Life After Death: The Legacy of Mark Sandman and Morphine

Mark Sandman, frontman of the Boston-based alternative rock band Morphine, died ten years ago, on July 3, 1999. It was the kind of death from which rock legends are born -- he was onstage, at the height of his powers, with the most ambitious album of his career having just been completed. Morphine were signed to a powerful record label, and if they weren't a household name in the music world, they had a large cult following that enabled them to pack large clubs and theaters worldwide.

You'd think Sandman's sudden death would have cued the stereotypical music biz vultures, ready to exploit his carcass for every dime it was worth. Only it didn't happen. In a bizarre twist of fate, the forces of the music industry wound up aligning against Morphine and Sandman's estate to prevent his music from being widely heard. And for the past decade, his family and collaborators have waged a lonely battle to keep his memory and his music alive -- a battle they finally seem to be winning.

Listen to a Morphine record today and it doesn't scream "'90s!" the way so many alt-rock albums from the era do. That's because Morphine didn't, and still don't, sound like any other band. Part of it was their unusual lineup, consisting of Dana Colley's baritone saxophone, Billy Conway's drums, and Sandman's homemade two-string slide bass, creating what Sandman liked to call "low rock." According to Dana Colley, it didn't happen by design. "He started developing the two-string bass -- it was a one-string bass at that time -- and I got a hold of the baritone saxophone I'd been playing. I'd been playing tenor previously. When we jammed once in his apartment, the sound just sort of clicked. It was one of these 'eureka' moments, you know? It wasn't anything we would have predicted."

To form a guitar-less band in the middle of the grunge era took guts. Colley says, "I can remember playing early on, at the height of grunge, and kind of jokingly saying at the end of the set that I think we're the palate cleanser, like the sorbet between the sandwich of heavy guitars." But it was also smart in that it distinguished Morphine from all the Nirvana wannabes, giving the press an automatic angle and music fans a reason to seek out their records.

What made Morphine more than a novelty was Sandman's brilliant songwriting, which fused shards of blues, funk, jazz, rock and poetry into a unique and thrilling synthesis; and the interaction between the three musicians. Morphine took all the conventions of what a rock band was supposed to be and stood them on their head. Sandman's fluid runs made two strings do the duty of bass, rhythm and lead guitar. Colley -- to my ears, one of the two or three best horn players in the history of rock -- refused to relegate his sax to the solo spotlight, playing meaty riffs that made him an integral part of the songs' foundation. And Conway was a genius at knowing what not to play, leaving plenty of space for Mark and Dana to create their groove.

Morphine released their first album, Good, with original drummer Jerome Deupree in the fold, on a tiny local indie label in 1991. It soon attracted enough attention that it was picked up by Rykodisc, a much larger indie with international reach. 1993's Cure For Pain was their commercial breakthrough, selling over 300,000 copies, and they consolidated their global popularity with Yes, released in 1995. They criss-crossed the globe tirelessly, playing everywhere from clubs to outdoor festivals, to a growing fan base and across-the-board critical raves.

With a new album, Like Swimming, already completed, their Ryko contract was bought out in 1996 by Dreamworks, a big-budget startup label run by music biz svengalis Lenny Waronker and Mo Ostin. The deal gave Morphine greater distribution and more promotional muscle, but it also put more pressure on the band, and especially Sandman, to deliver the goods. The ante was upped when Like Swimming failed to become a crossover hit and got middling reviews from critics who opined that they were treading water creatively -- accusations which still rankle Dana Colley.

"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. Like, OK, they're gonna shoot the bottom of the barrel with this concept - still thinking it's conceptual. That's funny, no one ever asked a rock quartet the same question, 'Another album with guitar, bass, drums?' To me, (Morphine) is like a combination lock. You've got three numbers to choose from. But let me see you open up a combination lock you don't know the number for. Let me see how many times it will take you to do that."

Compounding the problem was Dreamworks' eagerness to see Morphine as a vehicle for Sandman rather than a band. "They wanted to make him the next Beck, you know?" says Colley. "I think Mark was under a lot of pressure to really kind of live up to the expectations of the people who gave him a lot of support. We were in the big leagues, and he was under a lot of pressure to hit one over the fence."

The album that resulted, The Night, wasn't what Dreamworks had in mind when they signed the band. If it resembled Beck at all, it was the dark, melancholy artist that made Mutations, not the hipster wunderkind of Odelay fame. A moody, complicated and beautiful work, it took their music to another level, utilizing extras like piano, strings and backing vocals while retaining the classic Morphine feel.

The record hadn't been mixed or mastered, and it hadn't been heard by the higher-ups at Dreamworks, when Morphine hit the road in July 1999 for a European tour. But Sandman, who'd junked an entire album's worth of tracks to cut the whole thing over at his home studio, Hi-N-Dry, was happy with the results. Colley says, "I remember hanging out with him 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."

The second show of the tour was in Palestrina, Italy, at the Nel Nome Del Rock Festival. Colley remembers, "You drive up this winding road, up this beautiful hill town about an hour outside of Rome, underneath the pine trees and the ancient cobblestone roads and fountains. The stage was set below the bottom of the hill, underneath this big grove of trees. It was one of the most ideal places I'd ever seen, let alone played.

"The next day, the temperature was very hot, it was about 100 degrees on the stage. Mark seemed ready to go. He was sitting at Billy's drum kit, playing the bass drum and the hi-hat with both feet while playing his bass, waiting for us to come down to soundcheck. He was chomping at the bit, ready to play, with a big smile on his face."

At the beginning of "Supersex," the second song of their set, "we were doing the introduction, it's kind of an open-string thing. I look over to my right, and I just see him, his knees buckle. He fell down, he fell back, with his bass on, and the whole place just came to a complete hush." An ambulance rushed Mark Sandman to the nearest hospital, where he was pronounced dead of a massive heart attack. He was 46, with no history of heart trouble.

Colley and Conway put their grief on hold while they sequenced, mixed and mastered The Night. Colley says, "I think there's no greater love we could bestow as to get back to work and to finish this thing up, because we knew how much he put into it. I think we got right back into it -- we wanted to get it out there, and to finish it. And then we put together the nine-piece Orchestra Morphine to perform the songs, which had never really been performed onstage by Morphine in their fully realized arrangements."

With the album in the can and the Orchestra Morphine tour ready to go, Colley and Conway flew to the West Coast to meet the Dreamworks label execs, where their hopes for Sandman's last hurrah were swiftly kicked in the ass. Colley recalls, "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.'

"And it was over, essentially. We were the last people to get the message, maybe. But who knows. We just felt like we had to do it in spite of it all." Without a promotional push from the label, The Night flopped, and Morphine was effectively finished.

But it was just the beginning of a decade of legal and financial pitfalls that beset the Sandman estate. Mark never had any business deals in writing with the other members of Morphine; after a protracted debate, Mark's parents became the curators of his estate. But, as Colley says, "They're not in the business, and they're in their mid to late 80s. They don't want to run the publishing, they don't want to deal with that. So a lot of stuff fell through the cracks."

Colley, Conway and other members of the Morphine family opened Sandman's home studio, Hi-N-Dry, for public use, and started up a record company of the same name to record local acts. But when they tried to release Sandbox, a 2 CD/DVD set of unreleased Sandman music including a bunch of Morphine outtakes, Rykodisc sued to stop its release, saying they owned several of the songs. Hi-N-Dry went to court and eventually won, but Colley describes it as "the Pyrrhic victory - winning but losing everything in the process. That really sucked the lifeblood out of a lot of the momentum." With no money left to promote Sandbox, it went all but unnoticed when it finally came out in 2004. (It's still available, by the way, and still essential listening for fans.)

With Morphine's slim recorded legacy (five studio albums, a B-sides compilation and a live set) almost evenly divided between two labels, neither of whom wanted to help the band or each other, it seemed with every passing year that Mark Sandman was in danger of being forgotten entirely. If you ask me, the nadir came in 2007, when Hi-N-Dry studios had to move out of Sandman's loft in Cambridge, Massachusetts and relocate.

But the last couple of years have seen things take a turn for the better. Hi-N-Dry started the Mark Sandman Music Project in 2008, which gets local musicians and volunteers to work with kids and help them develop an interest and a talent in music. The Hi-N-Dry headquarters is now in a bigger, more sophisticated facility in Somerville, MA. Colley says, "There's an enormous performance space and artists' lofts, and we have our studio in the basement. So that's really promising, and we're just plugging away."

And with legal problems behind them, Morphine and Mark Sandman are finally going to have another shot at being heard. Two documentary films about Mark and his music are currently in production. Hi-N-Dry will be releasing previously unheard Sandman music and spoken word recordings online each week through September on its website, as well as new covers of Morphine songs by both local and national artists; among those featured are Les Claypool, Mission Of Burma's Roger Miller and Mike Doughty. To top it off, there will be a memorial concert this September in the renamed Mark Sandman Square in Cambridge, MA, featuring Sandman's music played by his friends, fans and collaborators.

Best of all, Morphine's first three albums have been acquired from Rykodisc by Rhino Records, who will be re-releasing them along with a 2 CD set of unreleased tracks and alternate takes from throughout the band's lifetime, compiled by Billy Conway. For this fan, who's listened to their five studio albums so many times that they're part of my musical DNA, the chance to hear "new" Morphine music is incredibly exciting.

As for Dana Colley, he'll continue to keep his friend's memory alive through his music. Ten years to the day after his friend and collaborator died, Colley went back to Palestrina and performed Morphine's classic songs on the stage where Mark Sandman performed for the last time, along with original Morphine drummer Jerome Deupree and Jeremy Lyons on vocals and two-string slide bass.

"You know," Colley says, "a day doesn't go by when I don't think about him, when I don't hear his voice, or there's a reference, or there's some weird coincidence that doesn't feel like a coincidence, it feels like a message from beyond.

"It feels right to be playing these songs again. No one's trying to be Mark, no one's trying to be Morphine. But these songs need to be played."

Follow Tony Sachs on Twitter: www.twitter.com/RetroManNYC

Comments

[DEC3]

There are two sides to every story. But as a living member of Morphine I would support
the account that stands in Tony's article. We won't debate the details of record contracts,
I can only say that we acted with the intention of preserving Mark's legacy and nothing more.
Dana Colley

[Tony Sachs - Huffpost Blogger]

I'd just like to add that this piece was written from my vantage point as a fan, and from the band's point of view. To write a Rashomon-like article including everyone's side of the story, not to mention an analysis of the legal documents involved, would require a much longer article, if not a book.

[siddartha999]

I think a book about Mark and the Morphine saga would be an ideal, not to mention informative, read about Boston and the "industry" [vs. the artistry] of music...

Just my opinion as a fan and someone who will always remember exactly where they were when they heard that MS was not on the physical plane anymore.

[Jroug]

I posted these in pieces and in order, so depending on how you set your preferences to organize the posts, you might see PT& first. Please read PT1, PT2, etc in that order for a (slightly more) coherent reading experience.

[Jroug]

PT7

I left Ryko again in 2006, when the label was sold to Warners, which is how the records ended up at Rhino and why the box set was delayed. It sounds like the box set material will now be released, albeit in a somewhat different presentation than originally envisioned. I'm glad that the fans will get to hear more of Mark's music and I hope the surviving members of the band appreciate what a rare and special thing they were part of. They were one of the greatest live acts I've ever seen and watching their career take off was a thrill. Finally, - a lot of people worked hard to help make Morphine a success. It's wrong that their work should be undermined. I hope this sets some of the record straight.

[Jroug]

PT6

Despite the assertions in your article to the contrary, Ryko never sued to prevent the release of Sandbox. We saw it's release as a good thing, but we also didn't want the companies property hijacked. We sued them only AFTER they had violated their agreement, AFTER the release date of the record.

This lays waste to the claim that there was no money left to promote Sandbox. When done properly, the vast majority of money spent marketing a record is done before release date. The surviving members of Morphine were not sued until after the record was released and all other options had been exhausted.

I'm not sure how either side can say they "won" the case, least of all Morphine. It cost both sides a lot of money. Morphine were finally put in the position of having to abide by the contract they signed, which was all anyone at Ryko had ever asked of them. They turned over tapes that had been owed to Ryko for many years, including the master tapes to the albums. They were given the task of assembling the best unreleased material for a box set, so the world would have more Morphine music to hear. It was unfortunate that the lawsuit had to happen, but was entirely avoidable had the band only lived up to their agreement, or at least, had come to the table.

[Jroug]

PT5

All of the Ryko staff involved travelled to New York from Boston & Philadelphia for the meeting.

No one from Morphine came.

Instead, they called late that morning and said they just weren't coming. This was same day that Sandbox was scheduled to be released, so I walked around the corner to the Virgin store in Union Square and guess what was on the shelves? The scheduled meeting appeared to be nothing more than a ruse, a premeditated "up yours" from Morphine to the label and a clear indication that they had no intention of negotiating further.

Sandbox was out and they had violated their contract. The only recourse left to the label was to pursue legal action in order to protect our rights - rights which Morphine acknowledged were Ryko's in the first place.

[Jroug]

PT4

I had left Ryko when it was sold to Chris Blackwell in mid-1999, but I returned in 2003. In that time, three "new" Morphine albums had been released and marketed - so it's not like the artist was being ignored, even though the band as we knew it no longer existed.

After I returned, we discussed what else could be done with Morphine internally, but before I had contacted the band, I got a press release about the upcoming "Sandbox" project - the first I'd heard of it. At that point, we reached out to band & management and asked about being involved. During these discussions the band admitted that they were including Morphine songs on the set that were recorded during the period of the Ryko agreement, something they had never cleared with the label, and a violation of their contract.

We carried on talking with them to amicably resolve this issue for months prior to the release of the record. I had a long meeting with Billy & Dana that I left feeling optimistic; as though some progress had been made, some bridges mended. They agreed to not release Sandbox until everything had been resolved. Unfortunately, subsequent discussions were unproductive, and both sides agreed to a meeting in New York with everyone at one table to hopefully hash out a solution once and for all.

[Jroug]

PT3

You write that neither label was interested in helping the band or each other. This just isn't true. A live Morphine album on Ryko was in the works when Mark died and was due to be released shortly thereafter. It was rescheduled as both management and the "vultures" at the label felt it would be wrong to release it so soon after Mark's death. A Greatest Hits record that Dana & Billy were both involved in assembling (including material from Ryko & Dreamworks albums) was released a bit later. Both of these examples prove that Ryko, at least, was willing to work with the band.

Universal/­Dreamworks didn't really have any reason to be difficult after Mark's death as their rights were only for North America. But to be fair, they didn't have a lot of reasons to support the act either. Dreamworks was a Major Label started by industry Heavy Hitters with huge track records and similar egos. With a lot to prove, they also needed monster sales to support the vast amounts of money they spent making and marketing records. When the frontman and seemingly creative force of your act passes, the odds of having a "Back In Black" type career resurgence is remote, at best, so they did what virtually any Major Label would do - they cut bait. That's the type of risk a band takes moving from the Indies to the Majors.

[Jroug]

PT2

Maybe I'm misreading it, but the article almost seems to suggest it was too bad the "vultures" didn't swoop in to milk Mark's carcass, as if it would've been swell if they had. I'm not sure how that works, but okay. While Ryko was not a "vulture" company, it was not shy about wanting to release more Morphine material - even after the band had left them for the supposedly greener pastures of Major Label Dreamworks.

I'm mostly interested in addressing the Ryko side of things, as I can't speak directly to the experience the band had at Dreamworks, although I knew from talking to Mark and his management that the label was micro-managing the "Like Swimming" record. The album had been delivered to Ryko finished before we sold off the Morphine contract to Dreamworks at the band's request. In fact there are Rykodisc advance CDs of Mark's originally intended "Like Swimming" master - with a different track list, some different mixes and one entirely unreleased song, which was one of the best, if not the best, things on the record. That the record changed so little after months of tinkering is indicative of how Dreamworks had inserted themselves, and must've been frustrating for an artist that had previously been given free reign to do as he pleased artistically.

[Jroug]

PT1

As a former Ryko employee and a longtime associate of Morphine, I have to take issue with some of the facts and conclusions in this piece. Clearly, the article is written through the eyes of a fan. But if you're going to put something like this out there you shouldn't be so eager to swallow the "poor little band vs big mean record company" rhetoric/s­tereotype. Not every record company is the devil and not every band is an innocent victim of their own naivete.

Mark Sandman, of all people, should have been as prepared as anyone could be to sign what were his second & third record company contracts. After all, he'd had an earlier Major Label experience when Treat Her Right signed to RCA. While he was very gracious to Rykodisc in public (especially on the stage), in private he complained constantly about the Ryko & Dreamworks deals almost from the moment they kicked in. Mark was no fool, and if he signed something he had a problem with, he had no one to blame but himself. Perhaps unwilling to accept this responsibility, he was antagonistic towards Ryko throughout his years with the label, a trait that the surviving band members seemingly carried on in his absence.

[Waterstone Guitars]

Interesting article about a great artist and band. We (Waterstone Musical Instruments, LLC (modguitars.com)) have been working with the Mark Sandman Music Project and Billy Conway on producing a signature guitar/bass after Mark's Premier 2-string bass. Proceeds will be directed to the MSMP in an effort to raise awareness of the foundation and Mark's contribution to art and music.
Pics of the prototypes are available at myspace.co­m/watersto­ne.

[countfloyd]

Just saw the article. I saw Sandman with both Morphine and Treat Her Right (they opened for Los Lobos, one of my all time favorite concerts). I actually like Treat Her right a little better but that is spliting hairs. Music certainly became less interesting after Sandman died.

[Tony Sachs - Huffpost Blogger]

You're in luck, countfloyd. Hi-N-Dry has just released "The Lost Album" by Treat Her Right, consisting of previously unreleased tracks including a killer Sandman rendition of Dr. John's "I Walk On Guilded Splinters." (Available at www.hindry.com) I dig THR as well, although they don't do it for me the way Morphine do.

[Bathtub]

Thanks so much for this great article Tony. No sign of THR CD at h-n-d though, which spoils the good news a bit. Can you tell us who's making the 2 docs? Will they only be seen on U.S. TV?
I'm in U.K. so it's a worry.....
The Rhino 2CD is great news but did Dana say what happened re. the 4 disc Morphine Box?
Is this a reduced version? Or will the third CD & the DVD come out later?
This matter has been bugging me for many years, and even more intensely leading up to this 10th anniversary week. Please can you try to get this $64 M. Q. clarified, I and many other fans I hope, would really appreciate it.

[stereolabb]

I really liked Morphine's unique, cinematic sound....film noirish and totally original. The other guitarless band that I well remember from the 90s, Ben Folds Five, put out a couple of decent albums but faded quickly. To my ears, they too had a fairly fresh sound but I have to say, Morphine really uped the creative ante. I'm happy to see them finally get the recognition and respect they so deserved.

[kapalabhati]

Gosh, I can't believe it's been 10 years. Their music holds up over time.

[girlyalias99]

Thanks for this - a reminder of a great band that I should listen to more often.

[LeeCalif]

Went to youtube and listened/watched Come on, Houston. I liked it.