A trio: drums, baritone sax, two-string slide bass. No guitar, no keyboards, no bullshit (last album "The Night - the exception). Heavy on the low registers. The only treble the tink tink tink of the cymbals. The resulting sound a slurry, bass-heavy concoction as soothing as actual morphine. Nobody else sounded quite like them.
Their albums—Good, Cure For Pain, Yes, Like Swimming—didn’t fully capture the uniqueness of their sound. The band was far better than what you heard on the records. I remember thinking, in 1996, that the studio version of “Buena” paled in comparison to what I’d heard on stage. I didn’t even like to listen to the albums, in fact, because they were like watered-down stage Morphine. This was a band that you simply had to see live to fully appreciate.
What would have become of Morphine had Sandman lived? He was under incredible pressure to write new songs, commercial songs, songs that justified their record contract. And yet the sound was not the sort of thing that could sustain more studio albums than what they’d already produced. What made them great also made them limited. Morphine was never going to play stadiums. They were never going to be the Rolling Stones or the Grateful Dead or Nirvana. Their sound was too specific, too alien, and it depended on quiet, on intimacy.
And Mark Sandman was not going to be a rock star, in the Cobainian sense. He was too protective of his privacy, too uncomfortable with celebrity. He would have loathed social media—although his tweets would have been funny as hell.
Morphine, lower-case m, is a balm, a way of temporarily arresting pain. It does not actually cure it. There is one, and only one, cure for pain. Mark Sandman found it eighteen years ago, on a hot and muggy Italian evening. He’s free now
(c) Greg Olear
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I'm like a mirror... I'm nothing till you look at me (c) Mark Sandman
#jazz_rock #blues_rock #low_rock #low_tempo #beat_noir #implied_grunge #drums #baritone_sax #bass