A Little Story About Morphine

(The band, not the narcotic.)

Back in the early 1990s, I confused the bands Morphine and Codeine, so whenever the now-legendary bass-sax band Morphine played Phoenix, Arizona, I skipped it. Teenage me thought I hated Morphine, because I thought Morphine was Codeine, and I actually hated Codeine. Turns out I’d never heard Morphine. I may never have heard Codeine either, but I’d seen a picture of them somewhere, and I hated how they looked. Heroin was everywhere in those days, sometimes up my own nose. Now here were two opiate-themed alternative bands—but it wasn’t drugs that caused my confusion. It was laziness. I was a lazy reader. I didn’t pay close enough attention. There were SO many bands back then, and so many shows and songs and friends’ recommendations. It overwhelmed me. MTV, radio, Spin magazine, the Phoenix New Times, Tower Records—sooooo much info to process! And sooo many bands to see! So every week we’d look in our local alt-weekly’s show listings to see what tickets my friends and I needed to buy, and sometimes that band Morphine would be listened, and I’d think, Ugh, they suck, and I’d skip that show. In 1999, their frontman Mark Sandman died suddenly during a performance, and the band has since assumed the kind of legendary status that a sudden youthful demise can provide. Now, decades later, my wife played me Morphine’s music, and I’ve fallen in love with it, so I recognize this all as a missed opportunity. Damn, if only I’d read instead of skimmed the Phoenix New Times and had actually listened to the music, not conflated the two opiate bands in my haste. Oh, well.

That’s just a little story I wanted to tell you.