Why Mark Sandman named his band Morphine
When it comes to the greatest acts in the world, names don’t usually have to be that important. Even though it’s cool for artists to have a band name indicative of the kind of music they play, it’s usually better to put together a bunch of words that sound good despite the fact there isn’t anything going on behind it. While artists like The Beatles didn’t make music for insects and Aerosmith didn’t make music for pilots, Morphine couldn’t have picked a better title when deciding on a moniker.
Compared to a lot of the alternative rock coming out of the early 1990s, though, Morphine was a bit of an outlier. Despite the new wave of grunge coming in to sweep every other genre under the rug, the band’s sound was always about pushing things into different directions, even leaning more towards jazz towards the end of their career.
When the group first assembled from the ashes of the terribly-named Treat Her Right, bandleader Mark Sandman had a clear of what he wanted when deciding on a name. Before they had gotten into the world of narcotics, he was taken with the idea of music that captured the kind of blissed-out state of mind whenever it was played.
Although the outfit was shit out of luck compared to the other blissed-out-named band out around the same time, Nirvana, Morphine was the perfect encapsulation of what their sound was supposed to be. Considering their background in blues, the sounds of their music tended to put people in that state of mind, even verging on the kind of ethereal sounds that didn’t really have a name.
As to the origins of the title, Sandman said that the title went all the way back to different holy figures, saying, “The word ‘Morphine’ comes from the word ‘Morpheus’, who is the god of dreams, and that kind appealed to us as a concept…I’ve heard there’s a drug called ‘morphine’, but that’s not where we’re coming from.”
Sandman would also credit Morpheus for helping the group come up with most of their ideas, explaining, “Morpheus comes into our dreams…and we woke up and started this band…we’re all wrapped up in these dream messages, and we were compelled to start this band.” Although they had that kind of mindset going into starting the outfit, there’s a certain musical sophistication that is practically descended from the gods.
While Morphine can barely fit into any of the conventional genre labels of the time, their use of horns on pieces like ‘Honey White’ and ‘Super Sex’ as well as unconventional song structures on albums like Like Swimming and The Night, had a lot more in common with the advanced players of their time, as if we got the alt-rock version of a soul band lineup.
Unfortunately, they wouldn’t get to take their musical dreams much further past the 2000s, as Sandman would later collapse onstage and pass away from a heart attack, ending the band for good. Morphine may have been able to keep the audience guessing on every single album, but their dreams of Morpheus were much too big for them to last for too long.
