Hey Andrew,

I just found this piece I wrote about Morphine and Mark Sandman.  I originally did it for the Huffington Post a couple of years ago -- they wanted me to write something about my memories of July 4th, and the only one I could think of was 1999, because that's when I found out that Mark died.  Anyway, I never wound up publishing it, but it's not a bad piece of writing.  I have no idea what you could use it for, but it's yours if you want to reproduce part or all of it somewhere at some point.
-- Tony

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Everything Mark Sandman did with Morphine went against the grain of what everyone else at the time was doing.  In the early '90s, when grunge ruled the world, Sandman had the balls to present a band with no guitars.  Mark's vocals and homemade two-string slide bass were at the front, supported by Dana Colley's saxophone (sometimes two played at once, a la Roland Kirk) and Billy Conway's drums.  Morphine's songs were spare and economical -- not very complicated melodically, not a whole bunch of chord changes -- but each player was a master of his instrument, and the result was as great a power trio as you've ever heard.  And at a time when even the most exciting new music sounded like a mix-and-match of older styles, Morphine were maybe the only band out there that didn't sound like anything that had come before.

Sandman didn't dress like most of his peers, either.  In 1993, when Morphine's second album, Cure For Pain, began to make waves at college and modern rock radio, the de rigeur uniform for alternative bands was flannel, ripped jeans, and long, dirty hair.  Mark, on the other hand, always looked casually put-together, with his short hair and pressed button-down shirts (which rarely if ever showed a sweat stain, even at the hottest outdoor gig) tucked neatly into black jeans.  I always dressed a little better after seeing Morphine in concert.

His lyrics, delivered in a cool baritone, were head and shoulders above the usual angst-and-alienation stuff we were hearing back then.  Sandman read a lot of Raymond Chandler and Charles Bukowski, and it showed up in some of his songs.  He wrote about down-on-their-luck gamblers in Atlantic City, extramarital affairs, murder, drugs. 

But mostly he wrote about women.  There was Candy, and Sheila, and Claire and Lilah and Mary and Justine.  He'd throw out obtuse but sexy-as-hell pickup lines, like "I can tell you taste like the sky 'cause you look like rain," or "Let's take a trip together, headlong into the irresistible orbit."  He sang about arguments -- "On my dying day I might be able to say, on a still sea full of manly rage, 'I finally see things all your way.'"  About breakups -- "People, they want to give me free advice, and that's something that I always try.  But you get what you pay for, that's what I say, and now I'm paying...."  I don't know if he ever divulged what he was talking about in one of his most famous lines:  "If I'm guilty, so are you.  It was March 4, 1982."

What really drew me to Morphine, and Sandman in particular, was that, at a time when most rockers were flailing about and screaming about self-hatred, or the awfulness of their lives, or the phoniness of the world, Sandman acted like he'd been around the track a few times and had seen and done it all before.  In a word, he was cool, at a time when it wasn't that cool to be cool.  (It wasn't until after he died that I found out he was a good 15-20 years older than most of the grunge-rock crowd, which helps to explain his sophistication.)

I never got to meet my man-crush.  The closest I got was a phone call from the record company that had put out a compilation of Mark's pre-Morphine band, Treat Her Right, for which I'd written the liner notes.  Mark was in their offices and my friend at the label, knowing how obsessed I was with him, called me so Mark could say hello and thank me.  I wasn't home.  Mark didn't leave a message.  I was devastated.  A few months later, when Morphine was playing in town, I brought the CD booklet for him to autograph.  I figured I'd wait for him to come out after the show, but nerves got the best of me.  I'll get him next time, I thought.  Three months later, he was gone.

Morphine released four proper studio albums during Sandman's lifetime, and when he died, they'd just completed their fifth, The Night.  It came out several months later, and I figured that, given the circumstances of his death and the morbid fascination that surrounds posthumous releases, that fame for Mark Sandman was right around the corner, even if he wouldn't be around to enjoy it.  But the label had been fighting with Sandman about the dark, brooding, melancholy record for the last year of his life, arguing that it wasn't commercial enough and didn't sound like the Morphine the fans had come to expect.  The label failed to promote The Night, and Mark's last shot at glory died on the vine.

Since then, Sandman's cult following has dwindled.  There's been a posthumous best-of CD and a live album that doesn't come close to revealing what a great band they were onstage.  A two CD/DVD set of unreleased material from throughout his career, split evenly between Morphine and his various other musical projects, was nearly derailed by record company lawsuits,

His death was sudden and unexpected -- in fact, he was onstage when it happened -- but it was from a heart attack, not your typical rock star o.d.  Then again, very little of what Sandman did was typical in any way.>>