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Mighty Purple winter 2006
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Happy New year friends
We will be in the studio & Rehearsal hall until April recording songs towards our next album. We will not be playing any shows until April 2006.
We thank all of you for your continued support.
All 5 of us are very excited to have this time to write and record...besides it is kind of nice to avoid risking our lives in the van through SNOW & ICE this year.
Jon is working on chamber music and has been in the studio recently .....you can check out a sample of his music at www.myspace.com/jonnyrodgers
Steve is constantly reinventing THE SPACE (the all ages cultural arts center he owns) www.thespace.tk
and is also writing songs for the next album
Max (keyboards) is always creating music and you can find some samples at www.myspace.com/ghostnotes
Tommy Lee (bass player) and his wife just had baby #2
Paul (drummer) can also be found this winter playing with several local groups such as Back of the Bus
A special thank you to our hometown crowd that came to support us at The Space in December...It was really fun having Adrian Van de Graaff play on a few songs.
In the meantime you can JOIN our ever growing MYSPACE community ...it is a great way FOR ALL OF US TO STAY IN TOUCH
WWW.MYSPACE.COM/MIGHTYPURPLE05
We will be on tour this spring ...including shows in NYC, Boston, DC, NC, Nashville, VA
and more ....if you think we should play in your town drop steve a note at steve@mightypurple.com
stay warm
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Forecasting the Weather.
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Coda - New York, NY 10/13/05
Look, they're playing "Tainted Love"–and not the Marilyn cover you twisted youngin's... New York is always a contradiction for us. Simultaneously more than we can handle and something we miss when we're gone. Jon and I both used to live here, I (and I think Max, but who can be sure?) still live a double life, secretly playing the role of New Yorkers every few weeks. It's a bad imitation, but its what we have to do. Playing the City during the week is a science experiment: you have to play early enough that people can make it home to sleep and go to work the next day, but you can't play so early that they can't get home from work, change, and then make it to wherever you're playing. Playing someplace in mid-town means that if you play early, people can come straight from work, but later on, they won't want to leave their comfortable, more residential neighborhoods. Playing someplace downtown, where people live, you run the risk that folks won't come out until much later, just to visit their neighborhood bar. It's trying to solve an algebra equation where the variables keep changing.
It's been raining for so long, Muni-Meters and other solar powered bits of urbanity have stopped working for lack of power. I think we're all getting a sense of how they feel. It feels like no one cares, like every soul on earth just wants to go hide under their blankets, and we're out at a club...
It feels like it won't stop anytime soon.
But, in the end, the guys play "Sing", and I lose my train of thought. Except to say the only sure way to tell who in your life will throw you a life preserver is to stand in quickly rising water.
On the ride home, Max turns 21. Short of a few well-timed phone calls, the fanfare is limited to a rousing debate about the history and complete lyrics to "The Birthday Song". Little known fact: it took two people to write this thing. Two people whose families will never have to work a day in their lives, all because of a nation of people that just can't help singing "Happy birthday to you..." no matter what the royalty costs. Anyway, I can't help wondering if my life would be much different if, like Max, I had been worried about tomorrow's French class on my 21st birthday, instead of...whatever it was that I thought was important then. Dang well-adjusted people. |
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Let Jonny and Max name your band.
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A shocking thing happened on Friday night. We were all sitting around having the traditional fast-food meal before the show, when it happened: We all simultaneously discovered that "snuck" is not a word. It had just sneaked up on us, pretending to be a word.
Anyway, it wasn't long before there was hysterical laughing and crying over the demise of an entire tense of a word that we thought had been based in reality... but had indeed been sitting upon a throne of lies all along.
It should now be mentioned that Jon has an almost sick fascination with naming bands, so after we had all gotten done with our cage match with the english language, he and Max proceeded to come up with a pretty definitive list of names you'd never want to name your band... but should. If you use one of these, please be merciful and send them a dollar or a sandwich... they really worked hard on these.
Just a taste:
Cop Cop
Copy Firefighter
Snuck Wagon
Losers :: Weepers (Punctuation Required)
The Best Meatball Sandwich I ever Hads
Schlock n' Spiel
Uncle Snuck Wagon
I think we're reserving one of these for the soon to not be Elizabeth Ziman Band, 'cause based on their show the other night, they need some sort of tragic flaw to keep them in check with the rest of us humans. I'm voting for Uncle Snuck Wagon. |
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9/23/05 - The Elevens, Northampton, MA
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Kind of a bar version of The Space, The Elevens is small, but feels a little more open. This is the band's first gig in more than a month... as one of them is much more married than before. Sooner or later, everyone has to learn how to play the guitar with a wedding ring on. Mark Schwaber opened up, and will open up at The Space tomorrow. He's a guitar player of the Nick Drake order (which is high praise from me), but it felt weird listening to that style of music in a bar, instead of in my living room. Anyway, he's great, and you should check him out.
The drive here was punctuated with random spurts of worry from the back half of the van. (Steve and Jonny have a rare form of auto paranoia, the kind that comes from having lived a life in which we've had to return home from lots of gigs in the back of various sizes of U-Haul trucks. One time, we actually continued on to a gig in Maine – in February. Jonny and I lay frozen in the pitch black of the truck with the gear for two hours. When we arrived at the gig, we had been singing "Cumbuya" in three part harmony for an hour. If I could figure out who was singing that third part... I'd be much better off in life, I'm sure.) As for me, I've kind of realized at this point that my constitution can't take worrying about things until they actually happen. Anyway, the van smoked and sputtered a little, everyone had a brief hallucination of being stranded on the side of the road... but the van endured, despite being almost as out of practice at traveling as we are.
It's comforting to all be in our tiny corners of the same van together again... Paul slept or alternately used the back of my seat as a practice kick drum. Tommy redifined "following distance" as we know it. I made a futile attempt at listening to music through our insanely busted stereo (two volume settings: too loud, and "huh?"). Jonny and Max talked about songs "in retrograde," or some other bizarre music geek code. Steve... well, let's just say I'm glad I'm not in charge of paying Steve's cell phone bill. It sounds like a whole bunch of annoyance, but really it amounts to a peculiar and wonderful sense of home that I've never in my life been able to explain to people, and I think as much as we all enjoyed the rest that this summer gave us, we all missed it.
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Studio News!
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The band has been holed up in three separate rooms of Inner Space Sound Labs, four different cars, and sticking their heads next to boom-boxes from around the world while they mix some new tracks. These days, Inner Space's engineer, Punk Rock Barry, can tell you when your toms are cloudy, vocals are pitchy, and turn any word into an adjective to describe your bass sound... from three rooms down. (Try to figure out what he means by pirate-y... we dare you.)
By the way, if you've ever wanted to hear your own self on tape, shifted up or down three octaves over backwards banjo music about the effect of speculative investing on The Great Depression... or you just have... maybe, like, a band, for instance... you owe it to yourself to check out Inner Space. Not only are they our best friends... they've been involved in every Mighty Purple recording project for the past three years. We're hoping that means that you really like their work. Call (203-444-9747) or click (innerspacesoundlabs.tk)
See you at the shows!
Mighty Purple |
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