That's the Day I Throw my Drugs Away
The Morphine album Cure for Pain came out 30 years ago, on September 14, 1993. A few years back, I was on this music review mailing list, where each member had to take a turn writing about an album of great importance to them. This was mine.
Ever since I was a kid, cities always held a fascination for me. I was not well-traveled, growing up in the middle of Michigan. The idea of being in some cosmopolitan, dense, East Coast metropolis was amazing to me, yet it took until well into college to even head out there, for a college television conference in Providence in 1996. We made the drive from Michigan State University, cut across Canada in the dead of night to spend a day in Boston, then head down to Providence in rush hour traffic. Checked into the hotel and one of the people in our group asked who was playing in town. Morphine at Lupo’s Heartbreak Hotel. A friend said we absolutely had to go, as the band was amazing. I’d never heard of them, but went along because, hey, a concert in an actual, real city and everything, you know?
A loud club with cheap beer. Lots of people crowded in. The band came on. It was one of those weird things you always remember. These guys were on stage- not young, one of them playing a bass with only two strings? The one guy playing two saxes at once? The lead singer going into some beat poetry? What was this? I’d never seen or heard anything like it. My mind exploded. The band, the crowd, everything was in sync. Leaving the club, being downtown in an old, established city- the whole weekend of experiencing something I’d built up for so long … it just cemented that I needed to be in a place like that. I needed to live somewhere with history, vitality.
We got back to East Lansing and one of the first things I did that week was go to Flat, Black and Circular (still one of the best record shops I’ve ever been lucky enough to shop) and pick up Cure for Pain. It wasn’t even the album they were touring for (Like Swimming). I think Cure for Pain was the first one I saw in the rack? But it grabbed me and entranced me and hooked me for life. I listened and listened and listened. This incredible, smooth, wonderful mix of I don’t know what- jazz? Rock? Stories of cheating and sleaziness and sadness and loss and regret?
It’s just a wonderful thing to just discover a band you had no idea existed and instantly be taken with them. To feel that connection you never knew was there and somehow know you’ll be listening to them for a good, long while. It’s almost like falling in love with someone, you know?
I just always associate the album with that time and it’s all smashed together in my head, making that absolutely certain decision that, someway, somehow, I was going to live on the East Coast, in an honest-to-god city where I could go to places like Lupo’s and see bands like Morphine for the first time.
Now, I live in Philadelphia and never go to shows!
Though the odd, strange miracle of the internet, I’m able to hear a bootleg of that very night, knowing that 21-year-old RJ is in that crowd somewhere, just happy and dumbfounded by what he is hearing and utterly enjoying being in that moment.
I don’t know if I can hear myself in there, though. That might be too strange, like thinking of the dead people in the repeated laugh tracks of old sitcoms.
But, the record! Just a pleasure to listen to, front to back.
“Dawna” and “Buena” kicking it off… “I’m Free Now” as a sad, incredible post-breakup song where you feel like that terrible jerk who’s made a bad mistake (I'm free now to direct a movie/Sing a song or write a book about yours truly/How I'm so interesting I'm so great I'm really just a fuck-up/And It's such a waste to burn down these walls around me)... That delicate mandolin of “In Spite of Me”... The barrelling train of “Mary Won’t You Call My Name”... That jazzy, smoky rambling of “Let’s Take a Trip Together”... “Thursday” is almost a short film, with the wenching title track slamming you right after… all of it...
July 3 will mark the anniversary of Morphine frontman Mark Sandman’s death from a heart attack in the midst of a 1999 concert in Europe. If you could throw this (or anything from their wonderful catalog, really) on, I think that would be nice.
Anyway, that's why I love this 30-year-old record and this band. Listen to it wherever you can, it's a hell of a beautiful thing.
