PopCult

Wednesday afternoon, The AIR brings you new episodes of Curtain Call and Beatles Blast.  You can tune in at the website, or you could just stay right here and  listen to the convenient embedded radio player lurking elsewhere on this page.

At 2 PM (EDT) Beatles Blast brings you a mixtape with female vocalists tackling Beatles classics. Some are faithful covers, while others are drastic reinterpretations.

The idea for this show came to me after I discovered the incredible rendition of “Eleanor Rigby” that opens our show. Erin Hill is an acclaimed harpist/vocalist/actor who has a resume as long as your arm, on stage, screen (big and small) and with music. Plus she’s also a regular at DragonCon and is firmly enmeshed in the type of pop culture we cover in this blog.

She also has created a great music video that mimics some of the classic elements of the song that you see in The Yellow Submarine feature film.

It’s so good that I’m embedding it here…

Thus inspired, and realizing that I hadn’t put together a show with all female vocals before, I assembled the following playlist, featuring some incredible female voices singing some of the best Beatles tunes.  I include a couple of tracks sung by Tina Turner, since we’re paying tribute to her this week on Curtain Call, too.

This is a topic that I’m sure I’ll revisit in the future…

Beatles Blast 095

Erin Hill “Eleanor Rigby”
Tina Turner “Come Together”
My Brightest Diamond “Everybody’s Got Something To Hide”
Gwen Guthrie “Ticket To Ride”
Pretenders “Not A Second Time”
Lucy Kapalansky “I’ve Just Seen A Face”
Heather Nova “We Can Work It Out”
Sheryl Crow “Mother Nature’s Son”
Low “Nowhere Man”
Barbara Casini “Do You Want To Know A Secret”
The Carpenters “Can’t Buy Me Love”
The Runaways “Eight Days A Week”
Rita Lee “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds”
Michelle Shocked “Lovely Rita”
Martha & The Vandellas “Something”
Fancy “All My Loving”
Dawn Penn “Here Comes The Sun”
Tina Turner “Help”

Beatles Blast can be heard every Wednesday at 2 PM, with replays Thursday at 11 PM, Friday at 1 PM,  and Saturday afternoon.

At 3 PM (EDT) on Curtain Call, Mel Larch devotes her entire show to highlights of the London Cast Recording of Tina: The Tina Turner Musical.

Anna Mae Bullock passed away last month, but you may know her by her stage name, Tina Turner.

So legendary was her career and so remarkable her life that she inspired a musical. Tina: The Tina Turner Musical opened in London in 2018 and on Broadway the following year. This week, to pay tribute to one of the most powerful singers to ever walk the Earth, Curtain Call brings you highlights of the Original London Cast Recording of Tina: The Tina Turner Musical.

You’ll hear all her hits, performed in a loving tribute which Miss Turner whole-heartedly approved of.

Curtain Call can be heard on The AIR Wednesday at 3 PM, with replays Thursday at 8 AM, Friday at 10 AM, Saturday at 8 PM and Monday at 9 AM. A six-hour marathon of classic episodes can be heard Sunday evening starting at 6 PM, and an all-night marathon of Curtain Call episodes can be heard Wednesday nights, beginning at Midnight.

Also on The AIR, Wednesday at 11 PM,  The Comedy Vault once again presents a new episode that I  haven’t produced yet, so there’s no telling what it’ll have in it.  It’s the fun of discovery!

After our week-long marathon, Radio Free Charleston is back this week on The AIR  as we premiere an all-local and partly-new episode of Radio Free Charleston! 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 elsewhere on this page.

We’ve created another new/old hybrid for you this week that you can hear at 10 AM and 10 PM Tuesday. The first hour is filled with new, local music. Hours two and three bring you one of our two-hour all-local episodes of RFC Volume Four, from 2016. Yours truly had his production time truncated by a routine doctor’s appointment, so I was only able to do one new hour this week, and had to schedule encore episodes for The Swing Shift. 

We open with just-released music from William Matheny, the title track from his upcoming album. That’s followed by new tunes from Matt Mullins & The Bringdowns, Buni Muni, Jim Lange, Abandon The Ship, Golden and more.

For our second and third hours I went back and dug up an episode of Radio Free Charleston from 2016, back when The AIR was “Appalachian Independent Radio.” This show hasn’t been heard for over seven years, and I didn’t want to let it languish any longer. It’s loaded with some primo local and regional tracks from years ago. While RFC was supposed to be all-local back then, I stretched the rules to include anybody who had any ties to the Appalachian region, so just go with it.

Check out the playlist below to see all the goodies we have in store (live links will take you to the artist’s pages for the first hour of the show)…

RFC V5 133

hour one
William Matheny “Grand Old Feeling”
Matt Mullins & The Bringdowns “Homesick”
Jim Lange “Easter Sunday Affirmation”
Buni Muni “Heart So Cold”
The Heavy Hitters Band “Liquid Crunchy”
Overvue “Space Race”
Golden “Courtesy”
Abandon The Ship “Goodbye”
Verdeant “Don’t Tell Him”
Massing “Lemon Jose”
The MFB “Star 69”
Corduroy Brown “Survivor’s Guilt”
Law Biting Citizens “I Like You”
The Switch “Speak of the Devil”

hour two
The Laser Beams “The Ballad of Patrick Morrissey”
Under Surveillance “Modern World”
Strawfyssh “Netted Fish”
Trielement “Accidental Chaos”
Hybrid Soul Project “Stay”
Cherry Poppin’ Daddies “Ain’t That A Kick In the Head”
The Science Fair Explosion “Cosmic Girls”
69 Fingers “Average Joe”
The Renfields “Transylvania Fight Song”
Time and Distance “War”
Mother Nang “Peel”
Farnsworth “I’ll Tell You When I’ve Had Enough”
Joe Vallina “On TV”
Boulevard Avenue “Mary Mary”
Billie Vacation “Get Paid”

hour three
Go Van Gogh “Shut Up, I Love You”
Wolfgang Parker “The Father The Son”
Crack The Sky “Invaders From Mars”
Jeff Ellis “Capitol City”
Andy Park and the True Lovers “I Got Some Swag”
Crystal Bright and the Silver Hands “Adungo”
Government Cheese “Camping On Acid”
Snakebox “Dead Planet”
Blue Million “Down To A Groove”
Scooter Scudieri “Ancient Ritual”
Michael Cerveris “Atlas”
Super Heavy Duty “Here I Be”
Three Bodies “Gardens of Hope”

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,  and  Monday at 11 AM, exclusively on The AIR. Now you can also hear a different 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.

Then at 1 PM we have MIRRORBALL, followed at 2 PM by Curtain Call. At 3 PM two great recent episodes of The Swing Shift arrive.

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

I warned you all last Friday. A week ago your PopCulteer spent a few hours in Manhattan. I was in a hotel room with an amazing view, and I took tons of photos which will inspire the works you’ll see in this space for the next several weeks.

Today’s art is a study for larger painting sometime later. It’s a detailed look at some of the roofops we could see looking down from the 44th flour.  I used two different photos for reference (one taken in the afternoon, the other the next morning) and tried to employ some of the techniques I’ve learned by swiping from Edward Hopper.  Rather than imitate his composition, I veered more in the direction of the 1960s Batman TV show.

This was done in acrylics on heavy duty watercolor paper.  I’m very happy with the high-detail look, since I’m currently battling a heat-induced flare-up of Myasthenia Gravis. Some of the later works in this series are sure to be less realistic and perhaps more impressionistic.  My fingers weren’t happy trying to maintain this style. Luckily it’s a smaller piece. When I blow it up later for a big canvas, I’m gonna have to rest up and probably work on it in the Winter.

I was trying to capture a bit of the feel of the heat in the city, combined with the kind of rooftop landscape that you found a lot in Marvel Comics in the 1970s.

To see it bigger try clicking HERE.

Over in radioland, Monday at 2 PM on The AIR, we bring you a classic episode of Psychedelic Shack, and then at 3 PM a classic edition 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. You can hear two classic episodes of the show Sunday at 2 PM.

At 8 PM you can hear an hour of Polka-heavy musical funniness from Weird Al Yankovic on The Comedy Vault.

Tonight at 9 PM the Monday Marathon presents ten hours of mind-expanding joy, with a marathon of Nigel Pye’s Psychedelic Shack.

This week we bring you a bit more than 27 minutes of commercials broadcast on WCBS (in New York) in August, 1975. These are random and rather mundane. There are no cool toy commercials here, just stuff like insurance, deodorant, food and headache medicine. Some are funny. Some are quaint.

Many of these will punch big nostalgia buttons for people over the age of 50.

Mainly, they’re random…and they’re commercials.

From 1975.

So at least they may seem weird.

Radio Free Charleston‘s 28th video episode was “John Lennon Shirt,” our first attempt at a Beatles tribute, despite the fact that we could not then use cover songs on the show. It debuted on October 11, 2007 and hadn’t been widely available for a few years until I restored it last year.

Our music included “Hey John, I Did Imagine,” by Seven Minutes Til Mdnight and “Requiem For Pepperland” by Go Van Gogh. We also have Sir Paul speaking about cannibas, and the end credit audio is an excerpt from the original Radio Free Charleston radio show, with Rudy Panucci talking Beatles with Clownhole’s John Estep and Go Van Gogh’s Johnny Rock.

“Requiem for Pepperland” is an animated video that yours truly cranked out in four days. I know, it looks like I spent a whole week on it, but I was just learning how to use the computer at this point, so I get points for trying.

You can read the original production notes HERE.

The PopCulteer
June 2, 2023

Earlier this week your PopCulteer and his lovely wife took a little whirlwind trip to New York City. Our Mission was to see two-time Tony Award nominee and two-time Drama Desk winner Gavin Lee perform a cabaret/tribute to Fred Astaire at the legendary Jazz club, Birdland.

This whole trip was a bit of an experiment. We had learned from our trip to DC a couple of months ago that we really liked the way Alexandria, Virginia was laid out in terms of hotels being within walking distance of the train station.

The Amtrak Cardinal, which goes all the way into NYC, only runs three times a week, which can be rather limiting in terms of how we structure a trip. So this time we took the Cardinal as far as Alexandria on Sunday, spent a night at the Embassy Suites, then got up early Monday and hopped the Northeast Regional for a four-hour trip to the big city.

Once in New York, we got a cab to our hotel, The Hilton Times Square, settled in and tidied up for the short walk to Birdland.

The show was amazing. Gavin Lee captured the grace and elegance of Astaire, and sang so many standards from the Great American Songbook which were originally introduced by the legendary dancer. You can’t go wrong with the songs of Berlin, Gershwin or Porter, and the show was exquisite.

I would go into greater detail heaping praise on Lee, and his backing band, Brian Taylor on piano, Corey Schutzer on bass and Rich Rosenzweig on drums, but while I’m sure he will be doing this show many times in the future, there are no solid dates on the horizon. Lee is off to Chicagoland to star in a production of The 39 Steps.

I will tell you a bit more about his show in the captions below.

We had arrived at our hotel about 1 PM, saw the show at 7 PM, wandered around Times Square and picked up our breakfast for the morning and were back at the Hilton by 9 PM.

Then Tuesday morning, 19 hours after we’d hit Manhattan, we were on the train back to Alexandria, where we would cool our heels until it was time for the Cardinal to drag our happy asses back to Charleston on Wednesday.

This trip was also experimental because we travelled light. We each had one personal bag for meds and chargers and tablets and stuff, and then we shared one backpack. This is a far cry from our usually entourage of rolling luggage. It worked out pretty well, too.

Here’s the photo essay version of our trip…

Alexandria, a great place to change trains, especially since there are four Hilton properties that are a short walk from the train station, and Mrs. PopCulteer is a Hilton points wizard.

The street where our hotel in NYC is. It’s just to the right of the Dave & Busters you see in this pic.

Among the many advantages of being married to “Diamond Mel,” the wizardess of Hilton points, is being able to score a top-floor room with a panoramic view of the skyline, and getting it for chump change.

I mean, this is what you see when you walk into the room.

Continue reading

The Radio Free Charleston Pre-Summer Marathon is happening now on The AIR. To hear the final day of this epic, five-day RFC extravaganza you simply have to tune in at the website, or you could just stay on this page, and  listen to the cool embedded player that’s become a beloved part of this blog.

Due to a perfect storm of your PopCulteer taking a little trip, and the need to clear a few episodes of Radio Free Charleston off of the server to make room for new shows, we are taking five days to present forty episodes of Radio Free Charleston Volume Five, the latest internet radio version of our show, all in one huge programming block on The AIR.

After this marathon wraps up, these shows will go back in the vault for a couple of months, only to return when it’s time to drop them in place for their spot on the RFC Daily replay weekdays at 5 PM. When these shows come back, the first forty episodes will go away for a while and we will still have freed up enough room for 120 hours of top-notch radio here on The AIR. The Daily rebroadcasts of Radio Free Charleston will start over with our first three-hour episode next Monday.

Here is Friday’s line up of RFC V5 on The AIR, and links that will take you to a post that includes each episode’s full playlist.

7 AM:  RFC V5 Episode 73

10 AM: RFC V5 Episode 74

1 PM: RFC V5 Episode 75

4 PM: RFC V5 Episode 76

7 PM: RFC V5 Episode 77

10 PM: RFC V5 Episode 78

1 AM:  RFC V5 Episode 79

4 AM: RFC V5 Episode 80

The marathon wraps up today in PopCult, so please keep visiting us for our regular features. We have fresh posts every day, even when we go on a little trip.

Now that we’ve made it to June it’s time once again for your guide to things you can do in and around Charleston.  Symphony Sunday is this weekend, which explains the graphic you see at the right.

Over the summer there are many festivals all over the state, and your humble blogger will strive to tell you about them even though stuff that happens out of doors is not exactly in his wheelhouse and he has to dig to find info and graphics for such things.

Be advised that there are a lot of Pride Events happening all over this weekend, and I don’t have graphics for most of them. The East End Pride Pub Crawl gave me the cool graphic below, but it’s a bit vague on details.

Live Music is back at Taylor Books. There is no cover charge, and shows start at 7:30 PM. Friday it’s Ty McClanahan. Saturday Swingstein & Robin entertain the crowd at Charleston’s beloved Bookstore/Coffee Shop/Art Gallery.

The World Famous Empty Glass Cafe has some great stuff through the week to tell you about.  Thursday from 5:30 PM to 7:30 PM, Swingstein and Robin play fiddle and piano and sing swing and early jazz standards. Each week they donate their tips to a local nonprofit or worthy cause. Then, at 9 PM, Erik Vincent Huey, of The Surreal McCoys, takes the stage at The Glass.  Friday Tim Courts plays during happy hour.  Also Friday at 10 PM the Glass is the place for The East End Ghouls Drag/Burlesque Extravaganza.  Next week The Empty Glass has an open mic hosted by Eric Roberts on Monday night, and the legendary Spurgie Hankins Band on Tuesday.

Saturday at 9:30 PM, Thump Daddy performs at Sam’s Uptown Cafe.

Please remember that the pandemic is not over yet. It’s still a going concern. And now there are seasonal allergies, the flu and other ferocious bugs in the mix. 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.

If you’re up for going out, here are a few suggestions for the rest of this week, roughly in order.

Continue reading

The Radio Free Charleston Pre-Summer Marathon is happening now on The AIR. To hear this epic, five-day RFC extravaganza you simply have to tune in at the website, or you could just stay on this page, and  listen to the cool embedded player that’s become a beloved part of this blog.

Due to a perfect storm of your PopCulteer taking a little trip, and the need to clear a few episodes of Radio Free Charleston off of the server to make room for new shows, we are taking five days to present forty episodes of Radio Free Charleston Volume Five, the latest internet radio version of our show, all in one huge programming block on The AIR.

After this marathon wraps up, these shows will go back in the vault for a couple of months, only to return when it’s time to drop them in place for their spot on the RFC Daily replay weekdays at 5 PM. When these shows come back, the first forty episodes will go away for a while and we will still have freed up enough room for 120 hours of top-notch radio here on The AIR.

Here is Thursday’s line up of RFC V5 on The AIR, and links that will take you to a post that includes each episode’s full playlist.

7 AM:  RFC V5 Episode 65

10 AM: RFC V5 Episode 66

1 PM: RFC V5 Episode 67

4 PM: RFC V5 Episode 68

7 PM: RFC V5 Episode 69

10 PM: RFC V5 Episode 70

1 AM:  RFC V5 Episode 71

4 AM: RFC V5 Episode 72

We will post a reminder every day here in PopCult, along with our regular features, so you’ll have even more fresh content every day!

The Radio Free Charleston Pre-Summer Marathon is happening now on The AIR. To hear this epic, five-day RFC extravaganza you simply have to tune in at the website, or you could just stay on this page, and  listen to the cool embedded player that’s become a beloved part of this blog.

Due to a perfect storm of your PopCulteer taking a little trip, and the need to clear a few episodes of Radio Free Charleston off of the server to make room for new shows, we are taking five days to present forty episodes of Radio Free Charleston Volume Five, the latest internet radio version of our show, all in one huge programming block on The AIR.

After this marathon wraps up, these shows will go back in the vault for a couple of months, only to return when it’s time to drop them in place for their spot on the RFC Daily replay weekdays at 5 PM. When these shows come back, the first forty episodes will go away for a while and we will still have freed up enough room for 120 hours of top-notch radio here on The AIR.

Here is Wednesday’s line up of RFC V5 on The AIR, and links that will take you to a post that includes each episode’s full playlist.

7 AM:  RFC V5 Episode 57

10 AM: RFC V5 Episode 58

1 PM: RFC V5 Episode 59

4 PM: RFC V5 Episode 60

7 PM: RFC V5 Episode 61

10 PM: RFC V5 Episode 62

1 AM:  RFC V5 Episode 63

4 AM: RFC V5 Episode 64

We will post a reminder every day here in PopCult, along with our regular features, so you’ll have even more fresh content every day!