Morphine: C/D?

Fuck me, Cure For Pain is good.

^^^^

love this band, had a limited but unique pallette and used it really well.

Probably my favorite band, at least during the cold weather season. Sandman one of the ultimate effortless songwriters.

RECOMMEND: Bootleg Detroit. BECAUSE: they were a PHENOMENAL live band.

THEY SUCK, RIGHT?

love them

Great band.

AAAARGH ILM SOMETIMES I JUST WANNA...!

Yes, they are awesome

Half awesome, half zzzzzzzz.

that means two and a half albums of awesome

That's about right.

They were incredible what is with this thread.

The negative parts of it, that is.

This is one of the weirder threads on ILM.

Light in the Attic's vinyl re-issue of "Cure for Pain" is beautiful, for the record.

Love this song

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7l0Oo89IyI0

I think of this one and 'Cure for Pain' the song as their quintessential defining tunes

What a great band

We are devastated to learn of the passing of Morphine/Treat Her Right drummer Billy Conway. One of the best drummers and most stalwart friends, Billy succumbed to a long battle with cancer. We love you Billy. Give Mark our love. RIP https://t.co/IxYodxpoh9

— Vapors of Morphine (@vaporsMORPHINE) December 20, 2021

:(

fuck, he was a really nice guy

Fuck me, Cure For Pain is good.

― Scik Mouthy, Tuesday, 4 March 2008 22:04 (fifteen years ago) link

I feel really blessed that a band mining such a cool sound and doing it so well made its way to high school me

Heh, same here. A slightly older friend who was in college tossed me his copy and said I could have it.

“What’s it like?”

“Some jazz shit, not my thing.”

Cure for Pain holds up as well as anything else from that era. like i'm kind of stunned at how much it's got it's hooks into me 25+ years later

I'm not sure why I clicked it but discogs has a little list of personally influential albums by The National's Matt Berninger and here was his blurb about Cure For Pain:

“Although they’re not from Cincinnati, I saw them at a laundromat bar there called Sudsey Malone’s when this record came out. Not many people were there, and after the show, Mark Sandman was selling the record out of a box from the stage and he seemed pissed. A dude in front of me bought the record for $5, and when I got up there I gave him $20 and waited for my change. He looked right at me and said ‘What?! For you it’s $20.’ That actually made sense to me, and it was worth it.”

There's really no way to read this in any other way than "that guy Mark was a huge asshole to me" and yet the takeaway was positive somehow? Sounds a lot like when you think the badass older kid is your friend but all they do is steal your lunch money and you just laugh and say thanks.

I like the idea of charging your fanbase for merch according to whether or not you like the look of them.

Anyway RIP Mark and Billy, can't think of another band that sounded anything like them.

Mark Sandman was very much like this, not an easy guy to get along with, but you could tell underneath there was a kindness there. Back in my band days we shared the same management, so I would cross paths with the Morphine guys here and there. Dana and Billy were always super nice and supportive, but Mark was thornier. It always felt a bit weird to me because we were a bunch of obnoxious kids making kind of hyperactive rock music and they were like the real deal, actual artists. Our manager would twist their arms to come to our gigs from time to time and I felt fairly embarrassed having Mark there looking dour while we jumped around and made lots of noise, but then a few days later I bumped into him at her office and he said "you guys rocked!" and it felt like the biggest compliment I ever received.

this touches on something that I have thought about often, which is "how much assholery is tolerable from a great musician"

and I presume it's a vast greyish nebula of an area depending on many things, but I would absolutely pay $20 for a record from grumpy mark sandman at his merch table, for the story fer sure but also the music is pretty good

it was very much part of his persona, he actively cultivated this kind of standoffish, above it all vibe, and I think people were generally into it

The cost on its own and the quality of the music have nothing to do with it!

If anyone did that to me I would have trouble not thinking about how they either hated me immediately for some reason (this can really fuck with me) OR were shamelessly trying to rip me off and get away with it and pass it off as eccentric humor (did I look like that much of a pushover?). Maybe there's more to the story but it would take me a long time to not be haunted by that every time I played the album afterwards.

I know in that Sandman doc Paul Kolderie and David Champagne of Treat Her Right talk of how he could be an asshole at times

An old band of mine was once on a bill with the Frogs in ... Pittsburgh? It was after my tenure, so doesn't really matter. Anyway, a bit into the set one of the Frogs guys kind of starts in, "who is having a good time?!" yeaaaaah! "Who bought our new record?!" crickets "OK, who is going to buy our new record!?" yeaaah! And whichever Frog was asking hops off the stage and starts going to the cheering people in the crowd, putting them on the spot in front of everyone and making them buy the new record.

“I propose a toast to my self-control”

https://i.imgur.com/MBAnLeE.png

omg they’re playing “good” at yr bar

Ngl, this band is literally classic. "Souvenir," ftw. i like how the bass player utilizes only two strings on his bass guitar. it's the embodiment of a e s t h e t i c

Heh

classic classic classic

I feel lucky that I got to see them as many times as I did. One of those sui generis bands that just had it figured out.

I’m not even going to ask what that means. I guess you went to graduate school for that lol

lol not this dummy. I suspect I picked it up from some Christgau review ages ago.

I saw a Morphine cover band last night. Not a sentence I'd've expected to ever type. Two or three songs in, I thought, yeah, I remember all their songs sounding alike. Then they did a song that I think was "Buena" and the whole bar started grooving. Okay, granted, half the place seemed to be the band's friends, but whatever. Anyway, I'm digging in. Seems like a POX thread would be in order.

Video from a couple years back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i92sWPktEXg

Haven’t thought about these guys in forever and I added the Like Swimming CD to a discogs order on a whim. It’s pretty good! Cure For Pain is still my fave.

Last night the bassist said Like Swimming is their masterpiece

I never heard Like Swimming! I think Yes is a more interesting album than Cure for Pain … in that the songs are more varied … idk higher highs, but a few songs are significantly not as good … idk Sharks is a bit of a clunker? Compared to Honey White and Supersex and Free Love, which is lowkey my favorite.

Thursday is the one for me

I think 'Scratch' is my favorite song on Yes, it's a pretty consistent album overall. Sharks is fine, it sounds the most like a coffeehouse poetry reading which was an important part of their identity then idk

A buddy of mine who runs a little label outside of DC curated a Cure for Pain cover album a few years ago.