THE REAL STORY ABOUT MARK SANDMAN

    Morphine singer-bassist Mark Sandman died of cardiac arrest onstage in Palestrina, Italy, on July 3, 1999.  And that's pretty much everything almost anybody knows about the circumstances of his death.  None of the accounts of the incident ever explained how such a thing could have happened to a vital 46-year-old man.  And so rumors started.
    In light of the fact that there wasn't any official word on why it happened, and the band, friends and family were too grief-stricken to talk, any explanation seemed to be fair game.  Maybe it was because Sandman was a rock musician, maybe because of his preternaturally laconic manner, maybe it was simply because his band was called Morphine, but some people jumped to the conclusion that drugs were involved.  If so, cocaine would be a good guess — too much and it stops your heart. Many musicians have died of cocaine-related heart attacks: the Pretenders' James Honeyman-Scott, soul giant David Ruffin, Quiet Riot singer Kevin DuBrow, the Who's bassist John Entwistle, and on and on. You could probably throw in comedians Chris Farley and Mitch Hedberg too.  It was an educated guess, but it was only that — a guess.
    In the course of reviewing the upcoming documentary, Cure for Pain: The Mark Sandman Story, I noted that the otherwise fine film doesn't answer the most basic question surrounding Sandman's demise, namely, why did it happen?  A work of long-form journalism about a man's life should surely be a little more illuminating about his death.  It didn't address, much less refute, the rumors.  I've since been in touch with Sandman's former girlfriend Sabine Hrechdakian, who's a friend of mine, and his former bandmate Dana Colley.  They're keen to set the record straight, so I offered to tell their story on this blog.  Here it is.
    Both Sabine and Colley say Mark Sandman did not use hard drugs — in fact, Sabine says he despised them.  "Over the course of his life, he'd seen the wreckage drugs cause," she says, "and someone of his intellect and curiosity just wasn’t interested in obliteration.  He wanted to heighten his experience of life, not deaden it."
    And let's face it, to infer merely from the band name that Sandman was a drug user is pretty juvenile and gives little credit to such a sophisticated artist.  In the film, Sandman says he likes the etymology of the word morphine, which stems from the Greek god of dreams, Morpheus.  But the name Morphine surely also refers to the anodyne powers of music, something Sandman leaned on heavily in the wake of the untimely deaths of his two younger brothers Roger and Jon.
    So why did it happen?  Well, Sandman had some classic risk factors.  He was a heavy smoker — a pack a day for many years.  And he was also under quite a bit of stress, not just as a middle-aged frontman of a hard-touring rock band, but also because he was the principal songwriter of a band that was trying to live up to the major label recording contract they had signed — "I think Mark was under a lot of pressure to really kind of live up to the expectations of the people who gave him a lot of support," Colley told the Huffington Post's Tony Sachs.  "We were in the big leagues, and he was under a lot of pressure to hit one over the fence…  He went through the mill for sure."  Sandman was also basically co-managing the band.  "As someone with strong opinions who liked to exert control over all aspects of the creative and business process, he basically didn't delegate anything, and I mean anything," says Sabine, "so he was under a lot of stress."
    And here was the biggest red flag: there had been a serious warning sign.  Two weeks before he left for what was to become Morphine's final tour, Sandman suffered what Sabine feels in retrospect was a minor heart attack.  "We were sitting on the couch together in the evening and he started complaining of pains and shortness of breath," Sabine recalls.  "It only lasted a couple of minutes and then he felt fine. He thought it might have been indigestion.  I asked if he wanted to go to the hospital, but he said no.  When you’re still relatively young, you just don’t assume the worst when something like that happens.  You figure it will pass.  It’s not a big deal.  We’ve all felt weird chest pains from time to time." Sandman promised he'd get a check-up when he got back from tour.
    By the time Morphine's European tour wound around to the hill town of Palestrina, a 45-minute drive east of Rome, it was near the height of the southern Italian summer.  Colley recalls blazing 100-degree heat that day and it was still very hot when the band took the stage that evening.  Several songs into the set, Sandman fell over backwards to the stage floor and never revived.  As noted by the American Heart Association, "adrenaline released during intense physical or athletic activity often acts as a trigger" for sudden cardiac arrest.  So there you go.
    All the ensuing news reports were variations on "Morphine frontman dies of heart attack onstage."  Which left a gaping open question: why such a relatively young man had suffered cardiac arrest.  Cardiac arrest doesn't happen for no reason, but it was never explained, and so the drug rumors flew, deeply upsetting the band, family and friends to this day.
    Here's the reason it was never explained: Sandman was Jewish.  Or, more to the point, his parents were.  (His mother passed away this year; his father is still with us.)  In Judaism, the body is considered the holy temple of the soul.  And you do not desecrate a temple.  So Jewish religious law, as written in the Talmud, prohibits autopsies.  It also urges a prompt burial, within three days.  Perhaps more important was the fact that this happened in a little town in a foreign country, which Sabine says made Sandman's parents uncomfortable with conducting an autopsy.  "None of us," Sabine says, "felt there was a plausible cause to warrant conducting one."  After all, he was gone, and the exact reason was of little importance.  A post mortem at the hospital confirmed it was cardiac arrest, but that's as far as it goes.  So that's why it has never been revealed why Mark Sandman died so young — because no one really knows.
    People can speculate all they want, but both Sabine Hrechdakian and Dana Colley confirm it wasn't drugs that killed Mark Sandman.  Now everyone knows the story.  Maybe that will put the whole thing to rest.

Comments

[jenn]

You failed to mention that he had been stabbed in the chest during a robbery, which might explain a frail heart.

[jon]

I dont blame people for thinking mark sandman used drugs.. his band was called morphine, and songs such as candy, like swimming and cure for pain are obviously about hard/ addictive drugs, which indicates he could have had experiences with them

[Michael Azerrad]

Good thinking. Likewise, I don't blame people for thinking the members of Nirvana were Hindu, or that the members of the Smiths were all named Smith, or that the members of the Eagles can fly.

[Teresa the Nurse]

*LOL* Michael Azerrad

According to the American Heart Association, in 2011, 382,800 experienced sudden cardiac arrest. Only 33% of those people had symptoms within one hour of death. So what happened to Mark is not at all unusual.

Source: http://circ.ahajournals.org/content/125/1/e2.full#sec-130

[Michael Azerrad]

I'm not sure what the LOL is for. That seems kind of uncalled for and just weird. Nor did I claim that what happened to Sandman is unusual. I just said it's unexplained.

[Adam]

A first-rate singer-songwriter. I played a lot of Morphine, as a college DJ in the 1990s.

For a variety of reasons, including genetically-high LDL levels, people can have heart attacks at an early age. And the symptoms aren't always the textbook severe chest pain. Some other artists who lost their lives to MIs include Joe Strummer, Robert Palmer, and Paul Young.

[antonio]

morphine refers to the god of dreams not the drug,so no,thank you for your attention,good night we love you all,and the milion goes to,nobody of you....hahahahahahahhahhahahahha

[Michael Azerrad]

Well, no, morphine is a drug and that is what the band was named after, Sandman's coy claims to the contrary. The drug itself is named for Morpheus. If the band really wanted to say their music was like Morpheus, then they would have called the band Morpheus, or the adjectival form Morphean.
It's OK, you can name your band after a drug and not actually use the drug. Only literal-minded cretins would believe otherwise. By their logic, one would have to assume that the members of the New Jersey Devils hockey team are satanists.

[JoshCook101]

Nice article. Glad to see that someone has tried to authoritatively set the record straight on his death and the mystery that surrounded it. Mark's presence over the 20 years I've lived and played music in Boston is missed to this day, by many. Its kind of hard to see him heavily abusing substances and being a hardworking as he was, honestly. He clearly partied and enjoyed the nightlife. But,I don't think he had the patience to put up with BS that accompanies fatal narcotic addictions.

[antonio]

good thinking,the drug is named after Morpheus,so its the same it just expands the conversation into something more deep or Joda kind of speech

[muse]

Michael Azerrad, let's look at your last 3 sentences; you say "no one really >>knows<<", then "Sabine Hrechdakian and Dana Colley >>confirm<< it wasn't drugs", and finally "Now everyone >>knows<< the story" (for the hat trick). You can delete my comment, or spin away, but without an ounce of irony, you've contradicted yourself to such an extent that would have all but the most irrational of minds rightfully deducing that you've got some kind of an agenda. "And so rumors started" ...

[Michael Azerrad]

No, I'd say that it's you who have the agenda, since you seem to deliberately fail to understand how we can rule out one cause and still not know what the cause was. For instance, if a non-smoker contracted lung cancer, we could rule out smoking as the cause and still not know what the cause was. Hopefully, this will clear things up for you.
How brave of you to hide your email address and post anonymously.

[Vector Nectar]

Nicotine is a deadly drug and one of the most addictive and toxic psychotropic substances that are known to man. 20 cigarettes a day can kill you in the long run. Only because something is legal, it doesn't mean it's good, healthy or non-lethal and only because something is deemed illegal by people who are upholding an anachronistic and historically falsified political agenda based on polemic propaganda(which now even gets questioned by law enforcement officers like "Law Enforcement Against Prohibition"; http://www.leap.cc), to support a global corruption pyramid(look up CIA's Air America, Iran Contra-affair, Operation Overcast/Project Paperclip, Operation ARTICHOKE, MKULTRA, MKSEARCH, MKDELTA, MKNAOMI, MKOFTEN, MKCHICKWIT, Frank Olson, Gary Webb, Harold Blauer, Roberto Calvi, Licio Gelli, Operation Gladio, the Kubark Manual, Operation Condor, Operation Northwoods, Operation Satanique, Operation Phoenix, Bohemian Grove, Propaganda Due, The Royal Order of Jesters, PNAC and ECHELON, especially the economic espionage report by the EU parliament released on 07/11/01 about the latter topic) and increase real crime(with involuntary victims) and violence(Viva El Calderon! Viva la Iniciativa Mérida! Muere Mexico!), while systematically blocking the prevention and prosecution of both, as it's also preventing control of access, age and quality, but guarantees the Mafia monopoly literally billions in tax-free profit, while the state pays all the courts, the damages and the arrests, jail time and resocialization. It doesn't mean it's bad, dangerous or lethal, just because it was deemed illegal by discriminating and stigmatizing fascists, which the American people should abhor since 1933, the end of Ethanol prohibition and Al Capone's empire. And I also think the stabbing during the robbery might have increased the possiblity of heart attack. Think for yourself. Question Authority.

[Vector Nectar]

Erratum: Possibility, not "possiblity".

[MB]

I saw Mark Sandman play about 300 shows in the Boston area over 10 years. I also chatted with him here and there, before and after shows, at parties. Mark was not a druggie. That simple. A drink, a toke, yeah, drug mania -absolutely not.

[RheaS]

Thanks so much for posting this. I saw "Cure for Pain" yesterday at the Brattle in Cambridge, and thought that Mark's death was kind of glossed over. My dad had a cardiac arrest, but he was 73. No one expects it in a relatively young man (and I was stunned that Sandman was in his mid-40s, thinking that he appeared to be quite younger). His former roommate talks of Mark smoking weed throughout the day, and I tried to reconcile that with what his girlfriend said about him not using drugs. I figured it was a one-time habit that he'd outgrown by the time Morphine started getting a lot of attention. You can't front and co-manage a band like that, churn out music and tour while under the influence of hard drugs; you just can't. I never thought that the band name suggested that they were all addicts.

I didn't know that he'd been stabbed in the chest either.

I was lucky to see Morphine play twice before Mark died. There's been no band like them since and it's hard to wonder about what might have been...but that could be said of so many bands too.

[AlD]

I, too, saw the movie at the Brattle. And yes, its treatment of certain topics is...sparse.

Here, I think, is why.

The movie was only made possible by the co-operation of Mark's family. That co-operation was based on a hope that it would help Guitelle Sandman come to terms with the loss of 3 sons at the end of her life.

Unfortunately, Guitelle Sandman contracted pancreatic cancer near the end of 2009 and she passed away in March, 2010. After her death, there were some requests made to the directors that they wished for certain interview footage to be removed. And I believe the directors complied with their wishes.

At the same time, the legal ownership of certain other footage was successfully contested...and I believe that this footage was also removed.

I very much doubt that Sandman's stabbing contributed in any way to his death. Physical damage to the heart would have lead to a cardiac event very quickly, and almost certainly would have been assessed during his treatment.

Sandman was a chain-smoker, 46 years old, exhausted, and attempting to perform in 100 degree heat. I traveled to Palestina in August, 2001 and though it is some 50km from Rome the air quality is quite poor. And I believe those were the sole contributors to his death.

Oh...and if drugs had been suspected the police would have ordered an autopsy because that is there mandate from the Ministry of the Interior

[Tony]

I never knew Mark but I knew friends of his, and they told me -- before his death -- that he was a pretty heavy pot smoker in addition to the cigarettes. I have also read that the chances of having a heart attack increase something like sixfold in the hour after ingesting marijuana. So while hard drugs may not have played a role in Mark's death, if he had a pre-show joint in Palestrina on a hot night with lousy air quality, a couple of weeks after a minor cardiac incident... that could have pushed him over the edge physically.

Anyway, thanks for writing this and thanks for quoting my Morphine piece.

[Teresa the nurse from Oregon]

The LOL was for the analogy to thinking that the members of Nirvana were Hindu. Not sure why you think that's weird. Perhaps you thought I was referring to the original post.

You are correct that sudden cardiac death is unexplained, Michael. Except for this: we do know some people with a genetic predisposition and/or lifestyle-related risk factors, in certain circumstances, will suddenly die when plaque in the coronary arteries ruptures, causing accumulation of platelets and thrombus formation, cutting off blood flow to the myocardium, starving it of oxygen. Which leads to a non-viable cardiac rhythm, usually ventricular fibrillation. Few people survive this.

But yeah, otherwise, it's a complete mystery.

[Holderlin]

Michael Azerrad is a perfect example of a rude, delusional hipster. No one here likes you or agrees with what you are saying. I knew Mark and you are just the type he would make a point to keep away from.

[Michael Azerrad]

Holderlin, I'm sorry that you are so deeply insecure about not being hip. It's OK, we all get old and out of touch.
But the fact that you made a false email address that contains a hateful homophobic slur pretty much says it all about you.

[Holderlin]

Look, I'm gay, so I have a right to that email address. I have been a proud homosexual all my life. I hope you don't have a problem with that.

[Michael Azerrad]

Not at all, Holderlin. But that's still a strange email address. And you still have no idea what my connection to Mark Sandman was, so you should probably know what you're talking about before advertising your ignorance in a public forum.

[Holderlin]

Then I sincerely apologize and take back everything I said. That was a wonderful post. Keep up the good work, sir.

[Michael Azerrad]

Thanks, that's big of you, Holderlin. Peace out, buddy.