Painless
Morphine – You Look Like Rain
From Good: Rykodisc [Buy]
Morphine – Mary Won’t You Call My Name
From Cure for Pain: Rykodisc [Buy]
Morphine – Radar
From Yes: Rykodisc [Buy]
For about seven and a half minutes in the middle of the 1990s, Morphine was the hippest band in the world. The planet’s ears were still fuzzy after a long night of those loud distorted Seattle groups and the commercial opportunism that followed. Morphine and their lineup of two-string electric bass, drums and low-end saxophones, seemed an intriguing excursion into music that perhaps really was ‘alternative’.
Despite airtime for their videos on MTV (especially Buena Buena off their 1993 disc Cure for Pain) and popularity on the college radio/gig circuit, the Boston trio never quite seemed destined for a popular breakthrough: there were intimations of blues, possibility of jazz. And the career of the group was cut short forever when bassist/frontman Mark Sandman died of a heart attack while performing onstage in Italy in 1999.
In certain teenage circles in Auckland, NZ, Morphine was a bit of a common touchpoint. Everyone in our little sweaty world had pretty much started in the same place: learning the opening riff to Nirvana’s Come As You Are, but there was soon a parting of ways. A happy few had stumbled upon Art Blakey and Cannonball Adderley reissues, while others were embarking on a long wade through the back catalogues of Kyuss and Sonic Youth.
So Morphine was a rock band that the newly evangelised jazzheads could still like, while the moshpit bunnies could kind of dig without being called a tosser.
Somebody’s back garden while the parents were away for the evening, illicit sixpacks of Lion Red that materialised from the secret recesses of bedrooms, making out that you liked cigarettes while somebody tried to convince everyone that Reservoir Dogs was the best movie ever, or that they’d actually spoken to one of those magical cyphers called a girl in a moment of bravado. And somewhere in the background of all this not-ever-getting-really-drunk, but-pretending-you-actually-were, amidst our plaid shirts and the sweet stain of what might have been a first awkwardly rolled spliff, there was a Morphine album playing.
Mark Sandman. Photo Copyright Ron Vink.
