Roger Powell -

Roger Powell is an American keyboardist who released the 1973 electronic album Cosmic Furnace on Atlantic. In 1975, he joined Todd Rundgren in the second Utopia lineup for a ten-album run. His second solo album, Air Pocket, appeared in 1980 on the band’s Bearsville label.

Background

Roger Powell was born March 14, 1949, in Front Royal, Virginia, in the Shenandoah Valley. His mother played Baptist hymns on piano, and his father collected Puccini opera records. Powell’s parents started him on piano lessons in the 1950s and bought him a piano in third grade. They added a tape recorder the next year, which Powell used to record parts for playback and improvisation.

Powell studied piano at the Shenandoah Conservatory in high school and read harmony and orchestration books. He spent two high-school years as a radio disc jockey and gained regular access to station tape machines and promotional LPs. Powell entered the College of William and Mary with an interest in drama and voice, then left four weeks into the term for an AM-FM radio position in Richmond.

He used five or six tape recorders and three or four turntables to build tape collages at the Richmond station. Powell next moved to Atlanta for a two-year position at a multitrack studio. He engineered the 1968 Joe South album Introspect at Kin-Tel Productions and Sound Studios. Powell also engineered the South single “Games People Play.” In the process, he mastered overdubs and tape-manipulation methods. Powell persuaded the Atlanta studio owner to buy an EMS VCS 3 in 1969 and spent four months with the synthesizer without a keyboard. Tonus employed Powell as an applications engineer by spring 1970 in the Boston area. Powell remained with the company under the ARP Instruments name.

ARP sent Powell and executive David Friend across the United States in a red Chevrolet van to demonstrate the ARP 2600 synthesizer. Powell met Joe Zawinul in 1971 at Boston’s Jazz Workshop and demonstrated the ARP 2600 synthesizer. Weather Report credited Powell as a consultant on their half-live second album I Sing the Body Electric. Powell gave his first concert performance that year in Venezuela with a thirty-minute ARP set as support for the New York Rock Ensemble.

ARP issued a 1972 demonstration disc on which Powell narrated and played the 2600 and 2500 synthesizers. Powell began solo album sessions at Boston’s Intermedia Sound in 1972 with producer Dave Baker. Atlantic signed Powell in September 1972 through Jerry Wexler’s office. Powell recorded six pieces at Intermedia Sound with producers Dave Baker and Gunther Weil for Cosmic Furnace.

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