Radio Free Charleston Celebrates Christmas 2014 With a Stellar Line-up of Music and Animation

Your host, at Capitol Market

This is the Radio Free Charleston Christmas show for 2014. Hosted from Capitol Market, where they still have plenty of fresh trees for you procrastinators. This week we’re bringing you holiday music sung by lovely female voices. You will hear Melanie Larch accompanied by Mark Scarpelli, Marium Bria, Lady D-Doris Fields and The Laser Beams, plus we have an epic cartoon about the war on Christmas by Jacob Fertig. But before we jump into the music we bring you some incomprehensible words from Santa Claus.

Melanie Larch and Mark Scarpelli

First up we have my wife, Melanie Larch, with piano support from Mark Scarpelli, giving us her take on “Christmas Time Is Here,” which you may remember from A Charlie Brown Christmas. We recorded this song just last week at Mark’s house, and they nailed the song after just a couple of run-thoughs. This the third Christmas song we’ve had Melanie peform on the show, and we’ve featured numerous tunes from MARY: A Rock Opera, which Mark wrote with Dan Kehde.

The cool thing was that this song came together during a chance meeting when we ran into Mark at Target doing some Christmas shopping, and he agreed to play piano while Melanie sang. In this show you’ll hear the third take of the song. The first take, with unplanned accompaniment by Mark’s dog, Rocco, on squeak toy, may turn up as a bonus in a day or so.

Marium Bria at DigiSo

Next up we have a music video that was produced last year starring Marium Bria. Alex Morgado produced and Doug Maxwell directed and edited this video of Marium performing Jody Herndon’s song, “Naughty Christmas,” at DigiSo, and we are pleased to bring it to you as part of our Christmas show.

Death Train comes to Christmastown

Jake Fertig returns on the anniversary of his killer Christmas cartoon in last year’s RFC Christmas show, with Death Train, at literal depiction of the “War on Christmas.”

Lady D, performing at “An Old Fashioned Christmas and a Movie”

We have a very special treat next. In a performance recorded at Limelight Theatre’s “An Old Fashioned Christmas and a Movie,” Lady D, Doris Fields, took on the Donny Hathaway classic, “This Christmas,” and thanks to sound work by Dennis Strom and video work by Darren Johnson, we can bring it to you. Many thanks to Doris, Dennis and Darren for saying “yes” when we begged them to let us use this on the show.

The Laser beams

Playing us out, we’re reviving one of last year’s PopCult Christmas surprises. It’s The Laser Beams with “Up on the Rooftop.” We recorded this at one of the late, lamented “Rock N Roll Theater” shows at Kanawha Players Theater, and liked it enough to bring it to you twice. Of course, The Laser Beams, just a few months later, gave us our most-watch song of the year with their salute to WV Attorney General, Patrick Morrisey.

This is the final RFC of 2014. We’ve had a great year–we hit our 200th episode, kept our spin-off RFC MINI SHOW going and launched a streaming radio version of the show. Plus I got married! As we look back on another year that’s flown by too fast, with twelve full episodes of the show, thirty-five RFC MINI SHOWs and, so far, seven episodes of RFC for streaming radio at New Appalachian Radio and over 500 PopCult posts, we have to stop and thank our audience, because without you, there would be no point in doing all this work. Thanks, and Merry Christmas!