Mighty Purple
Mighty Purple began with brothers Steve and Jonny Rodgers. They started playing music together during the extended tedious hours after church services on Sunday mornings, as the grownups chatted theology over coffee in the parish room. Guitars were explored using the two chords from Bye Bye Love (The Everly Brothers) and plans were made for a band. Mighty Purple (under various interesting names) was performing in bars when the brothers were 13 and 14 respectively. A hybrid of 80s New Wave and Garage Pop, they quickly began finding a signature sound based on the brothers’ vocal harmonies, which reacted with each other with almost telepathic intuition. Rejecting the distortion of the late 80s, they began to craft a nearly folky sound which set them apart from what was current. The brothers would sit in basements writing, playing, and sometimes arguing as they discovered new new ideas.
Together with childhood friend Adrian Van de Graaff (now in the bands Titles and The Weigh Down) they began playing clubs frequently. Drummer William Mix joined, and the band plunged into rehearsals with amps blaring and began their recording career with the album Revolution. This was followed with the acclaimed albums Bohica and Black River Falls, also on the Wonderland Records label, which was run by Steve Rodgers and longtime collaborator David Kone.
From 1992-1999 the band toured relentlessly, destroying more than one old RV Camper in the process. More than one tour ended with a long trip back to New Haven in the freezing cold, pitch black back of a U-haul truck, lumbering its way along I-95; the only light visible was the slowly moving, glowing ember at the end of their band-mates’ cigarettes. The country was spread out before them like a blank canvas, and ears were reached by radio, or one at a time in late night shows, long before the internet or MP3s came along to turn music making into an easier process.
The sound of Mighty Purple wrestled its way through the musical jungle of the 1990s, adopting elements from different genres along the way, but always striving closer toward its own true voice. The addition of Drummer David Keith in 1996 took the band into more experimental territory, and lead to the release of Para Mejor o Peor (Wild Pitch Records), an acoustic live album Live From The Eli Whitney Barn, and the band’s final record of the ‘90s, How to Make A Living (Horizon Records).
They spent most of these years on the road, with no jobs, apartments, cell phones; not even e-mail. Songs upon songs, and shows upon shows. Weeks on end in New Orleans, living in the camper in the French Quarter as the wild party of Mardi Gras progressed. Waking from an uneasy sleep on a blanket on Miami Beach after a long night’s playing, as supermodels walked expensive dogs down the strip. Running pell-mell as a tornado touched down a quarter mile from the outdoor stage that the band was playing on in North Carolina. Playing to thousands in outdoor festivals in the Northeast, and the next week playing to three people in a dingy dive in the middle of the american heartland. Hearing their singles charting on the radio as they crossed the border from Juarez to El Paso, nearly passed out from the “excess”...
Stages were shared with many groups. Dave Matthews, John Mayer, Ben Harper, The Cranberries, The Barenaked Ladies, an endless string... some were nice, some were not...
At the start of the new millennium, Mighty Purple went through a cathartic shift. David Keith and Adrian left to pursue other musical projects, Steve took a year off to go into overseas missions, working in various places, including an orphanage in Bosnia during reconstruction, and centers for impoverished children in London, UK. He also began running a club in New Haven called The Space, which was a compilation of all of the best elements of all of the clubs Mighty Purple had seen over the past decade. Steve also went through one of his most prolific writing spurts, releasing two solo albums within a year: 13 Years To Clarity was written in a month; half of it was recorded during the hard November tour of 2000 in an apartment in Chicago, while Jonny took a morning off and made a real breakfast for the first time in weeks; The other half was recorded in the studio of Burlap To Cashmere in Brooklyn, the day before the Rodgers brothers flew to the UK for the first time. Novi Zivot was written before and after Steve’s trip to Bosnia, the hallmark of a new life begun.
In 2001, Mighty Purple regrouped with Tommy Lee on bass, Max Heath on keyboard, and drummers Ray Bodine, Paul Guerra, and Steve Toby. With this group they began making new albums, beginning with Prefables, and ending with the acclaimed Arms And Voices. Mighty Purple still puts on amazing shows, displaying a chemistry and an artistic maturity that only years can bring. Any listener can immediately sense the power that comes from the sight and sound of two brothers united through the years and against the odds, creating something unique and beautiful.
Revolution - 1991
Bohica - 1993
Black River Falls - 1995
Para Mejor O Peor - 1998
How To Make A Living - 2000
Prefables - 2004
Things To Come - 2006
Arms And Voices - 2007
Live - Eli Whitney Barn - 1997