PopCult

Almost every Tuesday is NEW RFC DAY on The AIR  and today is epic and legendary because once again we bring you a brand-new, three-hour episode of Radio Free Charleston to tickle even the finest of your fancies.  And if that seems familiar, it’s because I’m recycling the intro from two weeks ago because I’m slacking off for my birthday week. To listen to The AIR, you simply have to point your cursor over and tune in at the website, or you could just stay here, and  listen to the cool embedded player found elsewhere on this page.  

You can hear Radio Free Charleston Tuesdays at 10 AM and 10 PM, with boatloads of replays throughout the week.

Radio Free Charleston brings you a new show with THREE FULL HOURS of newly-assembled free-format radio.  I didn’t shirk my duties when it comes to making the show. I’m just slacking off with writing this post. We have a bumper crop of new music by local, independent and cult artists, with some nice material from the vaults as well.

We open with a brand-new tune from Sierra ferrell, and pack the show with new tunes from Todd Burge & Larry Groce, Reserver, Vinto Van Go, Bootsy Collins & Buckethead, The Anchoress, Gary Myrick, Robyn Hitchcock, William Matheny, Jeff Ellis, Hardy Mums, Minor Swing and more.

For the last couple of weeks I’ve been telling you about Spark of Life, a cool touring band that will be performing at The Empty Glass Wednesday of this week.  We bring you another tune from them this week (with special guest, Fred Armisen) and we also bring you a song from one of their support acts, Common Ground 304.

Check out this playlist, with links to the artist’s page where possible…

RFC V5 281

hour one
Sierra Ferrell “Trying to Love You”
Todd Burge & Larry Groce “Mighty Trees (Demo)”
Reserver “Spirit Fauna”
Thee Leviathans “One Step Beyond The Sea”
Vinto Van Go “Sometimes, Maybe”
Bootsy Collins & Buckethead “Self Replicate”
Spark of Life with Fred Armisen “Never Say Never”
John Radcliff & Bobby Miller “Body”
The Anchoress “Hand To The Tide”
Stitch Jones and his Bionic Marines “Guido Was A Mob Boss”
Gary Myrick “Honk If You Love Jesus”
Corduroy Brown “Doin’ My Best (live)”
Robyn Hitchcock “Building From The Ruins”
Jim Lange “Roger Zero G (And I Feel Fine)

hour two
Common Ground 304 “To Live And Die In West By God Virginia”
best dressed ghost “Heather- I Hardly Know Her (Mouth x5)”
Guy Parker, Dirt Reynolds, Mark Shambles, Sea Monster, Steve Sleaze “Chevy Mandango”
Stiff Little Fingers “Johnny Was (live)”
The Holler Hounds “Cry Revolution”
Hardy Mums “Muldoon”
Sasha Colette & The Magnolias “Sacred Place”
The Settlement “Snake Farm (live)”
Jack Bruce & Friends “Politician (live)”
Matt Berry Trio “Everything’s Peachy Part 12”

hour three
William Matheny “Lights Down for the Foxtrot”
Ringo Starr “Why”
Jeff Ellis “Weeping Willow”
Minor Swing “Sweet Georgia Brown”
The Charleston Rogues “Greenland Whale Fisheries”
The Bad Shepherds “No More Heroes”
The Stranglers “If Something’s Gonna Kill Me (It Might As Well Be Love) (Acoustic)”
Noise Structures “The Irenic Culfre”
John Carpenter “Inside Out”
YES “Outside The Box”
Nothing To Protect “Silver Moon”
The Residents “Feast”
David Synn “Regression”

You can hear this episode of Radio Free Charleston Tuesday at 10 AM and 10 PM on The AIR, with replays Wednesday at 9 AM,  Thursday at 2 PM, Friday at 9 AM, Saturday at Noon and Midnight, Sunday at 8 PM and  Monday at 11 AM, exclusively on The AIR. Now you can also hear a different classic episode of RFC every weekday at 5 PM, and we bring you a marathon all night long Saturday night/Sunday morning.

I’m also going to  embed a low-fi, mono version of this show right in this post, right here so you can listen on demand.

After RFC, stick around for encores of last week’s episodes of  MIRRORBALL at 1 PM and Curtain Call at 2 PM.

At 3 PM get ready for two recent episodes of The Swing Shift.

 You can hear The Swing Shift Tuesday at 3 PM, with replays Wednesday at 8 AM, Thursday at 9 AM,  Friday at 10 AM and 8 PM and Saturday afternoon, only on The AIR . You can also hear all-night marathons, seven hours each, starting at Midnight Thursdays and Sundays.

One thing I’ve always seen as a great weakness of mine when I’m trying to do something realistic is the sky.  However, I feel I’m even worse at painting water.

We are still using photos I took on our way back from Chicago recently as reference for this larger watercolor.  Like the last two weeks, it’s based on our slow meander through the South Side of Chicago, during what is normally a brief part of the trip where Amtrak’s Cardinal rides on an elevated track.

Most of the time, this passes in mere minutes, but due to mechanical issues, it took us about an hour to travel the relatively short distance.

It’s turned out to be a goldmine of inspiration for me, artistically.

This week, using a photo I snapped while going over a bridge, we have what Terry Gilliam would call, ” a bunch of water.”  To be precise, it’s a nice, rippling body of water, calm except for being stirred by a warm summer breeze.

And for what is probably the first time, I am happy with my painting of it, so I’m inflicting it on you. I decided to try to make it a little more interesting by suggesting…something…below the surface. I’ll leave that to you to figure out. I also left out a lot of detail on the shore, since it was pretty cluttered.

If you want to see this image larger click HERE.

Meanwhile, over in radioland, Monday beginning at 2 PM on The AIR,  we bring you a classic episode of Psychedelic Shack, and then at 3 PM we do the same with an encore of a more recent episode of Herman Linte’s weekly showcase of the Progressive Rock of the past half-century, Prognosis.

You can listen to The AIR at the website, or on the embedded radio player elsewhere on this page. Psychedelic Shack can be heard every Monday at 2 PM, with replays Tuesday at 9 AM, Wednesday at 10 PM, Friday at 1 PM,  and Saturday at 9 AM. You can hear Prognosis on The AIR Monday at 3 PM, with replays Tuesday at 7 AM, Wednesday at 8 PM, Thursday at Noon, and Saturday at 10 AM.

Tonight at 8 PM, tune in for a classic edition of The Comedy Vault. That’s followed by two-hour blocks of Curtain Call and Beatles Blast at 9 PM and 11 PM, and then an overnight assortment of our Haversham Recording Institute programs at 1 AM.

Fifteen years ago this weekend in this feature, I brought you nine weird shot films. In the ensuing decade-and-a-half, the coding changed, and these videos all disappeared from the original post. Since your humble blogger is still wiped out after three days exterminating bugs on this site, I’m going to drop a restored version here, as much as possible. Four of the videos are no longer online.  Here’s how the original post went…

Here are weird short films.  I’m not talking about pants here. This week we’re bringing you some short, weird little films, designed to amuse and astound you.  Well, amuse, at least.

First up, Archie McPhee discovered that the group, Gorillaz, sampled their yodeling pickle without credit.  They decided to resample it from the record, and use it for a commercial for their new masks.

And there’s always this…

You can’t go wrong with a farting robot…

Harold Camping in action….

Finally, just what we all need…BUTT DRUGS!

This week we go back to our coverage of FestivALL 2014 in RFC 199, from June of that year. Radio Free Charleston looked at FestivALL with music from Todd Burge, The Bark O Loungers, QiET and The Company Stores, plus dance from Susan Angela Hughart and The Trillium Performance Arts Collective. Sprinkled throughout are many sights and sounds of FestivALL.

The show also includes a brief look back at an IWA East Coast wrestling show, held at Skateland in Campbell’s Creek. That’s also where we got the limited-edition Mad Man Pondo Birthday Shirt, which gives this show its title.

Following the FestivALL format established in previous years,  this show is a stream-of-conciousness collection of music and art. Along the way you’ll see The River Queen Sternwheeler, Jude Binder, The stilt-walkers, Ian Bode’s painting, the horse-drawn carriage, Apartment Earth’s “Pop Goes The Weasel” show, the FestivALL Catfish and more.

This is also a show that didn’t really render cleanly due to computer issues at PopCult.

Some things never change.

The PopCulteer
August 7, 2026

This week’s PopCulteer is just a post to let you know that our blogging schedule has been disrupted by technical issues with our hosting company and WordPress.

So there’s not much to talk about here because I don’t know if anybody will be able to read it anyway. I’m going to reuse old graphics and just try to crank this out and get it scheduled during those fleeting moments when everything is operational.

It sorta sucks extra hard because PopCult has an enormous amount of momentum right now. Readership of the blog more than doubled last year, and so far this year we’ve already more than tripled last year’s total.

And that’s not just AI bots scraping this blog for content. I can see when they do that, and it’s not more than two or three a day, at most.

For some reason, more people are reading PopCult than ever before.. I’m talking way more than when we were part of The Charleston Gazette, and this increase has come in spite of the fact that Facebook has dramatically scaled back how much we can count on them for promoting PopCult via links.

I guess writing a blog for damned near 21 years eventually garners a bit of a following. The reason this is so annoying to me is that, since August, 2013, I have not missed a single day of blogging. There are two posts missing that I had to take down because a crooked Canadian millionaire threatened me and The Gazette with a very expensive frivolous lawsuit, but aside from that and one other day missed due to a technical issue a decade ago, PopCult has been an every-day blog for more than two-thirds of our existence.

Also…and I hope this is still true after they fix this latest glitch, PopCult‘s comments are now working again, after not working for a bit more than a year. So if you want to leave a comment on this blog now, you won’t get rejected.

This is about all I trust the WordPress interface to swallow at the moment, so I will wrap it up here. Check back for fresh content every day…when we are actually up and running…and with any luck we’ll have all our regular features.

And…don’t forget, today is BANDCAMP FRIDAY!

PopCult was beset by technical issues Wednesday evening, and I had to work on that, rather than prepare the post I had planned for today. So, in place of that, here’s a flash back to what happened in PopCult 20 years ago, tomorrow. It’s the production notes for Episode Three of the Radio Free Charleston video program, which you can see at the head of this post…

Radio Free Charleston Production Diary: Episode Three

The third episode of Radio Free Charleston is finished, and may be posted later this afternoon (actually above, for those of you in 2026). This is a bit of a departure show for us. First of all, my host segments were shot against a green screen. I’ll tell you more about that later. We also feature our first music video by a local band, and the first chapter of “Pentagram Flowerbox,” a recurring cartoon by Third Mind Incarnation about Satan living in a trailer park.

We have a wonderful musical guest, Eduardo Canelon, who ran off to host a music camp before we had a chance to find out what the piece of music he performed was called. Evidently, this music camp is being held somewhere with no cell phone coverage. I’ll update you on Eduardo’s music as soon as he gets back. He’s the mastermind behind Latin Music WV and we’ll be telling you more about that in PopCult in the coming weeks. Eduardo is also the leader of Comparsa, an eight-piece Latin band that will appear on a future episode of RFC. He treats us to a very cool, laid-back Spanish number, performed on the Radio Free Charleston studio fire escape.

Our other musical guest is Three Bodies–no mean feat, since they haven’t performed together in over fifteen years. “Shingles And Tar” is a vintage music video, which was hastily assembled in the summer of 1990, the day before it was due to be shown at a film festival. I got a call from Brian Young, and headed down to an editing bay at West Virginia State College with a handful of tapes of stock footage. We combined the stock footage with a short film Brian had made starring Kris Cormandy, the lead singer of Three Bodies, and wound up with a decent little music video. As the night wore on, and the deadline loomed, we slacked off and ended the video with what may be a world record for the most nuclear explosions ever used in a rock music video.

For reasons of copyright and ox-mistreatment, this video was re-edited last Friday. Brian hasn’t seen this version as I write this. Hope he’s not mad. Since we were dealing with fifteen-year-old videotape, and a short production window for RFC, there is one glitch in the show. At the very beginning of “Shingles And Tar”, the audio is a little warbly. You can find an MP3 of the song here, which is all clean and neat and warble-free.

We wrap up the show with a public service announcement of great importance.

After we finished the show, we noticed that an unintentional theme had emerged. The show seems to be a bit hot. Perhaps subconsciously influenced by the record heat we’ve had in the valley of late, this episode of Radio Free Charleston has a recurring flame motif. In fact, the heat is the reason we used a green screen, instead of shooting on location. We actually shot the host segments twice. The first time, we had audio problems that were insurmountable. This was actually a good thing, because I was experimenting with my “look” for the show, and the particular combination of facial hair and old fedora that I tried for the first shoot imbued me with a look not unlike that of a fat Jed Clampett.

So we rescheduled the host segments for two days later. When faced with the prospect then of shooting on a rooftop in 104 degree weather at two in the afternoon, my resistance to the idea of using the green screen melted away, and we absconded to the secret RFC studio. I prefer shooting on location, but I think the show looks all right this time. In many ways, this is our hottest show yet! We’ve got fiery Latin balladeering, a neighbor from Hell, lots of nuclear explosions, and an oppressive heat which we defiantly flip off by shooting in an air-conditioned studio. Watch for episode three of Radio Free Charleston later today at the Gazz TV page (or above).
****

Apologies for the unplanned Flashback episode. There was some kind of glitch between WordPress and my hosting service, and as a result, not only was PopCult down for most of the last 15 or so hours, I couldn’t get in to update it with a new post. I was able to find my way in long enough to snatch this post from the archives, and I wrote the new intro and outro (and a couple of parenthetical asides) while offline.

I’m hoping to get this post going live today, and I hope that PopCult becomes stable for more than five minutes at a time. The giant photo essay of stuff from Kentuckiana will be delayed until things get stable with the blog. Thanks for sticking with us.

STUFF TO DO is PopCult‘s weekly guide to just a few of the great events happening in Charleston, Huntington and a few other points here in West Virginia, and sometimes a little beyond our borders, in the coming days.

This week’s featured event is a show Thursday night at Folklore Music Exchange that I hope to attend…

Each week I try to tell you about a few cool events all around the state that you might not know about.  If you have a show that you’d like to plug in the future you can still contact me via Social Media at Facebook, BlueSky, Spoutible, Instagram or Twitter.  I dont charge for this, so you might as well send me something if you have an event to promote.

I do ask that you send a graphic that includes the date, time and location, of the event, as well as the cost to attend.  I can’t promise that I’ll run it here,  but chances are I will unless it’s something completely offensive or an event happening in South Carolina. If it looks original and charmingly weird, you have a better chance of seeing it here.

Keep in mind that I’ll need this several days in advance, so please don’t send me a graphic on the day of the event and expect it to show up in this feature.

For much more comprehensive guides to things you can get into in our region, check out these two wonderful resources:

Cristen Michael has created an interactive calendar that is way more comprehensive than this list of STUFF TO DO, and you can find it HERE. Just click on the day and the event and you’ll be whisked away to a page with more details about loads of area events.

Mya Ross at Status Quo does a much better job of compiling a list of local events than I do, and you can find the WTSQ guide to events HERE. Toss ’em a donation while you’re over there.

You can find live music in and around town every night of the week. You just have to know where to look.  Keep in mind that all shows are subject to change or be cancelled at the last minute.

Among the notable music venues in town are The World Famous Empty Glass Cafe, Live at The Shop in Dunbar, Louie’s, at Mardi Gras Casino & Resort, In Huntington, there’s local institution, The Loud (formerly The V Club),  The Wandering Wind Meadery is on Charleston’s West Side, Plus there’s music in Charleston at The Blue Parrot, Sam’s Uptown Cafe and Fife Street Brewing. Plus there are free concerts almost every weekend at Taylor Books.

You might also find cool musical events at Folklore Music Exchange in Charleston.

To hear music in an alcohol-free enviroment, see what’s happening at Pumzi’s, on Charleston’s West Side.

For cutting-edge independent art films, downstairs from Taylor Books you’ll find the Floralee Hark Cohen Cinema by WVIFF. Each week they program several amazing movies in their intimate viewing room that you aren’t likely to see anywhere else.

Please remember that viral illnesses are still a going concern and many people who have very good reasons are still wearing masks, and many of us, understandably, are still nervous about being in crowds, masked or not. Be kind and understanding  while you’re out. And if you’re at an outdoor event, please remember that it’s awfully inconsiderate to smoke or vape around people who become ill when exposed to that stuff. If somebody asks you to refrain, please respect their weishes and don’t be a jerk about it.

Here’s a few select suggestions for STUFF TO DO in and around Charleston and Huntington this weekend…

Continue reading

You can hear Radio Free Charleston Tuesdays at 10 AM and 10 PM, with boatloads of replays throughout the week.

 This week we open with a full hour of brand-new local, independent and cult-following music, and that is followed by a rare episode of Radio Free Charleston International that hasn’t been heard since late 2016.  This time there were no major tragedies or inconveniences, your humble blogger and radio host just needed a slow week after a very busy summer.

As promised last week, we open our show with a killer new track from Nashville’s Saycouth, who come to use via the Chicago pipeline. I think Google Maps is involved in that, somehow. This is their new single, and it will be released this Friday, which just happens to be Bandcamp Friday, the day when you can buy music and stuff at Bandcamp, and they allow the musicians to keep the Bandcamp cut of the proceeds.  It’s a great deal for everybody involved, so be sure to spend some time shopping at Bandcamp as the work week ends.

The next song in our show is the latest from our old friend, David Synn.  David is working on a great new Prog album, but life has thrown him a curve ball recently.  His wife, Johnni, has suffered a traumatic brain injury and will need surgery in order to regain a normal life. A GoFundMe Page has been set up to help the family cover expenses and stay together as she undergoes medical treatments in Morgantown. Please check out the page and consider donating.

The rest of our first hour features new music from Noise Structures, Vinto Van Go, Gary Myrick, Hardy Mums, Corduroy Brown, Stitch Jones and His Bionic Marines and Robyn Hitchcock, along with a flurry of great recent tracks from local and indie talent, and a preview of a show at The Empty Glass, happening next week.

Our second and third hours bring you an episode of RFC International that hasn’t been available in any form since late 2016.  This show is loaded with great music that flows smoothly, even though it has no right to.

Check out this playlist, with links to the artist’s page, in the first hour…

RFC V5 280

hour one
Saycouth “Where Do We Go”
David Synn “Bombs And Scarecrows”
Noise Structures “Not Of Oneself”
Vinto Van Go “Recovery”
Gary Myrick “Havana”
Hardy Mums “Something New To Find”
Corduroy Brown “Hit Me Baby (One More Time)”
Spark of Life “Trying To Forget”
Common Ground 304 “We Ain’t In The Prisoner Takin’ Business”
Samuel S.C. “Get Red”
Green Day “Hitchin’ A Ride”
Payback’s A Bitch “Stupid Is As Stupid Does”
J. Marinelli “Cubby & The Argonauts”
Stitch Jones and His Bionic Marines “KaPow Gone”
Robyn Hichcock “My Dead Astronaut”

hour two
Green Day “Revolution Radio”
The Pixies “Um Chagga Lagga”
The Monkees “The Porpoise Song”
Kansas “Summer”
Macy Gray “Redemption Song”
The Sword “High Country (acoustic)”
Vangelis “Mission Accomplished”
Regina Spektor “Older and Taller”
Manfred Mann “I Put A Spell On You”
The Isley Borthers “Shout”
Freddie Mercury “The Great Pretender”
John Lennon “Stand By Me”
The Who “Batman”
Marillion “Living In Fear”
Frank Zappa “Cosmic Debris”

hour three
Elvis Costello “…and in every home”
No Doubt “Open The Gate”
Sting “I Can’t Stop Thinking About You”
The Screaming Jets “Cash In Your Ticket”
Miss Behaviour “Savage Heart”
Neil Young “We R In Control”
Starpilot “Blazor”
Mi Sex “Computer Games”
New Order “Bizarre Love Triangle”
M “Doubletalk”
Kate Bush “Pull Out The Pin”
Peter Gabriel “Intruder”
Adrian Belew “Standing In The Shadows”

You can hear this episode of Radio Free Charleston Tuesday at 10 AM and 10 PM on The AIR, with replays Wednesday at 9 AM,  Thursday at 2 PM, Friday at 9 AM, Saturday at Noon and Midnight, Sunday at 8 PM and  Monday at 11 AM, exclusively on The AIR. Now you can also hear a different classic episode of RFC every weekday at 5 PM, and we bring you a marathon all night long Saturday night/Sunday morning.

I’m also going to  embed a low-fi, mono version of this show right in this post, right here so you can listen on demand.

After RFC, stick around for encores of last week’s episodes of  MIRRORBALL at 1 PM and Curtain Call at 2 PM.

At 3 PM get ready for two classic episodes of The Swing Shift, featuring the best Swing Music from the last century!

 You can hear The Swing Shift Tuesday at 3 PM, with replays Wednesday at 8 AM, Thursday at 9 AM,  Friday at 10 AM and 8 PM and Saturday afternoon, only on The AIR . You can also hear all-night marathons, seven hours each, starting at Midnight Thursdays and Sundays.

We are back in Chicago for this week’s smallish watercolor.  Like last week, it’s based on our slow meander through the South Side of Chicago, during what is normally a brief part of the trip where Amtrak’s Cardinal rides on an elevated track.

Most of the time, this passes in mere minutes, but due to mechanical issues, it took us about an hour to travel the relatively short distance from Union Station, South, past the ballpark where the White Sox play.

So I was able to grab lots of photos of things that would normally pass us by too quickly to even notice.

This week it’s a picture of a building with a sign for a car wash that’s actually about a block away, our of our line of sight.  I liked the Hopperesque composition I was able to get the stark near-dusk shadows.  The painting itself is rather straight-forward, with no major omissions or additions. This is pretty much the way it looked. I may redo the sky at some point and paint out the streetlamp.

If you want to see this image larger click HERE.

Meanwhile, over in radioland, Monday beginning at 2 PM on The AIR,  we bring you a classic episode of Psychedelic Shack, and then at 3 PM we do the same with an encore of a more recent episode of Herman Linte’s weekly showcase of the Progressive Rock of the past half-century, Prognosis.

You can listen to The AIR at the website, or on the embedded radio player elsewhere on this page. Psychedelic Shack can be heard every Monday at 2 PM, with replays Tuesday at 9 AM, Wednesday at 10 PM, Friday at 1 PM,  and Saturday at 9 AM. You can hear Prognosis on The AIR Monday at 3 PM, with replays Tuesday at 7 AM, Wednesday at 8 PM, Thursday at Noon, and Saturday at 10 AM.

Tonight at 8 PM, tune in for a classic edition of The Comedy Vault. That’s followed by two-hour blocks of Curtain Call and Beatles Blast at 9 PM and 11 PM, and then an overnight assortment of our Haversham Recording Institute programs at 1 AM.

Your humble blogger is not planning on doing much this weekend besides sitting in front of the TV, watching big sweaty people hit each other.  It’s been very hectic lately, and I need some time to recharge.

To make life easier, this week in our video showcase, we are going to bring you five random videos that i produced for this blog over the years. Above you see my video from 2022, of a pedicab ride through NYC.

Right below, you see a video I made in 2009 that features Sierra Ferrel, with James Vernon Brown and Patrick Stephens on back up,  singing the Portishead song, “Glory Box.” After that, Patrick treats us to his own tune, “I Speak Spanish To God.” This was recorded at an open mic night at Sam’s Uptown Cafe in Charleston.

From there, we jump to a video I shot in 2013, featuring guitar legend, Neil Zaza, with Sean O’Bryan Smith, performing in Dave Robert’s living room in South Charleston…

After that, from the spring of 2022, it’s a video I shot from the window of the Amtrak Cardinal. We were passing the C&O Railway Heritage Center, and I got footage of the back end of the museum, including some of the rare and ancient cars they have in their railyard alongside the Amtrak tracks.

Finally, we have a PopCult instant video look at Shocka-Con 2013, including the infamous Twerking incident with The Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, plus music from Harrah, The Big Bad and The Renfields, and quick peeks of RJ Haddy, Daniel Boyd, Eliska Hahn, Danny Hicks, Eugene Clark, Eamon Hardiman, Pig Girl, Ghostbusters WV, Jeremy Ambler and cast members from The Walking Dead, a Dalek, The cast of Kanawha Players “Night of the Living Dead,” and more, all tighly-packed into one five and a half-minute clip. It’s a little bittersweet to see so many friends who are no longer with it, and it’s also hard to watch because of the video quality, but it’s still a fun reminder of how much fun ShockaCon used to be.