Roger is a self-taught musician who persuaded his father, also a musician, to get him a guitar so he could play the music of his early favorites like Roger Miller, The Everly Brothers, Johnny Rivers, Hank Williams and Bob Dylan. That was back in 1963. It was a great time to be playing guitar, because before too long, The Beatles, Dave Clark Five and Herman's Hermits had all appeared on TV. These British Invasion acts prompted Roger to join up with some other musically inclined boys from the neighborhood to form a band. While that particular group, like most bands he played with, did not stay together long, the hours spent together with other music geeks listening to records and pretty much everything on the radio dial opened Roger's ears to a wide range of musical styles. Roger's early love of roots country and folk was broadened by the influence of melodic pop, street corner group harmony, and classic 60s soul. The influences may be subliminal but they're definitely there in the tunes Roger writes and chooses to cover in live performances. As a college student at Penn State University, Roger performed as a solo acoustic act at coffeehouses and with his most successful band to date, The Jam Factory (around 1970). At college stations WHR, WDFM (later to be known as WPSU) and the commercial WQWK where he held a paying job, Roger built a reputation as a musically knowledgeable air personality and as producer/engineer for several programs that were syndicated to the American College Radio Network. A real career in radio was not to be — though he made a job search effort, the only offers came from small market stations that offered less than a subsistence wage. Realizing that it would be hard to make ends meet in a small town doing grave yard air shifts as well as production chores AND taking a second job on top of that to pay the rent, he returned to Philadelphia in early 1974 where he worked at several advertising agencies for the remainder of the 1970s.