Last December Radio Free Charleston lost a family member. Brian Young passed away suddenly, and it was a severe shock to everyone who knew him. That’s our tribute show to him you see above this text.
I actually promised to deliver this show back in January, but I kept putting it off. I knew it had to be the next video edition of RFC, but editing and producing this show made Brian’s passing too real, and I kept finding reasons not to do it yet.
Friday there will be a celebration of Brian’s life, from 6:30 PM to 9:30 at Short Story Brewery on Summers Street. Brian’s most recent band, the New Old Souls, will perform, and all of the people who loved Brian are welcome to attend.
This episode of our show includes a montage of Brian’s work with improv comedy and animation. With both, you’ll see and hear him in front of, and behind the camera. We have Brian animating short bits that we came up with, and you’ll see part of a piece of animation by his friend, Stephen Beckner, where Brian was rotoscoped. You’ll also see him hamming it up on a couple of our Halloween episodes and as an off-camera voice.
Whistlepunk at Livemix
We also have a long montage of Brian’s virtuoso drumming with several area bands, Three Bodies, Mother Nang, Whistlepunk, Electro Biscuit and even in a jam session where Brian and his brother, Alan, teamed up with Stephen Beckner, Mark Beckner and Kai Haynes to run through an old Go Van Gogh song.
We also get see Brian introduce a Whistlepunk tune, and a rare video of Brian, beaming from behind his drum kit, as his then-12-year-old daughter, Cadance, joined the band to do a Pixies tune at a Halloween show, nineteen years ago.
I’m going to recycle some of what I’ve written about Brian before here…
Brian was one of my best friends, but we weren’t attached at the hip. We were the kind of friends who could go months or years without seeing each other, and then instantly pick up where we left off when we reconnected.
Brian was a genius drummer, a technical wiz with video and communications technology and he was one of the funniest people I ever met. In the 36 years we knew each other, I can’t think of a single disagreement we’d had. Aside from being hilarious and fun to be around, Brian was also the most competent and reliable person I’ve ever known. You could always count on him.
Brian is also one of the “RFC Big Shots” listed at the end of every video edition of Radio Free Charleston.
I met him at The Charleston Playhouse in 1989, the night I’d been invited there by Johnny Rock. We hit it off, and I hired him to work part time at WVNS, where I hosted the evening show every night, plus the original broadcast radio incarnation of Radio Free Charleston.
It was there that we’d improvise comedy bits for the show and began collaborating on other projects. In the ensuing years he’d call me in to run camera on some of his projects, I wound up co-producing demos for his band, Three Bodies, and we became very close friends.
Mother Nang
In the early 90s Brian contracted an illness that had him hospitalized for quite some time. He pulled through, but was on medication that impaired his health a bit. Around the same time my parents started having various health issues, and I wound up withdrawing from most of my social circles to act as their caregiver.
Brian and his daughter, Cadance, at a Halloween show in 2007.
We’d still touch base. He called me the day before his first marriage and we talked for about three hours, and agreed to stay in touch. However, life got in the way, and a decade passed before the fateful day in early 2006 that he called me again, and pitched the idea of reviving Radio Free Charleston as a video show, which would be produced at LiveMix Studio, his new business that he’d founded with Kai Haynes and Greg Wegmann. I’d been hearing about LiveMix, and this was just a few months after I began writing PopCult. We still kept up with each other’s work, and this was a perfect storm for us to collaborate again.
If Brian hadn’t called me, there would not have been any video episodes of RFC, and it’s doubtful that it would still be going as an internet radio show to this day. RFC is my greatest work, and if not for Brian, it would have been long forgotten, consigned to the memories of the folks who tuned in to it on broadcast radio in the middle of the night over 35 years ago.
I owe Brian so much, and the Charleston Music Scene owes him a huge debt.
Brian as part of a Zombie Kick Line
I would be remiss if I didn’t go back to Brian’s sense of humor. If he saw this he’d start mocking it and peppering it with high-pitched f-bombs while reading parts of it in goofy voices.
In some ways, Brian was my comedic soulmate. We could always crack each other up. It could be pure silliness, dark absurdity, clever wordplay, or just goofiness, but it was always funny.
And fun.
I hope this episode of Radio Free Charleston conveys some of that. Brian was one of the best people I’ve known in my life, and his death leaves a huge void.
I also want to explain what’s going on with the host segments.
Over twenty years ago Brian came up with a concept for a series of short videos. This was in the days when YouTube was just starting up, and videos were limited to ten minutes or less.
Brian’s idea was “Streetlight Theater.” He was struck by how bright some of the street lights in Charleston were, and thought it would be funny to have a camera set up, and then have random actors run under the light and perform a quick scene before scattering away.
A year or three ago I was trading messages with Brian and mentioned that I’d found the perfect street light to revive that idea. Right outside my house, just across the corner, for reasons I have not yet figured out, the city of Dunbar installed the brightest streetlight I’ve ever seen in a residential neighborhood. It’s so bright that we have to pull the curtains to watch TV. I don’t know if the city found a bulb from a set of stadium lights or what, but it’s so bright that thought it’d be hilarious to shoot host segments under it at 2 AM.
I forgot that I’m not as young as I once was, and with me on meds for MG, I’m fairly useless after 10 PM. I also forgot that Dunbar is actually the city that never sleeps. As I dragged my sleepy ass out to ad-lib these host segments, I could imagine Brian doubled over in laughter as more than ten cars, eight pedestrians and one guy on a bike with a loudspeaker just happened to have some reason to make their rway through our sleepy residential neighborhood in the middle of the night.
Dunbar, 2 AM, illuminated by a single very bright streetlight
On top of that, I chose my wardrobe for the show because I knew that if I dressed this way, Brian would take one look, and then bust out laughing.
And that’s why I was standing in front of my house at 2 AM wearing a clown shirt, trying to remember what the hell I was supposed to say while getting interrupted every thirty seconds by cars, pedestrians, barking dogs and sirens.
Seriously, New York and Chicago are quieter at 2 AM than Dunbar is.
And I think that would crack Brian up. And that, in turn, would crack me up.
While I miss Brian every time I think about RFC, every time I think of Brian I smile, and sometimes laugh. I hope this episode of the show conveys a little bit of what made Brian such a special person.
One last note: I have made the decision that, going forward, we will continue to bill Brian as an “RFC Big Shot” in the end credits. But we’ll do something special with his name, each time.
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