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.