Month: May 2020 (Page 2 of 4)

This weekend you can tune in to  The AIR for a marathon of our flagship show, Radio Free Charleston. You can leap over and tune in at the website, or you could just stay on this page, and listen to this swell little embedded radio player…

Starting Friday at 9 AM, and running until midnight, Sunday, we will present every 2020 episode of the new three-hour version of the show, with a few of last year’s episodes of RFC and RFC International included to make sure there are no repeats during the first 60 hours of the marathon. After our Sunday night marathon of The Swing Shift, the RFC marathon will resume Monday morning at 7 AM, and run for an additional 24 hours.

This special event will let listeners spend the unofficial start of summer this weekend by listening to a great mix of local music with the best cool music in the world.

It will also let your PopCulteer attempt to relax a bit for a few days.

It kicks off Friday morning, with a replay of the final 2019 episodes of RFC and RFC International, before we combined them into one big weekly show. Then you can catch up with the new episodes of Radio Free Charleston Volume 5. Join us as we perfect the art of slacking off this weekend on The AIR.

Wednesday afternoon The AIR brings you a new episodes of Beatles Blast and Curtain Call that both continue series-within-a-series of shows that bring you rare Beatles recordings and pay tribute to the legendary composer/lyricist, Stephen Sondheim, in his 90th year, respectively. You know, just like last week. You can tune in at the website, or on this embedded radio player…

At 2 PM, your humble blogger returns with the seventeeth Beatles Blast that leads us closer to the conclusion of what has turned into a 20-part series, The Lost Beatles Project. This brings together bonus material from deluxe reissues of The Beatles’ group and solo albums and weaves them together in a flowing stream of consciousness mixtape that allows the listener to pretend to be a fly on the wall in the studio while the Fab Four make their magic.

After we conclude the Lost Beatles Project series in June, Beatles Blast will revert to it’s usual format, presenting The Beatles group and solo material mixed with cover tunes by other artists, music from related acts (like labelmates, offspring, or former collaborators) and songs that feature guest contributions from the boys.

Beatles Blast can be heard every Wednesday at 2 PM, with replays Thursday at 10 PM, Friday at noon, Saturday at 4 PM, Sunday at 5 PM and Tuesdays at 9 AM, exclusively on The AIR.

At 3 PM Mel Larch once again devotes the entire hour of Curtain Call to a musical tribute to Stephen Sondheim for his 90th year. This time she goes back to the 2010 PBS special, Sondheim: A Celebration at Carnegie Hall.

For this second of three parts of the Curtain Call Sondheim 90th birthday tribute, Mel presents highlights of this special, featuring performances by Jerry Hadley, Bernadette Peters, Victor Garber, Liza Minelli, Glenn Close, Patti Lupone, Bill Irwin, Betty Buckley and more.

Curtain Call can be heard on The AIR Wednesday at 3 PM, with replays Thursday at 8 AM and 9 PM, Friday at 10 AM and Saturday at 6 PM. An all-night marathon of Curtain Call episodes can be heard Wednesday nights, beginning at Midnight, and an additional marathon can be heard Sunday evenings from 6 PM to midnight.

Once again, we only offer up one new episode of our speciality music shows Tuesday on The AIR with a fresh edition of Psychedelic Shack. RFC is taking the week off because we’re planning a big marathon for this coming weekend, and your PopCulteer needed a week off.  Meanwhile, you may point your cursor over and tune in at the website, or you could just stay on this page, and  listen to this happy little embedded radio player…

I am planning a marathon of Radio Free Charleston this weekend on The AIR, and decided to take a week off from RFC and The Swing Shift this week. Today we’re going to bring you the final one-hour episode of RFC, plus the final two-hour RFC International at 10 AM and 10 PM, as we go back to the last week of 2019 for our last shows before we merged the two into what is now known as Radio Free Charleston Volume Five. We’ll tell you all about the marathon later in the week.

At 1 PM we’ll bring you an encore of MIRRORBALL, Mel Larch’s second Disco Special that premiered last Friday.

However, we do have a new edition of Psychedelic Shack from Nigel Pye today at 2 PM. Nigel returns with a new show that opens with an epic psychedelic/prog bizarro epic by Utopia.

Check out the playlist…

Psychedelic Shack 031

Todd Rundgren and Utopia “Singing And The Glass Guitar”
Spirit “Aren’t You Glad”
13th Floor Elevators “Fire Engine”
Donovan “Epistle To Dippy”
Iron Butterfly “In The Times of Our Lives”
Klaatu “Little Neutrino”
Janis Joplin “Piece Of My Heart”
Love “Live and Let Live”
Strawberry Alarm Clock “Strawberries Mean Love”
The Rutles “Nevertheless”

Psychedelic Shack alternates weeks with NOISE BRIGADE Tuesdays at 2 PM, with replays Wednesday at 11 AM and 10 PM, Thursday at 8 AM, Friday at Noon, Saturday at 8 AM, Sunday at 4 PM and Monday at 7 PM.

At 3 PM, The Swing Shift brings you three encore episodes. Our Swing showcase will return with new episodes next week. You can hear The Swing Shift Tuesday at 3 PM, with replays Wednesday at 7 AM and 6 PM, Thursday at 7 PM and Saturday at 5 PM, only on The AIR. You can also hear all-night marathons, seven hours each, starting at Midnight Thursday and Sunday evenings.

Our Monday art this week is a real-life, small-scale painting, based on a digital painting inspired by the trip your PopCulteer took to Chicago back in February, which seems like a lifetime ago now.

This is my depiction of the palm trees in The Crystal Garden at Chicago’s Navy Pier. It was sort of bizarre hanging out around palm trees in a giant glass atrium in freezing cold weather, but it inspired me to do a digital painting based on a composite of different photos. I posted that on Instagram almost three months ago, but this weekend revisited it and produced this version on a tiny canvas using a variety of different media, including oil pastel crayons, acrylic paints, water color markers and just a little Testor’s enamel.

After last week I was reluctant to put this in the scanner, so this is close-up photo of the finished piece, taken in the lightbox I usually use to photograph toys.

You can click the image if you want to see it bigger.

Meanwhile, over in radio-land, Monday on The AIR, our Monday Marathon runs from 7 AM to 3 PM , and brings you eight hours of Sydney’s Big Electric Cat, because Sydney Fileen’s New Wave Music showcase will be missing in action this week due to a Radio Free Charleston Memorial Day marathon. 3 PM sees an encore of a recent episode of Prognosis with Herman Linte.

You can listen to The AIR at the website, or on this embedded radio player…

Yesterday we lost comedy legend, Fred Willard, a master of improv, a first-class actor, and by all reports, one of the nicest guys in show business.  One indicator of how much people liked Willard was that this blog, which posted an episode of Fernwood 2 Nite about eleven and a half months ago, saw a surge as hundreds of people found us via Google to watch Fred Willard in all his glory.

I first saw Willard almost fifty years ago as part of the Ace Trucking Company, an improv group he co-founded, which appeared on variety shows like Flip Wilson’s program in the early 1970s.

It’s time for one more look at Willard’s work, with the little-seen Cinemax series History of White People in America, which also co-stars his Fernwood 2 Nite partner, Martin Mull, and several other comedy legends. That’s the second series of four episodes, combined into one mockumentary feature, posted up above. This series was written by Mull, directed by Harry Shearer, and co-starred Mary Kay Place and Edie McClurg alongside Willard.

Here’s to one of the nicest funny guys who ever existed.

RFC 99 "Porkchop shirt" from Rudy Panucci on Vimeo.

This week we go back ten years ago for the episode of Radio Free Charleston before our big 100th show.  Due to an encoding glitch, this video has been missing from PopCult for quite a long time.

Our 99th show was called “Porkchop Shirt,” in honor of Eamon Hardiman’s horror epic, which has sent gone on to become a cult classic, sold at Walmart and streamed on dozens of different online and Roku channels…sometimes even legally. We produced what was then an extra-long show, with music from Highway Jones, OVADA and HARRAH, plus a visit from IWA East Coast Heavyweight Champion contender, Chris Hero, a short film by Murfmeef and some really cute, but disgusting animation.

This was the first show where we used the Kodak Zi8 video camer, which was then-new, and is today obsolete, but it’s still our weapon of choice as we now have five and a half of them. (Don’t loan your cameras out to other people, kids)

It was also the first appearance of HARRAH as a band, although Lee Harrah had been part of the show since episode 19.

The promo for Chris Hero was shot for us by Bo Vance, and is notable because Chris spent years at WWE’s NXT brand (until just recently, in fact) as “Kassius Ohno,” and in this clip he challenges Roderick Strong, who is still a star in NXT, and name-checks other wrestlers he’d faced, like Billy Gunn, Jerry Lynn and current AEW champ, Jon Moxley.

All  in all, it’s a pretty solid show, loaded with great music and plenty of weird extras to help you pass the time. Original production notes are HERE.

The PopCulteer
May 15, 2020

It’s hard to believe that we’re almost halfway through May already.

We offer up our second edition of MIRRORBALL and a somber new episode of Sydney’s Big Electric Cat Friday afternoon on The AIR.

At 2 PM we present an AIR Music Special, the second edition of MIRRORBALL, hosted by Mel Larch. We follow that with a rememberance of David Greenfield, the keyboardist for The Stranglers on Sydney’s Big Electric Cat at 3 PM. You can hear these shows on The AIR website, or just click on this embedded radio player…

Your PopCulteer is trying to assemble some fun stuff to go along with VirtuALL FestivALL, and that is taking me away from the essayist’s chair this week, so we shall once again devote our weekly column of randomness to telling you about the new programming Friday afternoon on The AIR.

A couple of weeks ago I told you about a fateful car trip last summer when your PopCulteer and his wife were driving around Pennsylvania looking for toys and chocolate for our anniversary, we were passing the driving time by listening to the porn-nostalgia podcast, The Rialto Report. In particular, we were listening to a two-part podcast about porn-star turned Disco Queen, Andrea True.

This got Mel (Mrs. PopCulteer) talking about her love of Disco music of the late 1970s, and we came up with the idea of doing a Disco Music special for The AIR, with the idea that it might turn into a series if enough people like it. It turns out that enough people did like it, as it became the most-listened-to non RFC program on The AIR in its first airing.

As I mentioned before, MIRRORBALL is Mel’s baby. While I hated Disco during its peak, I have come to appreciate the production and the musicianship and actually like the best of it now, but Mel knows this stuff inside and out, so I just follow her lead while producing the program.

Here’s the playlist for episode two, so you can follow along at home…

MIRRORBALL 002

Amii Stewart “Knock On Wood”
KC and the Sunshine Band “I’m Your Boogie Man”
Rose Royce “Car Wash”
Sylvester “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)
Kool And The Gang “Ladies Night”
Donna Summer “Love To Love You Baby”
Disco Tex and the Sex-O-Lettes “Get Dancin'”
Candi Staton “Young Hearts Run Free”
Silver Connection “Fly Robin Fly”
Peter Brown “Dance With Me”
Patrice Rushen “Forget Me Nots”
Barry White “Can’t Get Enough Of Your Love Babe”

You can tune in at 2 PM and hear our second installment. Later today, it will go up in the Podcast section of The AIR website, so you can listen on demand. Let us know what you think. Mel would love to do more of these, and we plan to bring you more specials that focus on different types of music in the future. MIRRORBALL will also be replayed Saturday at 7 PM and 11 PM, Sunday at 11 AM and Tuesday at 1 PM. We’ll probably sneak in a few more airings during the week.

At 3 PM on Sydney’s Big Electric Cat, Sydney Fileen pays tribute to David Greenfield, the keyboardist and occasional vocalist for legendary punk band, The Stranglers.

Sydney was friends with the entire band back in her days in pirate radio and Greenfield’s death from Covid-19 on May 3 hit her pretty hard. She introduces the show, and then turns it over to his music for the remainder of the two-hour episode.

Sydney did not give us a full playlist, but I know that the show opens with “Golden Brown,” which was based on a harpsichord riff Greenfield came up with, and it includes songs that Greenfield sang lead on with The Stranglers, some of his more memorable keyboard lines with the band, and work he did outside the band with Celia and The Mutations, The Purple Helmets and in collaboration with The Stranglers’ bassist, J.J. Burnel.

The show concludes with “Waltzinblack,” his tour-de-force with the band.

Sydney’s Big Electric Cat is produced at Haversham Recording Institute in London, and can be heard every Friday at 3 PM, with replays Saturday afternoon, Tuesday at 7 AM, Wednesday at 8 PM and Thursday at Noon, exclusively on The AIR. You can also hear select episodes of Sydney’s Big Electric Cat as part of the overnight Haversham Recording Institute marathon that starts every Monday at 11 PM.

And that is it for this week’s PopCulteer. As always, check back for fresh content every day, including all our regular features.

Yesterday it was announced that FestivAll, the annual arts festival that turns Charleston into a work of art, will cancel all live, in-person events, but will release a schedule of virtual events that will take place during the same timeframe.

Maria Belcher, the Executive Director of FestivALL writes in the press announcement,

“We invite you to join us June 14-28th as our City Becomes a Work of Art and we look forward to sharing in these moments with you. The full schedule of this new “VirtuALL” experience will be available at the end of May, but until that time we encourage you to enjoy our weekly streaming suggestions that will fill your days with art, music, theater, and dance.

It is my sincerest hope that you and those close to you continue to stay safe and healthy during this time. On behalf of the entire FestivALL team, we thank you for your support amisdt so much uncertainty.

For more than 15 years, FestivALL has been synonymous with gathering with friends and family – at concert halls, parades, and street fairs. While we may not be celebrating in person this June, we will still be able to share in the feeling of FestivALL, together, and for many more years to come.”

You can keep checking the FestivALL website for the updated schedule as it comes together. PopCult and The AIR will unofficial join in during that time as we turn the blog into a virtual art exhibit and progam loads of local programming on our sister internet radio station. We’ll also keep you updated on the many virtual events happening in town that week.

This was a absolutely necessary move, and I’m glad to see sanity prevail as our city realizes that it is simply far too soon to safely stage any mass gathering. I also commend the organizers of Live On The Levee for calling off the 2020 season of this great outdoor concert series.

It’s bittersweet to see so many fun and exciting events being canceled this year, but the sacrifice is far outweighed by the safety factor. We can happily attend these events in 2021, and if we’re smart about it, more people will survive long enough to join us then.

There are forces in this country that want to hurry up and end the lockdown for a variety of nonsensical, wrong-headed, selfish and downright evil reasons. We need to resist stupidity and do what’s best for the country, which is to continue to stay home as much as possible to prevent the further spread of this disease.

It’s okay to feel bad about missing out on so many cool events, but you have to keep reminding yourself that your own personal jollies are not more important than the lives of other people.

My original plans for the weekend of June 18th involved a trip to Wheeling for the Marx Toy Convention, getting up early Saturday to head to Columbus for Record Store Day and MEGO Meet, and then meandering home through Ohio with stops at Menards and Meijer along the way. That is not going to happen. The Marx Toy Convention is canceled. MEGO Meet is indefinitely postponed. Record Store Day is tentatively rescheduled for three days over three months later this year.  None of the events I had planned for that weekend are going to happen. I’m okay with this because I know that it’s for the best.

Depending on how many waves of this virus we have to deal with, it could be three years before we can safely have toy or pop culture conventions on a large scale. The longer we keep the initial stay-at-home orders in place, the shorter that period will be. That’s why it’s so heartbreaking to watch the Covid-Lemmings rush to beaches and stores and gatherings way too soon. People are going to die because of this and it’s going to make this crisis last longer and cost more lives.

That’s why we need to be grateful when our leaders act like adults, and do what’s best, instead of encouraging the worst of human behavior.

I am considering publishing a book of the best of Monday Morning Art in conjunction with the virtual art exhibit happening in PopCult during VirtuALL FestivALL. I’ll keep you posted on that project if I can pull it off in time.

Wednesday afternoon The AIR brings you a new episodes of Beatles Blast and Curtain Call that both continue series-within-a-series of shows that bring you rare Beatles recordings and pay tribute to the legendary composer/lyricist, Stephen Sondheim, in his 90th year, respectively. You can tune in at the website, or on this embedded radio player…

At 2 PM, your humble blogger returns with the first of five episodes of Beatles Blast that will wrap up what has turned into a 20-part series, The Lost Beatles Project. This brings together bonus material from deluxe reissues of The Beatles group and solo albums and weaves them together in a flowing stream of consciousness mixtape that allows the listener to pretend to be a fly on the wall in the studio while the Fab Four make their magic.

After we conclude the Lost Beatles Project series in June, Beatles Blast will revert to it’s usual format, presenting The Beatles group and solo material mixed with cover tunes by other artists, music from related acts (like labelmates, offspring, or former collaborators) and songs that feature guest contributions from the boys.

Beatles Blast can be heard every Wednesday at 2 PM, with replays Thursday at 10 PM, Friday at noon, Saturday at 4 PM, Sunday at 5 PM and Tuesdays at 9 AM, exclusively on The AIR.

At 3 PM Mel Larch once again devotes the entire hour of Curtain Call to a musical tribute to Stephen Sondheim for his 90th year. This time she goes back ten years to an 80th birthday salute to the famed composer that was part of the BBC Proms series.

For this second of three parts of the Curtain Call Sondheim 90th birthday tribute, Mel presents a remarkable collection of West End legends who bring the songs of the master to life. You will hear Dame Judi Dench, Byrn Terful, Russell Beane and more, performing selections from…Frogs, Sunday in the Park with George, Sweeny Tood, A Little Night Music, A Funny Thing Happened on the way To the Forum and Company.

Curtain Call can be heard on The AIR Wednesday at 3 PM, with replays Thursday at 8 AM and 9 PM, Friday at 10 AM and Saturday at 6 PM. An all-night marathon of Curtain Call episodes can be heard Wednesday nights, beginning at Midnight, and an additional marathon can be heard Sunday evenings from 6 PM to midnight.

We offer up two new episodes of our speciality music shows Tuesday on The AIR with fresh editions of Radio Free Charleston and The Swing Shift. You can jump over and tune in at the website, or you could just stay on this page, and listen to this exquisite little embedded radio player…

Tune into this week’s Radio Free Charleston at 10 AM and 10 PM Tuesday for a how loaded with an eclectic mix of music–local and international–brand new and decades old–you can expect everything from punk to metal to ska to classic rock, melodic pop, experimental jazz and the blues.

We open with music from a new Charleston band, Jerks! who count former members of Miniature Giant among their line up. We also have the latest from Jay Parade and Mark Beckner Group, as well as a deep dive into the RFC local music archives, with a track recorded for our video show and several other classic local cuts. This is all mixed in with music from all over the world, including stuff by Paul McCartney, B.B. King, DEVO, Soul Asylum, Mungo Jerry, No Doubt and more.

We are about five months into my experiment of combining Radio Free Charleston and RFC International into one show, and I have to say, I’m loving the results. This is what I tried to do with the original broadcast incarnation of RFC back in 1989/90.  There’s just something really satisfying about taking local artists and showing that they can stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the coolest music that the world has to offer. I’m having so much fun with this format that I did all the announcing this week in one take. In the process I mangled one song title, so if you want to, you can try to figure out which one.

Check out this playlist…

RFCV5 017

hour one
Jerks! “You’re So Cool, Brewster”
Jay Parade “Jay Charade”
Rich Kids “Cheap Emotion”
Time And Distance “Little Disaster”
Cockney Rejects “Oi, Oi, Oi”
The Renfields “Ramones Zombie Massacre”
DEVO “Come Back Jonee”
Whitechapel District ‘How Heavy Is Thy Crown”
Stage Moms “California Cream”
Scorpions “We’ll Burn The Sky
John Lancaster “Liars”
Rush “Presto”
Sky “Toccota”
Danzig “Baby Let’s Play House”
Captain Catfeesh “They Hung Him On A Cross”

hour two
The Swell Fellas “Acid Tone”
Mark Beckner Group “The Beautiful Ones”
Paul McCartney & Wings “Letting Go”
Slade “I Don’t Mind”
Farnsworth “Erased”
Soul Asylum “Landmines”
Tom Rader “Angels”
Killing Joke “The Hum”
Scrap Iron Pickers “Junkyard Jesus”
J.G. Thirlwell and Simon Steensland “Catholic Deceit”

hour three
Green Day “Sugar Youth”
Payback’s A Bitch “Do You Wanna Go Out Tonight”
Blue Million “Don’t Leave”
Paul Callicoat “Trampled Flowers”
Mungo Jerry “You’ll Be Sorry”
Gary Moore & B.B. King “Oh, Pretty Woman”
Underdog Blues Revue “What You Say”
The Science Fair Explosion “Kornchipz”
69 Fingers “Average Joe”
The English Beat “Rough Rider”
Goldfinger “99 Red Balloons”
Madness “Night Boat To Cairo”
No Doubt “Snakes”

Radio Free Charleston can be heard Tuesday at 10 AM and 10 PM, with replays Thursday at 2 PM, Friday at 9 AM and 7 PM, Saturday at 11 AM and Midnight, Sunday at 1 PM and the next Monday at 8 PM, exclusively on The AIR.

At 1 PM today, we’ll replay last week’s edition of Rudy & Mel’s Shut-in Show. 2 PM sees an encore of a great episode of Steven Allen Adams’ NOISE BRIGADE. Steven is still being held hostage by the governor’s daily Coronavirus briefings, but we’re hoping he’ll return with new shows soon.

We have a new episode of The Swing Shift at 3 PM Tuesday. It’s a special episode that brings you Wynton Marselis and the Jazz From Lincoln Center Orchestra with their new release, The Fifities: A Prism, a celebration of Swing and Jazz as it evolved in the middle of the last century.  This is a stunning follow-up to last year’s Swing Symphony.

You can hear The Swing Shift Tuesday at 3 PM, with replays Wednesday at 7 AM and 6 PM, Thursday at 7 PM and Saturday at 5 PM, only on The AIR. You can also hear all-night marathons, seven hours each, starting at Midnight Thursday and Sunday evenings.