Desirea Rodgers
When Jon Rodgers—who has a show Saturday night at the Outer Space to support his latest project, Cindertalk—was 11, he was in the garage of the house in New Haven he lived in with his family, practicing guitar. “I didn’t even have an amplifier,” Rodgers said in an interview on WNHH radio’s “Northern Remedy” program. “A guy who was walking by on the street came in. He said, ‘Oh … you’re learning guitar, this is fantastic.’“So he picks up the guitar. He’s got the big weathered hands of an adult and he’s playing these chords, and I thought, ‘Wow, he’s really good — Who is this guy?’ And eventually he said, ‘well, you keep practicing and one day you’ll come and play my place.’ And I said, ‘what do you mean?’ And he said, ‘well, I own Toad’s Place.’”
Rodgers and his first band, Mighty Purple, which he started with his brother Steve, would indeed play Toad’s Place — probably sooner than any of them thought.
From The Garage To The Road
Rodgers started playing guitar on his 11th birthday. “I had just discovered music with drums in it,” he said, and when he and his siblings decided to start a band, he decided to play lead guitar. His father, who played and sang (and was the minister at St. John’s, at the corner of Humphrey and Orange Streets), showed him two chords to the Everly Brothers’ “Bye Bye Love” and said, “OK, I’ve shown you how to tune the guitar. I’ve given you a chord sheet. You can go out and play in the garage until you’ve figured out how to tune perfectly by yourself and then you can play in the house,” Rodgers said.
“I don’t know whether that was kind of a jokey thing on his part or whether he was actually super-annoyed at hearing an out-of-tune guitar.”
He spent the summer in the garage practicing — and playing with his brother Steve.
“Our playing developed symbiotically,” Rodgers said. Steve’s “right hand was just superb, with great rhythm. He could do all of this really expressive stuff and he still can; it’s really brilliant to watch. He had all of this rhythm stuff covered.” Meanwhile, “everything that I would reach for on the guitar was always high and melodic, and filling in the gaps per what my brother was doing.”
One day, he and his brother were walking by Toad’s Place on York Street.
“It has a particular smell,” Rodgers said. “Some people complain about it. Other people really love it. For me, it was the most enchanting smell ever — the smell of cleaner and a little bit of stale beer and smoke.”
“That’s the smell of success right there,” Rodgers recalled thinking.
Breaking Down, But Not Up
In just a few years, the brothers would be playing there, while still teenagers, as Mighty Purple. By then they and the rest of the band had grown as musicians. They practiced and gigged constantly; by the end of their teen years, they were playing 200 shows a year. Jon was almost never without his guitar, to the point where he would take it with him when they went out to Friendly’s. The night before he took his SATs, Mighty Purple had a gig at CBGB’s.
“We probably got home at four in the morning,” Rodgers said. “Let’s just say that I did not ace them as much as the world would have liked.”
Steve, meanwhile, turned out to have the business chops and ambition to be the band’s manager as well as its lead singer and rhythm guitar player.
“He had a phone in his bedroom by the time he was 14 so that he could use it for booking,” Rodgers said. “He knew how to do that thing really well,” and always did. For every club Mighty Purple played, “he had a checklist of what made it good and bad …. That is why he runs such a tight ship at the Outer Space,” which Steve founded, owns, and still runs.
Mighty Purple started touring in the 1990s, when the brothers were still in their teens. The tour didn’t really stop for six years. With the release of Mighty Purple’s second album, Bohica, the group “based a tour around where we were charting on college radio,” Rodgers said. “We’d play at tiny clubs and almost nobody would be there, and then we’d get to Forest Grove, Oregon and there’d be 150 fans in the audience. If a DJ picked it up, it was really good for us. So we got in the van and — this was pre-Internet, pre-cell phones. I don’t think I called home for a month. We just disappeared.”
Mighty Purple’s first cross-country tour was “pretty formative,” Rodgers said. He was 19 years old. “After that we really got into touring, probably six months of the year — three in the spring and three in the fall — and then a lot of gigging in New England throughout the rest of the time. It was the only way we were earning money back then.”
It was also a lot of fun — even as it tested Steve’s and Jon’s relationship as brothers, which “was really a central dynamic to the band,” Rodgers said. On the road, that dynamic was, well, amplified: “We love each other but we also police each other a lot.” So, Rodgers said, “maybe in Boulder, Colorado, I threw a bass amp down the stairs at him. Probably not the best idea.”
Meanwhile, “I had this saying back then that tour is always going to broadside you eventually,” Rodgers said. “You’re going to be going along, and everything’s going to be great, you’re going to be doing these great shows, and then one day you’re going to wake up kind of an emotional wreck, or you get offstage and realize you’re just cooked.”
Everyone in time had a breaking point for a tour. Jon’s came during a stop in DC. Steve was having an argument with their sound man. Jon decided to intervene, and the sound man stepped aside as the brothers turned on each other. “So we were fisticuffs,” Rodgers said. “I packed my very small backpack with whatever clothes I had and I said, ‘I’m out of here.’ So I jumped out of the camper and started walking. It was about four o’clock in the afternoon…. I had no plan at all. No cell phone. No money.”
He got a sandwich at a Salvation Army. It started to snow, and turned into a blizzard. Rodgers took shelter in a subway station with a man named Dave who was waiting for a plane to take him to Africa. While waiting out the storm, he formed a plan to hitchhike to South Carolina and join a friend to work with him. A string of all-night diners and passing acquaintances took him through to dawn. By then, Rodgers said with a laugh, “let’s just say my resolve was broken.”
He called their record label’s office in Connecticut. The office directed him to a friend’s house in DC where the band was staying. They reunited; mostly the band was just glad Rodgers was all right.
“We start driving to Maryland for our next gig,” Rodgers said, “and there’s where the problems really start.”
The camper had a “massive breakdown” on I‑95 just outside of Jessup, Maryland. Most of the band got a ride back to the house where they stayed in D.C. The camper was towed to a rest stop nearby with a Subway. The Rodgers brothers stayed behind to guard the camper.
“So my brother and I lived at this rest stop in Jessup, Maryland, for three days in the freezing cold, with no heat. Every now and then we would run an extension cord to the outside plug at the Subway just to plug in to have enough heat for a couple hours before they discovered us and told us to unplug. And we had a gallon jug of cider jack between us, and we had three days to be miserably cold, suffer, and make up with each other. And that’s what we did.”
The band’s mechanic was slowly but surely fixing the camper. But the cops showed up after three days, shining flashlights into the windows of the camper. They ordered Rodgers to move the vehicle.
“I turn it over, and there’s a massive explosion in the engine. I remember yelling at the cop, ‘Look what you made me do!’”
The camper was then totaled and also immovable. A large tow truck towed the camper “somewhere in urban Baltimore.” They abandoned the camper there, put all their possessions in the back of a U‑Haul truck, and the band rode in the back, all the way back to New Haven. “I spent the next six hours in the back of a U‑Haul truck going up I‑95,” “and all I can see is the glowing tip of my brother’s cigarette going down and up, down and up, back to his mouth.”
And that wasn’t even the last tour for Mighty Purple. They had many more after that — and many more for Rodgers still to come.
From Songwriting To Where?
In their mid-20s, the brothers decided they needed a change. Steve joined a mission to Bosnia doing humanitarian work after its civil war. When he got back, he started the Space. Jon decided to switch gears, toward composed music. He’s been doing it ever since.
“I started writing things like a guitar-cello duet that’s ten minutes long, or a string quartet, or whatever. And then simultaneously I was interested in integrating song-based music with composed stuff.”
He started teaching music in New Haven while he worked on his own compositions. “I really went hook, line, and sinker into composed music,” Rodgers said. “I think part of that was realizing I was getting a little bit older, and even from a young age, producers and managers would say, ‘Look, you got to hit this by the time you’re 25, and if you don’t, it’s a shelf life, and you’re going to have to get out of it.’”
When he turned 25, Rodgers said, he realized, “I love music. I love it more than I did when I was a kid. I understand it more now. My capacity for knowing it and understanding it has grown a lot. And I wanted to participate in all the music that I loved. It was a big, expansive time for me.”
He released two albums, The Sound of Birds and The Aviary, which showed his compositions growing longer and more ornate. At the same time, he started putting down his guitar and instead playing tuned wine glasses.
“At some point in my life I realized that I just embrace the difficult as a musician, with glasses probably being the most difficult thing I’ve embraced. It’s a really difficult thing to amplify. It’s an interesting, quirky thing to play, that the water system in whatever town you’re playing in can greatly affect — the tactile feel and how much sound you can get out of it,” Rodgers said. “Connecticut water is actually really great for playing tuned wine glasses. And Indiana water is abysmal. I never would have developed my project if I was from Indiana. I wouldn’t have thought that what I can intricately on glass would be possible.”
Moving into playing multiple instruments, and multiple styles, are what has enabled Rodgers to move into becoming a “lifer.”
“At a certain point as a musician you recognize whether you’re a lifer or not,” Rodgers said, “and to be honest, I think that there are more people who should consider themselves lifers who, for whatever reason, don’t.”
So he moved to Oregon with his wife. They live on a 15-acre farm just north of Eugene with a couple of family members in a couple different houses. They grow food. They raise chickens. Rodgers works in the garden for an hour each morning. Then he walks into a studio up the road with no windows and produces music — for commercials, for documentaries, for feature films, and for his own projects.
“Figuring out how to navigate being a lifer as a musician is really interesting, and a lot of plays into how the culture responds to music and how the culture engages in music. Music is wallpaper these days. It’s everywhere, you can hear it anywhere. It’s definitely not a commodity that is scarce. So, the question is, are you going to make something that is still valuable even if it’s not scarce?”
“If you’re in high school … and your guidance counselor says, ‘music is going to be a tough road for you,’ they’re actually right about that. But if you feel like you need to do it, then you need to do it,” Rodgers said. “I knew when I was sixteen or seventeen that that’s what I needed to do, and if that’s what you know about yourself, then that’s what you know.”
Cindertalk plays the Ballroom at the Outer Space in Hamden on Saturday, in support of a new album. Click here for more information.
Click on the above sound file to hear the entire WNHH interview with Rodgers.
great article!
thanks so much brian!
lovely to put some flesh on the bones of this sibling story
always a delight to see and hear either or both of these musical brothers!