The Music Never Stops

As part of the ’12 SBIFF’s “Cinesonic” sidebar and the generally amped-up segment of music films, and especially pop/rock music films, at least two of the films fall under the shadow of the VHI syndrome, offering fuller pictures of acts heretofore unexplored in a deeper way. We can safely file the documentaries on the Cowsills and Morphine’s Mark Sandman under the “where are they now…?” (and “where is their back story now?”) category, but from radically different ends of the spectrum and different time trajectories.

With the ‘60s teen idol and family band archetype of the Cowsills, their high profile in the ‘60s was their public pinnacle, and the documentary Family Band: The Cowsills Story seeks to tell the behind-the-scenes and after-the-fame-bubble story. Morphine, quite in contrast, was a unique, low, dark and enigmatic band from the alt-rocking ‘90s, and the documentary Cure for Pain: the Mark Sandman Story tells leader Sandman’s story backwards, from his early death onstage in 1999. Each story, in its way, is fascinating, heartwarming at times, tragic at others, but ever compelling to the rock culture junkies among us and within us.

Eerily enough, one point of commonality between these varied rock tales is the death of two brothers in each case. The passing of Mark Sandman’s two brothers no doubt left an indelible mark on the musician, whose music often clung to darker emotional palettes, and whose band Morphine was powered by bluesy swagger, Leonard Cohen-ish brooding and a wholly new and refreshing — and low-end hugging — sound, with Sandman’s two-string slide bass, baritone sax and drums. Guitars not allowed.