“Mark and his music were inseparable,” says Colley. “He was always writing and recording and performing and going out. Mark was probably the most comfortable when he was on stage. He reached out to his audiences in a way that he was maybe more reticent to do with his friends.”
Nonetheless, Sandman left many friends behind, as well as a fiancée and a family already shaken by the earlier deaths of his two brothers.
Twenty-two days after his demise, many of them gathered in Central Square, outside Sandman’s second home, the Middle East, for a memorial concert. His compadres in Morphine and Treat Her Right, plus Peter Wolf, Dicky Barrett, the Either/Orchestra, Chris Ballew, and members of his many side projects — Wooden Leg, the Hypnosonics, Candy Bar, the Pale Brothers, Superhero — performed to raise money to establish the Mark Sandman Music Education Fund. And that location, at the corner of Mass Ave and Brookline Street, was named Mark Sandman Square by the city.
Morphine and Sandman keep winning fans, thanks mostly to the band’s catalogue and the cult film Spanking the Monkey, which features a Morphine soundtrack. The Shout! Factory label plans a two-CD set of unreleased Morphine live and studio material this fall.
And Sandman’s ripples spread every time Les Claypool and Collective Soul — two prominent examples — play a Morphine song, and as New York art-rockers Rudder and Boston’s Monique Ortiz, among other artists, continue to reinterpret his sonic blueprint.
