Enter Sandman

In college, I enjoyed a few albums by the band Treat Her Right. They had a nice retro-rock/blues feel that was a welcomed relief in the overproduced world of the late 80’s. I had complete forgot about them for years until recently.
I’ve just finished Jen Trynin’s book Everything I’m Cracked Up To Be, a nice detailed account of her mid-90’s major label bidding war and the subsequent fall from grace when the result failed to make her the next Alanis Morissette.
The book also manages to namecheck a few of her Boston, Massachusetts peers like Aimee Mann, Juliana Hatfield, and one Mark Sandman.
The name rung a bell, but I needed to learn more about Mr. Sandman. And upon my discovery, I learned that he was the lead vocalists and guitar player for one Treat Her Right, another band that got some regional fame, which also lead to a major label bidding war, which then lead to the band to being dropped after they failed to sell jack shit.
The research also showed that Mark Sandman then started a group that managed to get a little more national attention, Morphine. To be honest, I never quite got that band, but I must admit that I never really went beyond the few tracks that I heard on public radio or whatever. Maybe it’s time to discover them, as I would consider myself a fan of Sandman’s prior work.
But what really blew my mind was the discovery that Sandman frigging died of a heart attack during a Morphine show in Italy in 1999.
I also learned that Sandman was quite a contentious figure, occasionally battling wits with interviewers and revealing just enough about his past to figure out that the dude went through a lot growing up and into his early adulthood.
What’s cool is how he transformed all of that into a nifty little enterprise that allowed him to, as one of Morphine’s album titles puts it, find a cure for pain.
It still blows my mind how I still manage to discover new things in rock and roll. My score on the RMATs and discovery of Mark Sandman’s resume keeps my elitism down to a minimum.