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My full name is Raymond Edward Powers, a Brooklyn-born 2nd-generation perfomer. Dad was a bass vocalist from the golden age of street performers; the Doo-Wop era, when it seemed every street corner had a fantastic 4 or 5-part a cappella vocal group creating magic with harmonies.
Live performance is literally in my blood, and when my piano teacher realized that I had perfect pitch at 6 years old, we knew that this is what I was meant to do.
I first toured the US at 15, playing keyboards in a Christian rock band, spent the next decade playing (sneaking) into nightclubs as a bassist in glam-rock bands and eventually earned an internship at Mad Hands Records, where I got my first shot at producing, session work and singing lead.
Having played with many legends and seeing much of the world, I'm blessed to still be doing what I love!
Back in 2006, when they were first casting for the brand-new 'America's Got Talent', I was on the audtion line in NYC, right on the street in Times Square. We whipped out the acoustic and rehearsed our audition song, and within two minutes, we had a huge crowd gathered around us, all singing and dancing. We even managed to stop traffic, as a cab driver was snapping photos and singing along.
By the time we got inside and auditioned, it proved anti-climactic. We soon realized that the judges were looking for us to present a gimmick in addition to singing and playing. We wound up being too straight for their liking, but after commanding an improptu audience on the busiest street on Earth...we were just fine with knowing we could flash-busk at will!
Easy.
Fall 1991, at the end of the commercialized glam-metal era.
My band was playing on the Lower East Side in front of a packed house.
I was much thinner than I am today (155 lbs. on a 6' frame).
We had just changed into our brand new stage clothes from Trash and Vaudeville.
The leather chaps I bought were a little roomy but they looked great.
All I had on under them was a micro-thin spandex pant.
The chaps fit just fine as I was standing in front of the mirror in the store.
I probably should have practiced running and jumping around the store, the way I was going to be doing so on stage.
I found out the hard way that they weren't going to stay on my waist as I did my stage thing. Thank God I had a bass in front of my 'belt buckle zone', as my roadie took his sweet time getting to me and getting me readjusted - making sure everyone in the crowd was aware that I was wearing my chaps around my ankles.
He couldn't look my way for the rest of the set without cracking up l
When I was 7 or 8, I got a small electronic organ for Christmas from the long-gone E.J. Korvette’s dept. store in Queens.
I was able to practice on it all week in between piano lessons, and it was instrumental (pun not intended, but I left it there!) in honing my composition skills.
I had it until I was like 11 or 12, and when we were about to leave my first-ever home, our six-room apartment in Brooklyn – it didn’t make the trip as it was pretty much fried. Some keys no longer worked, the internal speakers were shot and we decided to let it die in peace. I definitely made sure that we got our money’s worth out of it.
