RFC 114 "Flash Photography Shirt" from Rudy Panucci on Vimeo.

This week we’re combining two of our regular PopCult features into one. Above, you see the latest episode of Radio Free Charleston, “Flash Photography Shirt.”  The wide-ranging music on this show comes from Andrea Anderson, The Dad Horse Experience, and Shayla Leftridge-Bonds.  Our animation is Frank Panucci’s very first animated film.  We also have some Super Fancy Dancing.

Host segments were shot on the grounds of the State Capitol, after we considered shooting at Yeager Airport without permission, then thought better of that idea. Evidently last Saturday was “Take Your Screaming Baby To The Capitol” day, and also over at Laidley Field they were having a special Mumble Incoherently Over The Public Adress System Tournament. So it was a bit of a challenging shoot.  But we did get our host segments recorded and the show was uploaded a mere eight hours after the hosting adventure.

The namesake shirt for this episode comes to us courtesy of the folks at Teefury.com.  “Flash Photography,” desinged by Joao Lauro Fonte.was only available for one day, a couple of months ago, but it was so clever I had to snag one to wear on RFC. As I’ve mentioned on previous shows, Teefury.com is a cool site where you can find unique shirts at a great price, with a new design every day–available for one day only.

Our first musical guest is Andrea Anderson, who worked double duty on this episode, and was rewarded by me getting the title of her song wrong.  Andrea contributes the music video for her song, “Baloney,” which I incorrectly guessed was called, “Hard Earned Pay.”  Andrea didn’t get back to me with the correct song title until the show was rendering, so I’m correcting the record here.

Andrea Sings “Baloney,” but I get the song title wrong

Andrea also tells me that she’s working on a new video, which we will bring you on a future show.  “Baloney” is a cool, upbeat tune, played solo on banjo, and recorded by Andrea herself.  Andrea has also been running sound at The Empty Glass, and was the person behind the mixing console for our second musical guest, The Dad Horse Experience. Andrea is also still a member of The ButtonFlies, who host the open mic at The Empty Glass every Monday night.

“Hurry up and finish! We wanna go to Camden Park!”

Up next in the show we have “The Adventures Of Evel Knievel,” the first-ever piece of animation by an eleven-year-old Frank Panucci, with music and sound effects added this year.  I can stil remember the day Frank filmed this, because he didn’t have any lights, and was shooting it on a windowsill in our bedroom by sunlight.  In fact, the process was holding up a family trip to Camden Park, so we were pretty grumpy about it until we saw the finished product a couple of weeks later–right before the home movies of our trip to Camden Park. We have a couple of other early works by Frank that we’ll be bringing you on future shows.

Next in the show we have the amazing act from Germany, The Dad Horse Experience. TDHE came through town recently with his fellow one-man-band, Slate Dump (seen on RFC  74). I want to thank Slate Dump for bringing this guy to town (you’ll see Slate Dump again very soon on RFC).

The Dad Horse Experience

I don’t quite know how to explain The Dad Horse Experience.  His music is sort of Country Gospel Punk with a strong German accent and a touch of electronics, courtesy of his foot-pedal MOOG bass organ.  He sounds like the love-child that would result from a four-way affair between Hasil Adkins, The Amazing Delores, Jimmy Swaggert and Dieter from “Sprockets.” He calls his music “Basement Gospel,” because it brings the Gospel messge into the dark and dingy basements where it’s most needed.

I recorded him on the trusy Kodak Zi8, so there’s only one angle (actually, every song this week was shot with just one camera), and the video doesn’t really do him justice, but you can get a taste of The Dad Horse Experience, performing his song, “Hole In My Soul.”

Shayl Leftridge-Bonds in the Charleston Light Opera Guild production of “Dreamgirls”

Our final musical guest this week is Shayla Leftridge-Bonds, backed by the Chalreston Light Opera Guild Orchestra, under the direction of John Marshall, performing “One Night Only” from the musical “Dreamgirls,” which you can see next weekend at the Charleston Civic Center Little Theater, Friday and Saturday at 7:30 PM, and Sunday afternoon at 2 PM.  You can see a longer preview of the show in this PopCult post.

That’s it for this week’s RFC.  I decided to post it on a Sunday just to see how it does this week. Let me know what you think of this experiment. We are still hard at work on our first movie, “Jazz From Hell,” and we’ll keep you posted on that here in PopCult and over at the Radio Free Charleston fan page at Facebook. If you’re on Facebook and want to keep up with the latest on our show, then “like” the page.  Fans even get exclusive videos and sometimes they get to see the show before anyone else.

The production notes are over. You may commence Super Fancy Dancing.