Morphine: The Tragic Story Behind the Band and the death of frontman Mark Sandman.
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I cite my sources and they may differ than other people's accounts, so I don't guarantee the actual accuracy of my videos.
I’ve had several people request 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 unexpcted event cut the band’s career short. Today let’s explore the history of the band Morphine.
I’ve talked about a lot of bands on my channel from the 90’s and they all had one thing in common they had guitar players. That’s where morphine set themselves apart. I feel like the washington post perfectly summarized the band in 1995 saying “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.
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. . 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 Jermome 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.”
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Morphine would sign with local label Accurate/Distortion in 1991 who put out the groups’s first album Good in 1991. 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?’ ” \
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 music 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.
It was during his time i
