PopCult

Above you see a new music video of Ann Magnuson’s “The Enchanted Forest,” taken from her Dream Girl album, and animated by Adam Dugas.

The Dream Girl album was made up largely of songs from Ann’s one-woman show, An Evening of SuRURALism™, which debuted during FestivAll in 2015, Ann explored the mysteries of dreams, what they mean, and the world in which they happen. I was proud to have contributed a couple of pieces of artwork to that show (thanks to Mark Wolfe) and was thrilled to see Ann’s dream-based creation.

It’s really cool to see Ann’s Dream Girl visions fleshed out further.

In case you don’t know already, Ann Magnuson is a writer/actress/singer/musician/performer whose eclectic resume traverses the entertainment landscape like few others. She has acted in Hollywood blockbusters, Off-Broadway plays, TV sitcoms and indie films, fronted various bands, written for numerous publications and has presented her original performance art pieces at several major museums.

The credits for the video:

“The Enchanted Forest” by Ann Magnuson [Official Music Video] from the LP Dream Girl
Written by Ann Magnuson Based on an actual dream Ann had.

VIDEO Shot, edited and prompted by Adam Dugas / Lookitnow AI images and footages created with Midjourney and RunwayML
Arzetta doll by Grandma Magnuson ©2024 Ann Magnuson

MUSIC All vocals by Ann Magnuson Organ and synth effect: Ann Magnuson and Mark Wheaton Percussion: Joe Berardi Recorded and engineered by Mark Wheaton at Catasonic ©℗2016 Ann Magnuson

This week we go back to May, 2010 for our 99th show, “Porkchop Shirt.”  This time we produced what was then an extra-long show, with music from Highway Jones, OVADA and HARRAH, plus a visit from IWA East Coast Heavyweight Champion contender, Chris Hero, a short film by Murfmeef and some really cute, but disgusting animation.

This was the first show where we used the Kodak Zi8 video camera, which was then-new, and is today obsolete, but it’s still our weapon of choice, at least for the time being.

It was also the first appearance of HARRAH as a band, although Lee Harrah had been part of the show since episode 19.

The promo for Chris Hero was shot for us by Bo Vance, and is notable because Chris later spent years at WWE’s NXT brand as “Kassius Ohno,” and in this clip he challenges Roderick Strong, who is now a star in AEW, where Hero is now working behind the scenes as a producer.

All  in all, it’s a pretty solid show, loaded with great music and plenty of weird extras to help you pass the time. Original production notes are HERE.

The PopCulteer
September 6, 2024

The clarion call to dance has gone out, so  Mel Larch returns with a brand-new MIRRORBALL! You can hear this and more cool music Friday on The AIR.

The AIR is PopCult‘s sister radio station. You can hear our shows on The AIR website, or just click on the embedded player found elsewhere on this page.

Friday at 2 PM on The AIR, Mel Larch devotes her hour of Disco to a delightful and funky random assortment of classic dance tracks from the golden age of Disco. The focus this week is on extended mixes of some of the grooviest tunes ever created.  The show starts off with The Silver Connection, but by the time Foxy wraps things up, it’s all pure gold.

It’s yet another tasty collection of Disco treats in the grand MIRRORBALL tradition. Check out the playlist…

MIRRORBALL 105

Silver Connection “Get Up And Boogie”
George Benson “Give Me The Night”
Gonzalez “Haven’t Stopped Dancing Yet”
Musique “In The Bush”
Donna Summer “Could It Be Magic”
The Blackbyrds “Walking In Rhythm”
Jigsaw “Sky High”
Average White Band “Pick Up The Pieces”
Foxy “Get Off”

You can hear MIRRORBALL every Friday at 2 PM, with replays Sunday night at 11 PM and throughout the following week Monday at 9 AM and Tuesday at 1 PM plus there’s a mini-marathon that includes the latest episode Saturday nights at 9 PM

At 3 PM, it’s encore time on the Big Electric Cat time as Sydney Fileen graces us with special mixtape-style new episode of Sydney’s Big Electric Cat. This week Sydney presents a salute to the year 1983.

Forty-one years ago we witnessed a very significant year in the New Wave Era. As Sydney says in her intro, “This week, instead of spanning the entire New Wave era, we are going to zero in on one year that many people consider to be the peak of New Wave Music. In this week’s show, we will hear songs that debuted as either singles or album cuts in the year of our Lord, 1983.”

This was when MTV was taking over the nation, but hadn’t yet been corrupted by Hair Metal and crappy reality shows. Music lovers were mainlining innovativeand exciting new musical forms and a generation had their musical expectations turned on its head.

With this episode filling in the blank, Sydney’s Big Electric Cat has devoted entire shows to each year from 1978 to 1984. That means the next time Sydney decides to grace us with a “yearbook” show, she’ll be covering the fringes of the early, either in the very early days, or the very end.  I’m looking forward to seeing what she does.

Check out the playlist…

Sydney’s Big Electric Cat 108

Frankie Goes To Hollywood “Relax”
The Cure “Love Cats”
Orange Juice “Rip It Up”
Eddie Grant “Electric Avenue”
Siouxsie and the Banshees “Dear Prudence”
Madness “Our House”
Bananarama “Cruel Summer”
Tears For Fears “Pale Shelter”
Fun Boy Three “Our Lips Are Sealed”
Style Council “Speak Like A Child”
Kajagoogoo “Too Shy”
Public Image Limited “This Is Not A Love Song”
Yazoo “Nobody’s Diary”
Heaven 17 “Temptation”
New Order “Blue Monday”
Joe Jackson “Steppin’ Out”
Freeze “I O U”
Human League “(Keep Feeling) Fascination”
Nik Kershaw “I Won’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me”
U2 “New Year’s Day”
Duran Duran “Is There Something I Should Know”
The Pretenders “Middle of the Road”
Minor Detail “Columbia”
Re-Flex “The Politics of Dancing”
Art of Noise “Beat Box”
The Stranglers “Midnight Summer Dream”
Ultravox “Hymn”

Sydney’s Big Electric Cat is produced at Haversham Recording Institute in London, and can be heard every Friday at 3 PM, with replays Saturday afternoon,  Monday at 7 AM, Tuesday at 8 PM, Wednesday at Noon and Thursday at 10 AM, exclusively on The AIR.

That’s it for this week’s PopCulteer, check back for all our regular feature, with fresh content, every day.

Summer’s not over. August is done for now, but we are still in the midst of the hottest summer on record.  Yet there’s still  lots of STUFF TO DO, even with Labor Day Weekend in the rear-view mirror.

Remember, if you are attending an outdoor event, stay hydrated and please don’t smoke or vape around any humans who might find the associated stank to be offensive. Be mindful of your health and of those near you. Look for and offer to aid people who might seem frail, look like they’re about to pass out, or have met a sad fate.  With that bit of a caveat, let me tell you about plenty of STUFF TO DO in Charleston and the surrounding area as we trade-in the dog days of August for the red panda days of September.

As I have been copying and pasting for some time now, this a good time to remind you that THIS IS NOT A COMPLETE LIST OF EVENTS.  It’s just a starting point, so don’t expect anything comprehensive, and if you feel strongly about me leaving anything out, feel free to mention it in the comments. I won’t be offended if you volunteer to do the work I was too busy wallowing in nostalgia to do.

Live Music is on tap at Taylor Books. There is no cover charge, and shows start at 7:30 PM.  After a couple of weeks in the wilderness, we have their line-up of artists.  Friday it’s Ty McClanahan. On Saturday Sean (Richardson) and Bug (Schuyler) take the stage at Charleston literary, art and coffee institution.

The World Famous Empty Glass Cafe has some great stuff this week  to tell you about.  Thursday at 5:30 PM Swingstein and Robin return with music for a cause.  Friday Tim Courts holds down the forts for Happy Hour, and then at 10 PM, Spurgie Hankins Band and Golden celebrate Ron & Marry’s birthdays Sunday evening at 9 PM, Joe’s Cousin and Alan Dale Sizemore take the stage at the Glass. Check the graphics dump below for more weekend events at The Empty Glass.

Please remember that the pandemic is still not entirely over yet. It’s a going concern with the ‘rona still lurking about all robust and reinvigorated and with a chip on its shoulder. And now there are drought-fueled nasty seasonal allergies, Moose bearing ping-pong balls, sentient ham salad sandwiches, skating KGB Agents and other damned good reasons to be careful. 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.

Keep in mind that all shows are subject to change or be cancelled at the last minute.

Here we go, roughly in order…

THURSDAY

FRIDAY

SATURDAY

SUNDAY

So yesterday I told you all about the 35th Anniversary episode of Radio Free Charleston, and it turns out that a lot of folks who read PopCult and listen to the show were not aware of the history of the show and how it came to be.  So today I’m going to recycle an edition of The PopCulteer that ran in this blog exactly 15 years ago, but I’ll update it a bit and fill in some more details. At the end of it, I will compile a series of posts from 2007 that talk more about the original broadcast incarnation of the show, and provide a few audio snippets.

Be prepared for a long, long post.

IT WAS TWENTY (Thirty-Five) YEARS AGO, TODAY (Yesterday)

Well, sort of. Thirty-five years ago, in 1989, during Labor Day weekend, at 2 AM Sunday Morning September 3, Radio Free Charleston debuted on WVNS, 96.1 FM. It was part of my reward (in lieu of a raise) for working over a hundred consecutive days at the station. After starting out as the night deejay who wasn’t trusted to talk, and winding up as the assistant program director I had become indispensible. Part of my job was filling the weekend schedule with part-timers, and I was having a hard time keeping anyone in the Saturday late night/Sunday early morning spot.

Since the station owed me–I’d been filling up to three shifts a day, sometimes using three different voices and personas–I made a proposition: We had syndicated programming in my regular 7 PM to Midnight shift on Friday nights, so I really wasn’t needed. I offered to give that spot to a part-timer in order to take the Saturday Midnight timeslot…on one condition.

They had to give me total freedom to play anything I wanted.

The station was so poorly managed that they agreed. And I went nuts assembling a four-hour show (starting at 2 AM due to contractually-obligated syndicated programming). Inspired by the 1970s incarnation of WVAF, which had no real format, I put together a show featuring New Wave music from the early 1980s, 70s progressive rock, headphone comedy, local music and bizarre stuff that I did myself. We snuck onto the unsuspecting airwaves that Labor Day weekend, and the in-studio photos in today’s post were taken by Frank Panucci during that very first broadcast.

I should point out that “Radio Free Charleston” was what I wanted to call it. Our program director hated that title and insisted I call it “After Hours,” a title I hated. From the first minute, I called it by both names, but by the second week I’d dropped “After Hours” and re-cut all the promos for the show to omit that part of the name. That was the first of my tiny subversive victories.

The first episode had no local music. It didn’t have a theme song, or interstitials or promotion, either. I just got the okay to do it two days earlier. It was always my intention to include local music but I was timid about asking too much of my unpredictable program director.  When I worked up enough nerve to ask him if I could play Hasil Adkins’ “Big Red Satellite” in the second week of the show, he cut me off first and asked me to play a single by “Cheryl,” a wannabee teen pop singer, and the daughter of a local car dealer who advertised on the station.

I immediately agreed and said, “I’ll even play some other local acts so that it won’t look like we’re playing favorites!”

And a legend was born. By the third week I was playing songs by Stark Raven and Big Money (Michael Lipton’s pre-pre-Carpenter Ants band).  My program director had no idea what he’d unleashed.

Largely because of the local music, at one point we had over ten thousand listeners. That was more than the station’s morning and afternoon drive dayparts…combined. Once the show was successful enough to attract interest (and advertisers), forces within the station conspired to kill it after eight months. I wrote about the man who pulled the trigger a dozen years ago, but in 2022 I finally revealed his name.

It took 16 years for me to revive the show at The Gazz as a video program. In the interim, there had been multiple radio pilot episodes recorded and several false starts, but the video concept, with much help from Brian Young, Frank Panucci and Mel Larch, brought RFC back to stay.  Then, in 2014, I returned to radio–internet radio this time,–via Voices of Appalachia radio, which has since mutated into The AIR. Since November, 2014, Radio Free Charleston has been your source for local music every Tuesday at 10 AM and 10 PM.  At the beginning of 2020 I expanded the show to three hours and began to emulate the free-format style of the original show, mixing local music with national and international artists, including independent and major-label releases.

When I was diagnosed with Myasthenia Gravis in 2016, I cut the video show back to one show a year, and I’ve restarted the count on the radio show with volumes 3, 4 and 5, but we’ve been a Tuesday institution for nearly ten years. All told, there have been over 500 episodes of the RFC radio show, and over 300 video episodes, when you combine the main show with The RFC MINI SHOW.

I think that deserves a little self-horn-tootery, don’t you?

After the jump, let’s wallow in a little more nostalgia, there’s a series of posts from this blog from December, 2007, newly-restored with their little audio clips and compiled into one huge post…

Continue reading

It snuck up on me, slowly, over the course of three-and-a-half decades, but today (September 3) is the 35th anniversary of the very first broadcast of Radio Free Charleston, over the air, on 96.1 FM, which at the time was an oldies station with absentee owners, which is the only reason I got away with doing free-format radio at 2 AM once a week.  To mark the occasion, in the middle of a 35-hour marathon that began Monday night, we will bring you a new, three hour episode of RFC today in its long-established timeslots, 10 AM and 10 PM.

Of course we have to dig into the archives today on The AIR.  We also mix in some new stuff and some very rare records on this special new episode of  Radio Free Charleston, it’s a load of nostalgia but we still look to the future.  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 tons of replays throughout the week.

I open the show with new music from David Synn. I told David I’d open this week’s show with his music before I realized it was an anniversary show, but it’s a killer track and I didn’t want to make the show a complete throwback, so I have new tunes from David and Bad Keys of the Mountain this week before we jump into the backwards-looking navel-gazing (which hurts, when you think about it).

This episode includes some recordings from the legendary Charleston Playhouse, which was demolished late last year.

Because I was busy with a few other anniversaries last week, it didn’t even hit me that I needed to put this show together until late last week. I ordered a cassette dubbing machine (a cheap one) and it got here Saturday, so I was able to dig out a few archival gems for this show. The insterstitials are all from the third-ever episode of RFC, and the jam session tapes had only be listened to once, if that many times.

Our first hour digs deep and brings you local music from the 1960s to the 1980s, with one track from the 90s.

Our second hour opens with a new recording of “Heads On Fire” by Clownhole, which was widely requested on the broadcast version of the show even though I only had a crappy bootleg recording of it performed live. I even had it remixed and paired with a video by my brother, Frank Panucci, back on the first Halloween episode of RFC volume 2, our long-running video show.

Our second and third hours each include long (possibly too long) excerpts from Charleston Playhouse jam sessions. They are presented for historical and/or hysterical purposes, depending on your point of view. Among the performers you’ll hear are an ersatz line up of The Defectors with Jack Griffith instead of Lynne Sandy; The Hepcats, including Gary Price and Tommy Medvick; the incredible Johnny McIntyre; a extremely drunk girl, and more.

The non-local music this week includes a lot of tracks that I played way back on WVNS on the original incarnation of the show. I hope you folks don’t mind me wallowing in a little nostalgia on this milestone anniversary of Charleston’s longest-running local music radio program.

There are only a few links in the playlist this week. With this many archival recordings, not every artist has a website to send you folks to.

Check out the playlist.

RFC V5 192

hour one
David Synn “Hypomania”
Bad Keys of the Mountain “Free Ride”
Rose Garden “Next Plane To London”
Mind Garage “Reach Out”
Hasil Adkins “She Said”
Amazing Delores “One On One”
Stark Raven “Whiter Shade of Pale”
Go Van Gogh “Shut Up, I Love You”
Three Bodies “Shingles and Tar”
The Swivels “Cinnamon Girl”
Some Forgotten Color “High Chair”
Big Money “Words On The Street”
Brian Diller “Don’t Stop At Anything”
The Defectors“Nightlife In Tokyo”
Velez Manifesto “You’re Too Dark”

hour two
Clownhole “Heads On Fire”
Wolfgang Parker “The Father, The Son”
Government Cheese “Camping On Acid”
Tilting At Windmills “Serve Him Whiskey”
Strawfyssh “Graveyard Shift”
Charleston Playhouse Jam Excerpt #1
Pete Townshend “Rough Boys”
Bill Nelson “Flaming Desire”
The Call “The Walls Come Down”

hour three
John Radcliff “It’s Not A Dream”
Novo Combo “Up Periscope”
Mother Nang“Fuggin'”
Wall of Voodoo “Mexican Radio”
Red Hot Chili Peppers “True Men Don’t Kill Coyotes”
Charleston Playhouse Jam Excerpt #2

You can hear this episode of Radio Free Charleston Tuesday at 10 AM and 10 PM on The AIR, with replays 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 the rest of the 35-hour marathon, which will wrap up Wednesday morning.

We are back in Chicago this week for a small acrylic painting on illustration board that depicts what is probably the worst view of the famed Willis Tower, once the tallest building in the world (and once known as The Sears Tower, back when Sears was a thing).

This is my first color piece in a few weeks, and I’m fairly sure I’ve painted Willis Tower from this angle before, but this time I left out other buildings, lamp posts and traffic signals, and just used some of my photos from last July to reference the reflections on the side of the building. I honestly can’t recall if any of my prior paintings from this angle made it into this feature in PopCult.

This was an exercise in getting the fingers working with brushes and color again, and also trying to justify standing across the street from Willis Tower pointing my camera almost straight up to get reference photos.

To see it bigger try clicking HERE.

Over in radioland, Monday at 2 PM on The AIR, we bring you encores of a classic episode of Psychedelic Shack, and then at 3 PM a recent 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.

At 8 PM you can hear Neil’s Heavy Concept Album, a Young Ones side project starring Nigel Planer on a classic episode of The Comedy Vault.

Tonight at 9 PM for the Monday Marathon We begin a 35-hour marathon of Radio Free Charleston, which will include the regularly-scheduled airings of a new episode because Tuesday is the 35th anniversary of Charleston’s longest-running local music showcase. I’m working on some surprises from the archives for our new episode this week.

I don’t like to repeat the videos I post here in Sunday Evening Video very often, but this one has become an annual tradition and hardly anybody reads the blog on Labor Day weekend anyway, so here goes.

If you are of a certain age, Labor Day seems synonymous with The Jerry Lewis Labor Day MDA Telethon, which the famed comedian hosted for almost sixty years.

The telethon is gone, as is Jerry, but MDA (the Muscular Dystrophy Association) maintains a YouTube page where they still post highlights from the vaults.

Above you see a playlist with over a hundred videos of musical legends like Frank Sinatra, Aretha Franklin, Smokey Robinson, B.B. King, Diana Ross, Ray Charles, Elton John, Paul McCartney, Tony Bennett, Little Richard, Johnny Cash, Toni Basil and many others. Best of all, you can watch these clips without sitting through four hours of corporate spokespeople droning on in a monotone about how much they care about the kids. I mean, no offense to the guy from 7 11, but I’m pretty sure they play those parts on an endless loop in hell. Above you see the good stuff, the cream of the crop.

Seriously, there are some gems in there like Duran Duran, MC Hammer and Charo. There’s lots of Charo. Lots of MC Hammer, too, now that I think about it.

Enjoy!

This week The RFC Flashback goes to April, 2010, for Radio Free Charleston 98, “Marilyn Monroe Shirt,” featuring music by The Diablo Blues Band, David Synn and Captain Crash and The Beauty Queen. We also had animation by Frank Panucci, and a look at the then-new GI Joe Adventure Team.

You can read the original production notes HERE.

The PopCulteer
August 30, 2024

We have a couple of new projects from old friends of PopCult to tell you about this week. First up, we have a new Kickstarter campaign for a new comic book from Anthony Stokes. As has become the norm when I plug a Kickstarter campaign, some browsers will show a line struck through the links, as though they don’t work, but rest assured, they do. It’s some kind of conflict with the blog template I use here and certain browers.

I’ve been telling you about comic books written by Anthony Stokes for almost two years now, and his last campaign just wrapped up successfully last month. This exciting young writer has become so proflic that he has an entirely different new comic ready to launch.  In fact, just a couple of days in, it’s already funded.

My Girlfriend Is A Cyborg Assassin is a pretty self-explanatory title.  It’s a bit of Cyberpunk Noir that tells the story of a private detective at some point in the future by the name of Ralph.

Ralph hates machines.

Charisma is a machine…a Cyborg Assassin, in fact.

They’ll have to learn to work together to solve the mystery of his ex-partner’s murder.

Inspired by Blade Runner and odd-couple buddy cop stories like Who Framed Roger Rabbit, this is a comic book that fans of Cyberpunk 2077 and Akira will enjoy.

Set in a cyberpunk landscape where people regularly get cybernetic enhancements to their bodies, Cyborg Assassin at its core is a story about the walls technology can put up between people.

My Girlfriend Is A Cyborg Assassin features 26 pages of incredible full-color artwork, illustrated By Jack Dunne and colored By Maximo. There are a variety of rewards available in digital and print form, with variant covers and “risque” covers, if you’re into that sort of thing. You can also get just about all of Anthony’s previous works as add-ons, in case you’re coming to this game late.

The campaign is fully-funded, so you can be sure that you’ll get to read this in December, if not earlier, and it looks like another sure winner from the creative mind of Anthony Stokes. You have just under three weeks to Kick-in and make sure you get a copy. Check out some of the great artwork…

SKYFLAKE Firmament Shirt

SKYFLAKE is the musical project of William Mull, whom readers of PopCult will remember from his Forbidden Gallery comic book.  I’ve also been playing his band’s music on Radio Free Charleston, and in fact I opened an episode just a couple of months ago with his song “Firmament.”

Now, William has created a cool shirt to go along with the song. I’ll let him tell you about it…

We thought we’d create a very limited-release t-shirt to commemorate SKYFLAKE‘s new song and video, FIRMAMENT — we’re ordering some for ourselves, and would like to offer it to YOU as well!

In order to get your hands on one of these nifty T-shirts, all you have to do is go HERE, and do it quick because it’ll only be available for less than two more weeks. In addition to the cool design on the front, the back also sports the band’s cool logo.

And if you wonder what the tune sounds like, check out this cool new video…

Any funds raised from the sale of this shirt will go back into creating more SKYFLAKE musical projects.

And with that, we wrap up this week’s anniversary travel-truncated PopCulteer. Check back every single damn day for fresh content and our many regular features.