Low rock. Beat noir. Rock noir. Many have tried to come up with a catchy label for Morphine's music, but it might be a big waste of time.
It's a tough task summing up the smoky, spare compositions that employ little more than a two-string slide bass, simple drum beats and the catchy honks of a saxophone. Somewhere between jazz, pop and blues, it's a musical no-man's land that the guitarless Boston trio has filled with increasing success in the '90s.
After three albums on Rykodisc, the group's recently released "Like Swimming " marks the trio's first album to be distributed by Dreamworks, the entertainment-media giant.
The group added an occasional flourish (female background singers join in on "French Fries w/Pepper, " and bassist-vocalist Mark Sandman contributes a touch of guitar, Mellotron and synthesizer to a couple of songs), but little else has changed. The trio (Sandman, drummer Billy Conway and saxophonist Dana Colley) still abides by the less-is-more philosophy, squeezing out dark, bare-bones compositions strung together with Sandmanšs economical musings.
The greatest change, Sandman said, was in his rent.
"My landlord read about our deal with Dreamworks and raised my rent, " Sandman said on the phone from San Francisco's Warfield Theater earlier this week. "He said he had been subsidizing me before.
"But we still made the same album we were going to make and put the same artwork on it, " he said.
And that's about as much as you'll ever get Sandman to say about his work. He talks as he sings, with a certain reticence that once prompted an interviewer to ask if he should grab a cup of coffee while waiting for Sandman to answer.
Still, if you can get him to talk, Sandman has interesting tales about his journey to pending rock stardom. Before he hooked up with Conway and Colley, he traveled the country doing odd jobs, whether it was driving a cab in Boston or building condominiums in Colorado.
"When I was younger, I liked to do extreme jobs. You could get lots of overtime, and then use that money to travel. I would do a lot of construction, and after five, six weeks of overtime, you would have enough to drift around for a while. "
That's what brought Sandman to Colorado, where he got odd jobs in the tiny towns of Hartsel and Alma outside of Fairplay. There he fixed fences in the mid-'80s and played in an occasional jug band. He said he still sees the desolate Hartsel landscape in his mind while writing many Morphine tunes.
Eventually he made his way back to Boston.
"I figured I had gotten a somewhat bigger picture, and I should go back and investigate the microcosm, so to speak. I got into playing in bands and decided I didnšt want to travel again until I could find a band and travel that way."
He looks at his role in the music business much the same way he once viewed doing odd jobs. The idea is to make more music so he can travel more.
"The bigger profile we get, the more we get to travel, the more exotic places we get to visit," Sandman said.
And that's where the deal with Dreamworks fits in.
"The benefit of having good distribution and advertising and just general help is that it enables us to tour more and reach more people and play live. That's always been our focus. It makes us feel like musicians."
Sandman knows that Morphine's stock will rise with the new deal and album. "Like Swimming" debuted at No. 67 on the Billboard charts, a lofty start for the group.
"I have a feeling that Dreamworks isn't going to give up," he said. "They're going to be probing the weak spots in the marketplace, sliding us into the public consciousness. I apologize in advance for that."
(Michael Mehle is a pop music writer at The Rocky Mountain News in Denver.)
By MICHAEL MEHLE of Scripps Howard News Service, 1997
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