun and Don’t Look Back. The blues have rarely been played more polished and with so much affection. On the second album, Tied To The Tracks (RCA, 1989), it was Mark Sandman that took control. It was Sandman’s tormented personality that dominated the record, a personality that was capable of producing epic country serenades like Marie, songs about troubled pasts such as Junkyard, a honky-tonk tribute like Hank and even the desolate portrait of King of Beers. Once again Champagne created the more sparkling compositions (Big Medicine, and Back To Sin City, the title track). Once again the album was a production masterpiece. The third album, What’s Good For You (Rounder, 1991), lost a little bit of the "shimmer" that the two previous albums had. The Anthology (Razor & Tie, 1998) sums up their career.

Sandman played for a short time in Supergroup with Chris Ballew (future member of Presidents Of The USA) and then at the beginning of the 1990’s he formed Morphine. In this period Sandman began to play a two-stringed bass guitar and to sing languishingly in the style of a "crooner", while Jerome Deupree (drums) and Dana Colley (baritone sax) livened up the structure of the songs. Not only the instrumentation, but also the technical composition of these songs is completely unusual and out of the ordinary. In fact, these songs flirt with a type of "minimalism", a minimalism that hinges on a bass-sax dialogue, two instruments that find difficulty in complementing each other. It is out of precisely this discordance that they draw their lifeblood, and define their trademark. The thin and glassy sound that results from the bass-sax dialogue forms an ideal rhythm section for their irregular songs. Unable to use the "manuals of rock", the trio "fishes" abundantly from the seas of jazz and blues (and catches), something that previously only Tom Waits knew how to do.

On their first album, Good (Accurate, 1992), Morphine became acknowledged as great masters of modern blues alongside Nick Cave, Gun Club and Tom Waits. Their sound, however, seems to have been filtered through a different dimension. The title-track Good and Claire are the first masterpieces of the second millennium that introduce us to the possibility of, and affirmation of, the blues living on. Full of dramatic tension and simultaneously indolently lacking emotion, the atmosphere remains subdued and mechanically counter pointed by the bass and sax. The melodic saxophone phrases seem to have wafted to our ears from clubs smoky with "cool jazz", while the singing stays velvety and persuasive. It is the sax and the bass, their riffs and duets, their progressions and their fractures, that are the protagonists of this unique sound. It is this combination that shapes structures that are unstable, mobile, and fluid, even if at first they appear to be repetitive. It is these structures that propel Have A Lucky Day to the threatening pace of a pow-wow. Once again these same structures generate the sparkling tempo of On The Other Side; and last but not least their viscosity sets the swamp-like cadences of Do Not Go Quietly Under Your Grave. By introducing energy little by little into the scheme, a virile and organic sound is born. Their organic sound ultimately reaches its zenith in You Speak My Language, a novelty about stormy developments, and in Test-Tube Baby, a song that speeds ahead like a freight train.

Less experimental, but in no way less suggestive, is the façade provided by the jazz ballads. The jazz ballads employ a more normal usage, but still they bury themselves in the same mobile sands of "nocturnal" harmonies: You Look Like Rain and The Only One.

The fluid itinerary of Morphine through the blues scene, spiritual scene, gospel scene, and the jazz scene, seems to have as its purpose the exploration of the obsessive awareness and of the anguish of the incommensurate emptiness that surrounds our existences. Morphine speaks of the emptiness that makes us all useless, crazy, and outcasts.

Cure For Pain (Rykodisc, 1993), with Billy Conway (ex-Treat Her Right) replacing Deupree, evolves towards a more traditional form of 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. From the solemn, syncopated gait of Buena to the urgent boogie of Thursday, their blues continue to be increasingly articulate, energetic and thriving. The specter of Nick Cave returns only in Mary Won’t You Call My Name, while In Spite Of Me is representative of pastoral folk music. They also perform a jam entitled Miles Davis’ Funeral, one that bears evidence as a fleeting memorandum on his after-life.

This trio's high-class acts are able to continuously exit and re-enter their "theme", while at the same time enabling them to conserve their "swinging" quality and precious calligraphy. The whispered refrain and rumbling groove wed in I’m Free Now, or the funeral lullaby that acts as a pretext for All Wrong, continually transform the identity of Morphine. Below the surface, however, there is always a dramatic, depressed, sinister, and gloomy side to Morphine. It seems as if all their stories were underlined by the same premonition of a cruel destiny. In their anti-spectacular synthesis of the transcendent and the worldly, Morphine managed to find a temporary and prodigious point of equilibrium.

Morphine's third album, Yes (Rykodisc, 1995), loses something in terms of noir atmosphere, of sorrowful contemplation of the futility of everything, but gains in immediacy and incisiveness. Above all, the songs are extremely compact. They are respectful of the melodic unity that in the past the trio was diluting to disintegration. Generally speaking, the music is more rhythmic, and therefore more aggressive, but it isn’t the drummer that conducts the beat; the bass and the saxophone carry the beat, in an arrangement that increasingly looks like an acrobatic exchange of roles.

Honey White, placed at the beginning of the album, can be deceitful in that it is the liveliest piece of their career. Here the percussive push of the instruments is on full-throttle, lingering somewhere between the little R&B orchestras of the 1950’s and 1950’s rock n’ roll. Morphine were certainly also a great revival group (and not only of those two aforementioned genres, but also of bebop, movie soundtracks and, in short, a little bit of everything from that gone era), but it would be diminutive to limit the reach of their work by saying that they just conceptualized a more creative form of musical revival of their contemporary rockabilly revival bands. Sandman sets up Radar as a country ballad worthy of Stan Ridgway, but the obsessive rumble of the bass (more still than the theme of the sax) transforms the song into a gloomy and sinister piece that doesn’t belong to any specific genre. Sandman recites Whisper like a gospel rosary à la Nick Cave, but the rarefied chaos of the accompaniment hurls it into an erotic nightmare. Furthermore, he sinks his "blues talons" into the pauses of I Had My Chance and leaves himself shrouded in saxophone melodies.

What is breathtaking about Sandman is especially his sixth sense about constructing musical pieces that continue to be original, diverse, and sophisticated. It is difficult to find a jazz musician that can compose and arrange something like Yes. One thinks of Joni Mitchell when listening to the complexity and subtlety of a song like All Your Way.

No less astonishing is his (their?) ability to narrate; Super Sex is not a song, it is a passage recited over background music, but what background music! Jury reattempts this down the road but it is adorned with less success. The successive piece, a type of "swing for hard rocker’s" is Sharks Patrol These Waters, a song that catapults the disc to the musical standard of Ten Years After with Albert Ayler on sax.

Through and through this is 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 (in Scratch for example). The melancholy baritone of Sandman by now shows a resounding mastery of dramatic gestures. Colley must be recognized as one of the great modern sax virtuoso’s, and above all, Morphine must be remembered as one of the most important groups of our days.

B-Sides And Otherwise (Rykodisc, 1997) collects rarities that perhaps are worthy of being just that.

On Like Swimming (Rykodisc, 1997) Mark Sandman plays always more tired, as if he was doing the mimicry alone. Billy Conway (drums) and Dana Colley (saxophone) continue to complement each other beautifully, and the jazz noir of the trio enriches ones palate. But Sandman is short on ideas. The swing-like tapestry of Potion could develop into an interesting song, but it is ended abruptly, leaving us wanting more. Many of the songs are worthy of the classics of the 1950s which simply indulge in reconstructing the atmosphere of a past age (Wishing Well, French Fries). Others are simply botched scores. Some redeeming qualities of the disc, however, are the several harder pieces like Early To Bed, a piece that is similar to the blues-rock of the Doors. For Morphine, Murder For The Money is almost an attempt at heavy metal given that it is characterized by a sinister, repetitive groove.

Sandman died in 1999 during a show in Italy. The band had just finished recording The Night (Dreamworks, 2000), that stands as their most introspective work. While it is impossible to sound more atmospheric than their previous albums, adventurous instrumentation makes it at least more psychological. The chamber ballads Rope On Fire (for a middle eastern psalm with viola, cello and oud) and Take Me With You (a passionate soul with gospel choir, viola, cello and standup bass) stradle the line between misery and trance.
Jane Scarpantoni's gloomy cello steals the show in The Night, but the song is actually a collective masterpiece: Sandman's vocals fluctuate between Leonard Cohen's warm/sad tone and a nonchalant rap, Colley's sax first resonates with the cello and then soars in a romantic solo, and Conway drums convulsively throughout.
Even when it grows to pompous effects, the orchestration is more mournful than symphonic, as in the driving (almost techno) and very Nick Cave-ish I'm Yours You're Mine.
The band still excels at creating bleak and somber atmospheres, reminiscent of the most dejected Tom Waits. The elegy Souvenir flows over the haunting piano phrases. Slow Number is a languid cocktail-lounge blues. Like A Mirror, hardly more than a whisper over voodoo drumming, marks the emotional bottom of the disc.
Very few tracks are upbeat. The garage-rocker Top Floor Bottom Buzzer is led by rhythm and blues horns and punctuated by a gospel choir. So Many Ways may be the most eccentric genre crossover, as it combines Brazilian drumming, jazzy organ and sax, and feverish gospel chanting. A Good Woman Is Hard To Find is a pulsing rhythm and blues reminiscent of Girls Vs Boys.
A dark undercurrent to these songs is easily identifiable, whether because of voodoo rhythms or because of lyrics whispered like prayers. Sandman's music had reached a highly personal stage.

Sandbox (Kufala, 2004) is a box-set of unreleased material.

Twinemen (High N Dry, 2002) is the new project by saxophonist Dana Colley and drummer Billy Conway, led by vocalist Laurie Sargent. The sound is eerily reminiscent of Morphine's gloomy existentialism, although with a stronger country-music accent. The playing is as magical as ever. The album only lacks strong songs. Colley then formed AKACOD, fronted by vocalist Monique Ortiz, that released Happiness (2008).

Sandbox (Hi-N-Dry, 2005) is a terrible double-CD retrospective of Mark Sandman's work.

Billy Conway died in 2021.