Day After Day #18: Cure For Pain

Day After Day is an ambitious attempt to write about a song every day in 2024 (starting on Jan. 4).

Cure For Pain

When people typically think of the rock scene circa 1993, they think of the grunge/alt-rock explosion. Lots of dudes wearing flannel and ripped jeans, playing depressing heavy guitar dirges and shaking their long hair around. There was some truth to that, but there were also some true alternatives to that narrative. 

One clearly original sound was coming out of Boston from the band Morphine. The trio featured a low-end sound built around Mark Sandman's deep croon and two-string slide bass, Dana Colley on baritone sax and Billy Conway (who replaced Jerome Deupree) on drums. Morphine incorporated jazz and blues into their rock songs, calling the sound "low rock." Sandman didn't sound like any other contemporary singer, preferring to deliver his mysterious tales of debauchery, infidelity and other vices, and he played his bass like a guitar to create a unique sound.

When Morphine released its second album Cure For Pain in 1993 it was a good time for Massachusetts-based acts, as Dinosaur Jr., the Lemonheads and Buffalo Tom were also finding success with excellent albums. But Morphine just exuded coolness as it delivered these film noir-esque sounds that were made for the nighttime.

The band's members weren't newcomers to the Boston music scene. Sandman and Conway had been members of Treat Her Right, a blues-rock act that had a local hit in 1986 with "I Think She Likes Me." Colley was previously in the band Three Colors and Deupree was a member of the Hypnosonics with Sandman. 

Sandman was also an innovator when it came to his instruments, playing basses with one, two or three strings and different tunings, and sometimes pairing bass strings with guitar strings to create the "basitar," "tri-tar" and "guitbass." The band The Presidents of the United States of America later used the basitar and guitbass to much different effect than Morphine and had some success with songs like "Lump" and "Peaches."

Released on Rykodisc, Cure For Pain wasn't a huge commercial success but it found some footing on college radio and MTV, where the band even hosted an episode of 120 Minutes. Morphine's sound was tailor-made for movie and TV soundtracks, with songs from the album appearing in such varied productions as the movies Spanking the Monkey and Ulee's Gold, and episodes of The Sopranos, Beavis and Butt-head and Daria.

Songs like "Buena," "Thursday" and "A Head With Wings" were all grabbers, but the title track stands out for its mournful elegy about pain and how we deal with it. Dana Colley reported posted online that the song was not about hard drugs, but instead getting rid of the drugs people use to take the edge off life like caffeine, nicotine, alcohol, etc. Whatever the case, the song is stirring and memorable.

"Someday there'll be a cure for pain/That's the day I throw my drugs away/When they find a cure for pain."

Morphine began touring heavily and released the album Yes in 1995 before signing with DreamWorks in 1997. Like Swimming came out that year and the band had just finished its final studio album, The Night, in 1999 when Sandman had a heart attack on stage in Italy and died shortly afterward at the age of 46. The band immediately broke up and The Night was released in 2000. There have been some Morphine-related projects to celebrate the music of the band, including Orchestra Morphine and Vapors of Morphine. Conway passed away from liver cancer in 2021 at age 65.

Sadly, I never saw Morphine live, even though they played countless shows in the area. I was a fan from the release of the Cure For Pain album and just never got it together, always figuring I'd catch them another time. Sandman's death was a shock to the local music community; the intersection of Massachusetts Avenue and Brookline Street in Cambridge's Central Square is named after Sandman, right outside the Middle East nightclub/restaurant. It's a lesson I've learned more than a few times: see your heroes while they're still around because you never know when they'll be gone.