AUDIO: I'm Free Now

The location is appropriate for Morphine's late lead singer and songwriter due to its proximity to two of the city’s premier rock clubs, The Middle East and T.T. the Bear's Place. As for the war he fought or the community he led, it can only be said that Sandman was a soldier of the stage -- it was where he battled and where he died.

Like too many great artists, Sandman's life ended before its time -- in July 1999 at age 46, he had a heart attack while performing in Rome. He was a pretty unassuming looking guy, skinny and scraggly, but he swaggered through sets, bandmates Dana Colley and Billy Conway accompanying his husky vocals and two-string slide bass with sensual drums and saxophone. While Morphine made their mark locally as a staple of the live music scene, their five albums -- most released on Rykodisc or Dreamworks -- allowed music lovers everywhere to enjoy the group's unique brand of smoky blues-rock. Of these, 1993's Cure For Pain emerges as not only the band's best work, but also a standout product of the decade.

The emergent saxophone notes on short, delicate opener "Dawna" blossom into "Buena"'s ominous bass-and-drum groove -- and then Sandman crawls into the song with his trademark cigarette-scratched and whiskey-soaked baritone, luring the listener closer with mischievous entreaties. By the time the song explodes, with Sandman belting "I think it's time for me to finally introduce you / to the buena, buena, buena, buena, good good good" over a squeal of sax, you're hooked.

"I'm Free Now" -- in my opinion, the album's best song -- touches on Cure For Pain's larger theme, romance gone awry. A vulnerable Sandman croons an honest, lonely lament to a woman he has lost, begging "Honest, I swear the last thing I want to do / is ever cause you pain." As he confesses "I got guilt, I got fear, I got regret / I'm just a panic stricken waste, I'm such a jerk," mournful horns trumpet and swirl around him, and we are as empathetic as we are curious about what precipitated these feelings. The tender "In Spite Of Me" is a relative departure, the album's most guitar-centric track, with Sandman's rueful vocals treading lightly upon a shimmering acoustic stage. "I always knew you would succeed no matter what you tried / And I know you did it all in spite of me," he acknowledges with no bitterness, just hard-edged regret.

Besides sporting an overall smoky vibe, Morphine is also a very lustful band. The combination makes for some marvelous portraits of barroom rendezvous and innuendo. In "All Wrong", Sandman -- who isn't as poetic as some of his songwriter brethren -- says all he needs to with lines like "She had black hair like ravens crawling over her shoulders" and "She had a smile that swerved all over the road." If the tune had hips to shake and eyes to wink, it would. In lieu of such anthropomorphic manifestations, it gives us an erotic earful. And while "Candy" doesn't leave much to the imagination with descriptions like "Candy said she wants me with her down in Candy Land", tucked therein is the admission, "you love me way too much for you to ever leave" -- giving the song as much an air of desperation as desire. The uptempo "Mary Won't You Call My Name" falls into that same category, while in "Sheila", the woman is a bewitching presence who holds the suitor captive under her spell. But it all really comes to a head on "Thursday", a frantic recap of an affair with a married woman that spreads from "a motel across the street / and the name of the motel was the Wagon Wheel." After an assignation at the woman's home, her husband finds out, and as Sandman says, "her husband he's a violent man a very violent and jealous man / Now I have to leave this town I got to leave while I still can." It's a comic and sultry cautionary tale wrapped in driving sax riffs and drum rolls that I only wish I could've heard live at least once.

The other sort of innuendo you'll find throughout Cure For Pain pertains to drugs. While the devil evoked in "Buena" could have a number of illicit translations, the lively "Head With Wings" is a bit more straightforward in its suggestion of mind-altering and mood-lifting experiences. Similarly, the hazy, dreamy "Let's Take A Trip Together" lopes along, inviting the listener to journey "headlong into the irresistible orbit." Appropriately, the jazzy, self-referential title track is pretty much an ode to the addiction-addled life. Sandman promises "Someday there'll be a cure for pain / That's the day I throw my drugs away." And in what could be a summary of the entire album, the song yields the line, "I propose a toast to my self-control / You see it crawling, helpless on the floor." Hear, hear!

With their bluesy, darkly sensual rock, Morphine penned their own chapter in the book of the '90s rock renaissance. With Sandman at the helm, the band electrified live audiences and released a body of recorded work that, while varied in quality, carves its own special mark in the bar of the rock universe. Cure For Pain is easily the highlight, replete with longing and desire, regret and grief, but also a wry sensibility buoyed by the swoon and swagger of bass and sax. It's easy to wonder what could have been if Sandman hadn't died on that Roman stage, but it's harder to view that possible future through the prism of an album like Cure For Pain, knowing that the force behind this stellar work is gone for good. At the intersection of Mass. Ave and Brookline Street, the sign demarcating Mark Sandman Square stands as a landmark for those seeking rock music in its purest form, as its namesake once passionately delivered.

-- Georgiana Cohen