Mark Sandman: Patience
I can tell you the exact place I was when I first heard Morphine. It was 1995. I was at school at Ithaca College, and my mom dad and brother were coming to visit and then go up to Montreal for a vacation.
This was around the time of the Quebec referendum and there was a lot of tension just under the surface. We were tourists so nothing overt was directed toward us, but you could still feel it. When I lived there, a friend of a friend told me she used to run home after high school lest she get beat up for speaking English. This would have been around the same time, only a few decades after very real terrorist incidents occurred there.
As we all know, they voted, barely, to remain. But I often wonder what would have happened if Quebec had separated. There's a good chance it would have become more nationalist, and as a result, more provincial and mistrusting of "Anglos." I say this having lived there for two years in the 2000's where the remnants of bitterness in the Parti Québécois would still show itself in certain bars in parts of the city.
Going back to that time in the 90's. We were in the hotel getting ready to go out to dinner at an Indian restaurant which is still there, although it's one I never frequented when I lived there. I was sitting on the bed watching Music Plus, basically the French MTV, when the video for Morphine's "Thursday" came on.
The hypnotic yet insistent drums, the droning saxophones, the weird bass that wasn't a bass and Mark Sandman, the singer's effortlessly cool voice, looking like a character out of a Jarmusch film or a real life member of the Beat Generation. I didn't know if he was older, but he seemed older somehow, as if he'd been playing in bands for decades and was just receiving some kind of due.
I transferred from colleges, went back to Pittsburgh and ended up seeing them more than a few times. Each time was fantastic. Sandman lived up to his name, always laconic and deliberate. He never seemed bothered by anything, never seemed like a rock star but just a great musician who loved performing. And yet despite the strange hipster (in the best possible way) jokes, and what seemed like improved jams and words, there was always a strange distance to him, at least on stage. As if the music was going to reach your core, but not the man.
My favorite show they did demonstrated his sense of humor. He came out and told everyone they were going to do the show in reverse. So they played three songs, their encore, then left the stage. They came back ten minutes later, and played the rest of the show. For the last song, he introduced it as the first.
I remember seeing him last in late spring or summer in 1999 at Metropol which was one of Pittsburgh's best clubs. After the show, I waited outside for what seemed like ages until he appeared, coat on, cigarette in his mouth. I told him how much his music meant to me, and asked if he'd sign his autograph. He said thanks, and obliged, with the same amount of enthusiasm as if I'd served him a cup of coffee. My friend Mark was there and also got an autograph, scrawled on his ticket stub. Unfortunately for him, Mark only signed his first name. We joked no one would believe him.
A few months later he was dead of a heart attack in Italy. There's a fantastic documentary about his too brief life and the legacy the band left behind, called Cure For Pain. It paints a portrait of a restless soul who wanders, only to create a unique sound. Morphine is like Camper Van Beethoven, Ween, or Captain Beefheart for that matter. Not many bands if at all, even attempt to cover them.
The band's output was just five albums. From the opening shot Good to the sublime Cure For Pain to the overproduced (in my opinion) Yes, to the super murky (in the best possible way), Like Swimming, with a cover that looked more like he was drowning, and finally The Night, This last album was recorded before Sandman died and mixed posthumously. It included a guest spot by John Medeski, and you could hear their sound benefitting as a result. Medeski's organ on two of the tracks added to the sound nicely while still respecting the open spaces the band was known for.
Morphine is one of those bands that I return to every so often and discover new things to love about them. Though they only had five official albums, they left behind a lot of other tracks. More albums kept coming. One of my favorite songs on these leftover collection albums is Patience. It's an alternate version, much more somnolent, even hypnotic than the other version. I'll even forgive the mandolin, and instrument R.E.M. destroyed with overuse.