Mark and Richard bond

Morphine hang tough and stay their course on Like Swimming

by Richard C. Walls

Morphine -- whose line-up remains songwriter Mark Sandman, bass and vocals; Dana Colley, saxes, mainly baritone; and Billy Conway, drums -- have landed on a major label, DreamWorks, with their sound intact and their slinky, elliptical night-town attitude un-futzed-with. "DreamWorks signed us because they like what we do," says Sandman, "not because of what they could get us to do. That's what they tell everybody, of course, but the record" -- he's referring to Like Swimming, their fourth and latest, which arrives in stores this Tuesday -- "was finished before they got their hands on it. And we're our toughest critics anyway. There are a lot of songs that didn't make it on the album for various reasons. Even some that at first we thought might make a good single. A few months later they're just forgotten . . . not mentioned anymore . . . in disgrace."

Heed those ellipses. Talking to Mark Sandman on the phone -- which is the only way I've talked to him -- is like listening to somebody who's half-heartedly negotiating his way around the Final Nod. Soft-spoken doesn't begin to describe it, and the frequent silences can be alarming. There were a few moments there when I thought I'd lost him; but no, he revived and completed his thought. Our conversation was taped, and playing it back for transcription purposes, I turn the volume all the way up. Now he sounds coolly articulate, thoughtfully responsive as I bellow my questions at him like a drunken Shriner.

What was it about the group's instrumentation that originally appealed to you?, I shout. "Basically, it was a sound that we liked," he answers, "and we were interested in seeing whether we could get away with it, with keeping that much space in the songs. Arriving at the Morphine sound was like an accident, it was a convergence of various things. I was trying to play the bass with a slide and I had worked it down to one string because I realized all the notes are there . . . and Dana was a friend and he was over at the house with his baritone and we just tried some things and heard something there. So we said, `Let's get a drummer, turn up the reverb and see what happens.'

"It was pretty casual at first. For a long time, actually. And we started recording to see what we would sound like on tape . . . and we liked it . . . still like it. But we started out very low-key. Played just the most low-key shows you could imagine. No advertising. Playing very early in the night . . . just to see what would happen."

. . . And what HAPPENED?.

"Well . . . we didn't get booed off the stage. Which was encouraging."

Okay, enough vérité, you get the idea: he talked soft, which made me sound loud. The conversation continued. I asked him about musical influences. I was curious -- what with him being a bassist and all and given Morphine's tendency to smolder hiply among ominous, low-end tonalities -- whether there was much jazz in his background.

"Yeah, I've found some cutouts that turned out to be pretty good albums, some old Jimmy Smith, Mose Allison. . . ."

I say I've detected a little Mose on his albums.

"Maybe. . . . I like the way his singing voice seems to be a natural extension of his speaking voice."

Hmm. . . . But never a jazzhead?

"Not really . . . but there are some great jazz records that I've listened to a lot, certain Mingus, Roland Kirk, Miles Davis, Monk."

This leads to a discussion of the Monk documentary Straight No Chaser, a film we agree is both fascinating and unsettling.

"It was pretty weird," he argues. "I couldn't figure out why he was spinning around all the time."

Children do that a lot, I point out. It's their way of getting high before they're introduced to the wonderful world of drugs. We then switch over to Roland Kirk and agree again, this time rather predictably, that Rip, Rig & Panic is his magnum opus. Hey, this is cool, now we're bonding.

But maybe we should get back to Morphine. Uh, which came first, the music or the lyrics? Or is that a dumb question?

"Well. . . .  [This time the pause is diplomatic.] I kind of have two piles going simultaneously. One of melodies and riffs and one of unattached words. That second one's a pretty big pile, so it's often a kind of mix-and-match process. It's difficult to generalize about how it's done. Some of the songs come out pretty much all together, but that's rare. It's a long process by the time it makes it to the album. We tend to work out the arrangements by playing them live rather than slapping them around the rehearsal studio.

"But the words-and-lyrics question is the one I get asked most often. I can understand it, that people are curious about how a song is written. I mean, when I read a book, I can't understand how a writer can sustain that much focus for so long."

I sense another digression coming on and, having no formal journalistic training, lean into it. "So what have you been reading?"

"Actually, I go back and forth between crime and history. . . . Ideally, I can find the two together. I like social history. It can be about anything, just books that bring an era to life beyond the kings and queens, the wars and plagues. I like James Ellroy's books, the way he evokes '50s LA . . . and the Walter Mosley series."

How about true crime?

"I've read a few of those but I dunno. . . . I'm sort of moving away from the hyper-violence, serial-killer thing."

Ah yes, I know. It's a phase we all go through.

"Right, ha-ha . . . but crime novels are a great device, a great excuse to go to all sorts of different places and meet all kinds of people. But it's really good when they combine the social history with the sordid behavior." He recommends Philip Kerr's Berlin Noir. I recommend Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz. But not the 15-hour Fassbinder movie version. I wouldn't do that to a pal.

Meanwhile, back to Like Swimming. I notice that there's a lot of water imagery. On "Potion": "Below the ocean/I make my bed down there/I gotta live somewhere/Maybe the graveyard/Maybe I don't care." On "Wishing Well" it's "I move smooth underwater/I know my way around/I grew up in this town." There's also significant wetness on "Empty Box" and, of course, the title song. Although I like these lyrics, and the kind of kicked-back but punchy, dark ambiance they float in, I just can't squeeze a question out of them. So instead I ask what's a tritar.

"It's a name I gave an instrument I've been working on that has one bass string and two guitar strings. I play it with a slide. You can hear it on this album on `Murder for the Money.' "

Yes I can, and it's a wonderfully grotty sound, very like a loud guitar with a cheesecloth wrapped around the amp. A dirty sound. Also sonically striking is "Eleven O'Clock," which has some very dense unidentifiable sounds and the simplest of lyrics: "Every night at eleven o'clock/I go out." Period. It's a pothead's dream, I tell him, if you don't mind my saying so. "Well, the lyrics are easy to remember. Actually those sounds are mostly the bass."

By now we've been talking for about 50 minutes and have barely mentioned the album, but that's okay because we both know it's good -- Morphine fans won't be disappointed and that non-Morphine fans will be converted on the spot. And anyway, I say, emboldened by kindred feelings, don't you think this whole interview, uh, concept is sort of like, you know, absurd?

"Yeah," he concurs (I knew he would). "I'm all for doing away with the whole question-and-answer format because it becomes virtually interchangeable. . . . Just change the names and a few details and the photos. . . . Sometimes I hear myself saying things that everybody else says . . . just variations. Does that make sense?"

Oh yes, it definitely does. And so, all things considered, I think we did pretty good.