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Beyond Morphine
Sandbox reveals just how much there was to Mark Sandman
BY MATT ASHARE

Click here to watch an exclusive just-released Mark Sandman video: "Temptation," with the Either/Orchestra.

Most people, both in and outside his home town of Boston, know Mark Sandman as the leader of the trio he was on stage with when he died in Italy in 1999 — Morphine. And many of those people are apt to think of Morphine as a three-piece band featuring Sandman on two-string slide bass, Dana Colley on baritone sax, and Billy Conway on, as Mark liked to say, "d-tuned drums." But the truth behind Morphine and the music Sandman wrote and recorded beginning in the mid ’80s with the innovative blues band Treat Her Right is more complicated — in large part because Mark wanted it that way. (It gets particularly confusing when you consider that Sandman started Morphine with drummer Jerome Deupree, who had to quit after the band recorded their first album, Good, but who then returned to play on all but three of the tracks on the following disc, Cure for Pain, before departing for good.) And though the new three-disc Sandbox, an independent release from Hi-N-Dry, the label named after the studio Sandman built in the living room of his Cambridge loft, makes it clear that the "House of Morphine," as Colley likes to call it, involved dozens of players and at least half a dozen actual bands, it isn’t designed to draw sharp distinctions among those various bands and projects. In fact, much of the air of mystery that Sandman cultivated around himself and his music when he was alive remains intact even after you’ve made your way through the 31 previously unreleased tracks on Sandbox’s two CDs and the anecdotal and entertaining footage on the set’s DVD.

For starters, the set is not arranged in chronological order or in any other way that might shed light on how Morphine emerged as Sandman’s primary vehicle out of a number of projects he’d put together in the late ’80s, during the waning days of Treat Her Right. That band, who had Conway on drums along with harmonica player Jim Fitting and guitarist David Champagne, were still very much alive and kicking after a bad major-label experience with RCA when Sandman began to branch out with groups that included Candybar, the Pale Brothers, Supergroup, the Hypnosonics, and, of course, Morphine. It’s clear from the Sandbox material, which includes contributions by all the members of Treat Her Right, that the less-is-more noirish æsthetic that would come to define Morphine was already taking shape within the confines of Treat Her Right in tunes like "Doreen," a harmonica-laced song story that goes up the same musical alley as "Dawna," the lead track on Morphine’s breakthrough album, 1992’s Cure for Pain. "Doreen" sounds like a Treat Her Right tune because it has guitar and harmonica. But it isn’t labeled as such. Indeed, none of the tracks on the two CDs is credited to a particular band. Those familiar with Sandman’s various musical creations will be able to take a few educated guesses. When there’s a three-piece horn section, you’re probably hearing the Hypnosonics, especially if the drummer is banging out eighth or quarter notes on a block of wood instead of a hi-hat. The presence of mandolin on "Patience," a poppy tune that marks a departure from the bluesy sound of so much of Sandman’s songwriting, is an indication that Jimmy Ryan was involved. Which could mean the song was conceived as a Pale Brothers tune. But the version here is a full-band arrangement that includes baritone sax and drums à la Morphine. And "Tomorrow," one of the more poignant and beautiful songs on the collection, is largely piano-driven, so it doesn’t fit neatly into any of the various groups Sandman put together to perform live, and in fact it refutes those critics who pegged Morphine as a novelty and a one-trick pony. On stage, Morphine may have been the above-mentioned trio. But in the studio, especially at Hi-N-Dry, Sandman was constantly building on the sound he’d found in Morphine. One of his latter-day inventions, the "tritar" (a guitar/bass hybrid featuring one bass string and two guitar strings), can be heard to good effect on "Good Time Last Night," a hard-rocking song filled with plenty of distortion.

Instead of attributing particular recordings to particular players, Sandbox simply lists the various bassists, drummers, horn players, and other musicians who participated in the realization of an æsthetic and the creation of a band (Morphine) who would find success on Rykodisc before signing to DreamWorks, touring the world in the process and building a loyal audience from the grassroots on up. Except for the occasional Hypnosonics gig in New York City, you had to live in the Boston area to get the full Sandman experience, which could include him playing everything from his two-string bass and tritar with a stripped-down band to him leading a larger configuration with a full horn section, guitar, four-string bass, and keyboards. Sandbox is perhaps the closest anyone can come at this point to getting a taste of what that was like. And as diverse as the material on these discs is, it holds together as a body of work that grew out of a core of musical ideas that were never as limited as some may have thought.

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Issue Date: December 10 - 16, 2004
Click here for the Cellars by Starlight archive
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