Month: February 2018 (Page 4 of 5)

Live and Local on The AIR brings you part six of the Rubber Soul Beatles marathon concert from February 2 tonight at 9 PM on The AIR. Tune in at the website, or on this cool little embedded player…

This part of the concert is around the mid-point of the 14-hour show, and sees Mark Parsons-Justice stepping in to give Larry Groce a break as MC about halfway-through.

Here’s the playlist. Guest musicans are listed in parantheses, on vocals unless otherwise noted:

Live and Local 002

“Rain”
“Baby’s In Black” (Erin Elizabeth Martin)
“I’ve Just Seen A Face” (Erin Elizabeth Martin)
“Norwegian Wood” (Ryan Hardiman)
“Love You Too” (Mark Davis-hand drums)
“Tomorrow Never Knows”  (Mark Davis)
“Michelle” (Bob Thompson-solo keyboards)
“In My Life” (Jonathan Tucker, Bob Thompson keyboards)
“It’s Only Love” (Ryan Hardiman)
“Girl” (Ryan Hardiman)
“Two of Us” (Tayan and Zene Cooper)
“When I Get Home”
“Maggie Mae”
“I’ve Got A Feeling” (Jeff Gianola)

Mark Parsons-Justice steps in to host

“One After 909”
“It’s Only A Northern Song”
“All Together Now”
“It’s All Too Much”
“Here There and Everywhere” (Kim Javins, Ryan Kennedy-Guitar)
“Magical Mystery Tour” (Kevin Mullins)
“The Fool On the Hill”
“Flying”
“Blue Jay Way”
“You’re Mother Should Know” (Travis Stephens)
“I Am The Walrus” (Daniel Calwell)
“Hello Goodbye” (Beth Segessenman)
“Strawberry Fields” (Kevin Mullins/Michelle Toliver)
“Penny Lane” (Larry Groce, David Porter-Trumpet)
“Baby You’re A Rich Man”
“All You Need Is Love”
“Yellow Submarine” (Ron Sowell)

Rubber Soul is Mark Scarpelli, Greg Hunt, Garret Maner, Michele Toliver, Bryan Flowers and Brian Holstine. We will bring you part seven of the marathon Monday at 3 PM, and parts eight and nine starting at 10 AM Tuesday. Then on Wednesday, Valentine’s Day, we’ll start at noon and bring you thirteen hours of the entire concert.

From April, 2011, we bring you Radio Free Charleston 126, “Purple Batman shirt.” This episode featured music from WhiteChapel District, the duo of Chad Foss and Sean Sydnor, and a trailer for “Zombie Babies,” Eamon Hardiman’s legendary motion picture. This was our first show uploaded in Hi-Def, which seemed like a big deal at the time.

Host segments were shot on a beautiful Sunday morning in front of Jeff Pierson’s East End mural, which can be found right across Greenbrier Street, on the back of the Mini Mart. Our first musical guest for this show was WhiteChapel District. recorded on New Year’s Eve, at Tomahawk’s Smokehouse and Saloon, which spent a few years as Grumpys, and is now Mountain Pie’s on The River or something. It was a wild, high-energy night. These guys open and close the show.

Next up we had a trailer for Eamon Hardiman’s movie, “Zombie Babies.” This touching family drama told all about about what happens when a zombie infestation happens at a discount abortion clinic.

The musical guest sandwiched between the two WCD songs was the duo of Chad Foss and Sean Sydnor. Sean was on the show way back in our early days as a member of Professor Mike and has since gone on to fame as the bassist for Byzantine. Chad needs to be singing again.

The PopCulteer
February 9, 2018

This is going to be a short PopCulteer. As you may have read Wednesday, my workhorse PC gave up the ghost on Monday, and I’ve been working on two laptops while trying to set up a new computer from scratch.
While that was happening, I was neck-deep in editing the audio from last Friday’s Rubber Soul marathon concert tribute to The Beatles. I’m working on my wife’s laptop, since that’s the only working computer in the house with my audio programs on it. I have my laptop set up in the living room, so I can keep up with my email and post to PopCult and The AIR.

It’s a bit of a chore. Once I get the Rubber Soul audio edited, I’ll be devoting all my energies to finishing the set up of the new computer. The plan is to be running at full speed by the end of next week.

In the meantime, except for the Rubber Soul specials and The Third Shift, The AIR will be in repeats for the next ten days at least.  I’m dealing with the new computer. Michele Zirkle is finishing her second novel and the folks at Haversham Recording Institute are all hard at work covering the Winter Olympics.

I still plan to update PopCult every day, but it’ll mainly be plugs for The AIR ,mixed in with Toy Fair news.
So what I’m saying is, bear with me.

Today’s Piece of The Rubber Puzzle

Like I said, I’ve been hard at work on what will likely be a thirteen-hour marathon broadcast of last week’s Rubber Soul concert where the band played over two hundred Beatlesongs. Today you can tune in at 2 PM for a special Beatles Blast on The AIR, at the website or on this magical mystery radio player…

Rubber Soul is Mark Scarpelli, Greg Hunt, Garret Maner, Michele Toliver, Bryan Flowers and Brian Holstine. In the playlist below, one or more of them will be singing lead, exceot where noted…

Beatles Blast 022

“Think For Yourself”
“The Word”
“Wait”
“Run for Your Life” (Bill Robinson-Pedal Steel Guitar)
“I’m Looking Through You” (Julie Adams)
“Dig It”
“Dr. Robert”
“Act Naturally” (Bill Robinson-Pedal Steel Guitar)
“What goes On” (Bill Robinson-Pedal Steel Guitar)
“For No One”  (Curtis Chittendon)
“Long Tall Sally” (Ryan Hardiman)
“If I Fell” (Jonathan Tucker and Ryan Hardiman)
“Anytime At All” (Mark Davis)
“Another Girl” (Mark Davis)
“I’m Only Sleeping” (Eli Chambers)
“Yes It Is” (Michael Tomasky, Jeff Gianola, Ken Munday)
“Nowhere Man” (Michael Tomasky, Jeff Gianola, Ken Munday)

The next big chunk of this concert hits Saturday at 9 PM, as an installment of The AIR’s Live and Local program. Monday a special edition of Live and Local will take the place of Prognosis at 3 PM, and then Tuesday there will be two one-hour episodes of Radio Free Charleston that will bring the concert to a close.

Wednesday, February 14 we play every piece of the concert starting at noon.  We’ll do it again Saturday, February 17.
And with that, this PopCulteer is done. Check back this weekend for our regular features and the playlist for Saturday night’s Live and Local.

Your PopCulteer is hard at work editing and tweaking the music from last Friday’s Rubber Soul Beatles Marathon, and today you can hear two more hours this epic event on Radio Free Charleston International, Thursday at 3 PM on The AIR.

Tune in at The AIR website, or on this particularly fab embedded radio player…

Rubber Soul is the brainchild of Mark Scarpelli, as was this admirably insane idea of performing over two hundred Beatlesongs in one go. Rubber Soul is Mark, Greg Hunt, Garret Maner, Michele Toliver, Bryan Flowers and Brian Holstine, and they did an amazing job last Friday.

As we’ve been doing for a few days now, Thursday it’s time for more of this great marathon concert as we bring you big chunks of hours two, three and four, with a terrific list of guest vocalists and musicians. Just to remind you, I’m working through the recordings of the entire show, and plan to have every song that has acceptable sound quality (that’s most of them) ready to run as a marathon on The AIR on Valentine’s Day, starting at noon. This is part four of the marathon. Tune in to The AIR on Friday at 2 PM for part five, and Saturday at 9 PM for part six.

But today at 3 PM it’s part four…

RFC International 049

All songs by Rubber Soul (guests noted in parentheses, performing vocals except where noted)

“I Want to Hold Your Hand”
“Do You Want To Know A Secret” (Beth Segessenman)
“Thank You Girl”  (Eli Chambers)
“I’ll Get You” (Eli Chambers)
“Roll Over Beethoven” (Ron Sowell)
“You Can’t Do That”
“Chains”  (Mark Parsons Justice)
“Twist And Shout”
“You Really Got A Hold On Me” (Phil Washington)
“I Call Your Name” (Curtis Chittendon)
“A Hard Day’s Night”
“Tell Me Why”
“Slowdown” (Eli Chambers)
“Words Of Love” (Eli Chambers)
“Matchbox”
“I’m Happy Just To Dance With You” (Curtis Chittendon)
“I Should Have Known Better” (Curtis Chittendon”
“Can’t Buy Me Love”

“I’ll Follow the Sun”
“What You’re Doing”
“You Like Me Too Much” (Rusty Marks, vocals, ukelele)
“Eight Days A Week”
“Please Mr. Postman”  (Mark Parsons-Justice)
“Rock and Roll Music” (Terry Moles and the Outdoor Cats-full band with Mark)
“I Feel Fine”  (Terry Moles and the Outdoor Cats-full band with Mark)
“Every Little Thing” (Beth Segessenman)
“Dizzy Miss Lizzy” (Curtis Chittendon)
“Tell Me What You See”
“Honey Don’t” (Larry Groce)
“The Night Before” (Curtis Chittendon)
“Hey, You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away”
“I Need You” (Curtis Chittendon)
“You’re Gonna Lose That Girl” (Phil Washington)
“You Won’t See Me”(Eli Chambers)

Stay turned on and tuned in to The AIR. We’ll bring this incredible local feat to you, just like we bring all the local music to you.

It is my sad duty to inform you of the unfortunate but not unexpected passing of one of my closest associates and longime silent, creative collaborator, the Compaq Presario, known to those closest to him as “my computer.”

Compaq was a trusted companion who would only occasionally flake out and cause me grief.  But he has been a part of PopCult since day one and performed the amazing task of helping me to edit over two hundred episodes of the Radio Free Charleston video show, over seventy episodes of the RFC MINI SHOW, over a hundred audio episodes of Radio Free Charleston, and all of the other video and audio projects that I’ve worked on for the past fourteen years.  Almost every PopCult post and piece of art in this blog was created with his help.

He did this all with a mere dual core CPU and Windows XP operating system. Compaq lived a good life, one that I hope was made richer by our creative collaborations. It was a full life, much longer than the average desktop computer. Compaq soldiered on in the face of later, more exotic operating systems like VISTA, Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 10. He was more than a mere tool. He was a magical box into which I poured my heart and soul so that I could watch art and music and video come out.

I will endeavor to keep my memories of the good times we had together and not these last few months as a degenerative CPU disorder afflicted him and turned him into a mere shadow of his former self. This computer was an underdog. a diminutive powerhouse who created more with a dual core and 2 GB of RAM than a hundred MAC Air Pro Platinum models.

I have to admit, I am taking the loss pretty hard. I’m doing my best to soldier on, editing programs for The AIR on my wife’s laptop and posting to PopCult from my laptop, but it does get overwhelming at times. I miss my reliable little buddy.

Life does go on and I will be spending the next week or two teaching a new computer, hopefully, to be as reliable and give me as many creative options as my beloved Compaq did.

Compaq Presario was preceded in death by my 1998 Hewlett Packard. He is survived by two Toshiba laptops, a Sanyo netbook and a brand new Samsung Galaxy J7, upon which he doted.  At Compaq’s request, there will be no formal memorial service, as he has donated his body to computer science.  The family asks that donations be made to the Old Computers Home, or Digital Hospice.

Beatle bootleg week continues on The AIR. You can listen at the website or on this gear little embedded radio player.

Wednesday at 2 PM, this week’s episode of Beatles Blast brings you an hour of last Friday’s marathon Beatles concert by Rubber Soul, as part of our serialized presentation of most of the 200 plus Beatlesongs performed on Friday, February 2nd at the Capitol Theater by Rubber Soul and friends.

The “With A Little Help From Our Friends” concert involved Mark Scarpelli and Rubber Soul doing the heavy lifting with the help of several dozen local singers and musicians stepping in to keep the music flowing. This is part 3 of our bootleg presentation of that concert for The AIR.

In this one hour excerpt of the concert, you will hear Larry Groce introduce Rubber Soul performing the following songs, with the guest musicians listed parenthetically:

“Little Child” (Ron Sowell-Harmonica)
“Don’t Bother Me”
“All My Loving”
“This Boy” (Eli Chambers)
“Not A Second Time”(Eli Chambers)
“Til There Was You” (Mark Parsons-Justice)
“I Wanna Be Your Man” (Mike Fitzwater- Drums)
“Love Me Do”
“Money”
“Please Please Me” (Ray Singleton-Guitar)
“She Loves You”
“The Devil In Her Heart” (Casey Litz)
“I’ll Cry Instead” (Casey Litz)
“Everybody’s Trying To Be My Baby” (Casey Litz)
“It Won’t Be Long” (Curtis Chittendon)
“All I’ve Got To Do”

Thursday at 3 PM, Radio Free Charleston International will bring you two more hours of this epic concert. We’ll also bring you additional chunks of this show Friday, Saturday and into next week. Our goal is to have it all ready in time for a Valentine’s Day marathon, scheduled to start at noon. We’ll be telling you all about that as the day approaches.

All right, I’ve had a few days to decompress, and I have to say it: The “With A Little Help From Our Friends” marathon Beatles concert by Rubber Soul was an impressive musical feat, the likes of which Charleston has not seen before. February 2, 2018 is a date that will be remembered for a long, long, long time.

Mark Scarpelli and Rubber Soul undertook the daunting task of learning and performing over 200 songs that were recorded by The Fab Four during their 1962-1970 career. They rose to the occasion with a level of energy and enthusiam that amounted to a modern-day Herculean feat of pure musical power. Mark, Greg Hunt, Garret Maner, Michele Toliver, Bryan Flowers and Brian Holstine proved themselves to be the toughest band in town by running full-speed for fourteen hours without too much of a break. Kudos also to Larry Groce, who was there at the beginning and end, and only took a short dinner break. Mark Parsons-Justice filled in while Larry replenished himself.

I was there for the whole show, and at the end I was exhausted, just from watching. The band, aided and abetted by dozens of guests, delivered show-stopping moments all day long and well past midnight.There were standing ovations even when the audience was too tired to stand.

And…I bootlegged the whole thing. Not all of the recordings are usuable, though. I went ultra-low-fi on this project, recording everything on my trusty Zoom H4 on a tripod in the back of the hall. Unfortunately, a few songs were obliterated by coughing fits, and a few others are being held back due to HIPAA laws, as loud conversations about medical issues were barked loudly right in front of the microphone. However, I got about 95% of the show recorded in glorious bootleg-quality stereo, with the audience reactions and all.

And since I have this amazing document of such a fantastic and historic show, you know I’m going to share it with my readers and folks who listen to The AIR.

After the long day last Friday, on Saturday morning I got up at the crack of noon and edited a two-hour episode of Live and Local that included all of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Abbey Road, as performed by Rubber Soul and friends. I even had room for a bonus, Bob Thompson and Curtis Chittendon guesting on “Get Back.”

That was only two hours out of a fourteen-hour show. So I needed to figure out the best way to bring this music to you, and I found a way to do just that and slack off at the same time.

You can hear all of this on The AIR website, or just leave this page up and click on this nifty little embedded radio player…

Starting today at 10 AM, Radio Free Charleston will be part of four shows on The AIR that will divvy up the music from last Friday and dole it out for your enjoyment. Tuesday at 10 AM and 10 PM you can tune in to hear one more hour of last Friday’s show, followed by the two hours we brought you over the weekend.

We kick off with one of the highlights, as The Gazette-Mail’s own Bill Lynch managed to out-Shat Shatner with his striking interpretation of “Help.” Here’s the full-line-up for this week’s special Radio Free Charleston…

RFC 68: Rubber Soul “With A Little Help From Our Friends”

“Help” with Bill Lynch

Eli Chambers “Fire Speech”
Song Introductions by Larry Groce

Performed by Rubber Soul, with guests where noted–

“I Saw Her Standing There” with Curtis Chittendon
“Misery”
“From Me To You” Michael Tomasky, Jeff Gianola, Ken Munday
“If I Needed Someone” Jeff Gianola, Ken Munday, Michael Tomasky
“Boys”
“Anna (Go To Him)” Curtis Chittendon
“A Taste of Honey” Curtis Chittendon
“Baby, It’s You” Eli Chambers
“PS, I Love You”
“We Can Work It Out” Beth Segessenman
“And Your Bird Can Sing”
“Taxman”
“Ticket To Ride” Terry Berhans (drums)
“Good Day Sunshine” Eli Chambers, Terry Berhans (drums)

We are definitely not stopping there. Wednesday at 2 PM, Beatles Blast, another weekly show that your PopCulteer happens to host, will bring you another full hour of crunchy, Rubber Soul goodness. On Thursday at 3 PM Rubber Soul takes over Radio Free Charleston International for two more hours from the marathon. We’ll bring you a bonus hour Friday at 2 PM, and then two more hours on Live and Local Saturday at 9 PM.

And that still won’t use up all the good stuff we managed to record. Expect even more next week on Radio Free Charleston and Beatles Blast. By that point we ought to have all of the usable songs from Friday in easily-programmed form. And that means that we’ll be airing twelve hours of this marathon on Valentine’s Day, starting at noon.

That is sort of what we call in the trade, “burying the lede.”

While we will be bringing you bits and pieces of this awesome show all this week and beyond, on Valentine’s Day you can catch almost the entire show on The AIR. It starts at noon, Wednesday February 14, and we’re going to run it again Saturday, February 17, starting at 7 AM.

Until then, tune in for all the component pieces as we air them fresh out of the musical oven. By the time The AIR runs the marathon concert, we’ll have a complete list of guest performers. I could try to do it off the top of my head, but I don’t want to risk leaving anyone out.

Today’s artistic week-starter is a psychedelic digital painting based on a publicity photo of the late Norwegian starlet, Julie Ege. Ege was originally a model, who turned to acting after finding herself in the UK. She was a Bond Girl in Her Majesty’s Secret Service, and starred in a couple of Hammer Films (Creatures the World Forgot and The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires) and worked alongside Marty Feldman and Skip Milligan. Her main claim to fame was as Voluptua, the ruler of Rome in the 1971 Frankie Howerd comedy, Up Pompei. After her acting and modeling careers ended, she returned to Norway and earned a degree in nursing.

Ege passed away in 2008, after her second bout with Breast cancer. Her pose in the original publicity shot was so striking that I decided to use it as the basis for this piece of art.

I am still recovering from Friday’s Beatles Marathon concert by Rubber Soul (and I was just in the audience– imagine how wiped out the performers are). I do want to let you know that you can hear some of the concert as a Bootleg recording Monday on The AIR at 1 PM and 10 PM, and most likely Tuesday at 11 AM and 11 PM, immediately following this week’s Radio Free Charleston, which will devote an hour to even more bootleg recordings of last Friday’s concert. I’ll also be playing more of the concert on Beatles Blast, Wednesday at 2 PM.

I do have to let it be known that we will not be bringing you every single song performed on Friday. I was recording the show with a stereo microphone set up in the back of the hall. Unfortunately, somebody sitting directly in front of where I had the microphone had a few serious coughing fits during the day, which made the audio for a few of the songs unusable (unless you need a recording of someone coughing). So we will eventually bring you, probably, 95% of the songs from the Marathon, but hey, that’s still more than a 190 Beatle songs.

Saturday night on The AIR we’ll devote the two hours of our show, Live and Local, to songs the Beatles recorded in 1968, and that includes most of The White Album, as well as “Hey Jude” and “Lady Madonna.” That will be on the schedule at 9 PM. You can listen at The AIR’s website, or on the embedded radio player below…

Look into the Hypno Wheel. You are feeling calm. Relax. Repeat…”I feel so calm. I am relaxed.”  Repeat over and over…”I feel so calm. I am relaxed. I feel so calm. I am relaxed. I feel so calm. I am relaxed.I feel so calm. I am relaxed. I feel so calm. I am relaxed. I feel so calm. I am relaxed. I feel so calm. I will not notice that Rudy just re-used a Sunday Evening Video from six years ago. I feel so calm. I am relaxed. I feel so calm. I am relaxed. I feel so calm. I am relaxed. I feel so calm. I am relaxed. I feel so calm. I will send Rudy all my old action figures and Charlton comics. I feel so calm. I am relaxed. I feel so calm. I am relaxed. I feel so calm. I am relaxed. I feel so calm. I am relaxed. I will listen to The AIR more often, really, I’m not just saying that this time. I feel so calm. I am relaxed. I feel so calm. I am relaxed. I feel so calm. I am relaxed. I feel so calm. I am relaxed.”

Don’t you feel better now?

If you enjoyed Beatles Week, we have a very special treat for you tonight on The AIR. You can listen at the website, or on this embeded radio player…

If you’ve been reading PopCult for the last few weeks you know that Friday, February 2, Charleston’s Beatles tribute band, Rubber Soul, held court at the Capitol Theater for a marathon 14-hour concert of almost every song the Beatles recorded during their career. I was honored to be in attendance for the entire show, and I was also sneaky enough to set up a microphone in the back of the hall to record all of it.

Saturday at 9 PM you can tune in to The AIR for the debut of a special “Bootleg” edition of Live and Local as we bring you Rubber Soul and Friends performing all of the songs from the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Abbey Road albums. For these tunes, the band is aided and abetted by Curtis Chittendon, Phil Washington, Mel Larch, Kevin Mullins Ryan Hardiman, Bob Thompson, Tanya Dillon-Page, Ryan Kennedy, Ted Rose and The Kanawha Kordsmen.

Rubber Soul is Mark Scarpelli, Greg Hunt, Michelle Toliver, Garret Maner, Bryan Flowers and Brian Holistine. They were also joined by an orchestra which was too large for me to get all their names correct as I write this. You will also hear the song intros by Mark Parsons-Justice and Larry Groce.

We will replay this special edition of Live and Local Sunday at 9 AM and 7 PM and Monday at 10 PM, with more airings as I get around to making the rest of the schedule for The AIR.

In the coming days, as I have more time to work on preparing the shows for The AIR, we will bring you many more performances from the Marathon Concert. If you couldn’t make it there in person, you can still capture some of the excitement, albiet with a bootleg-quality recording.

Next Saturday Live and Local will bring you the songs from The White Album that Rubber Soul and friends performed at the Marathon. Before tonight’s broadcast, you can also listen to last week’s special Beatles programs, which we are replaying until 7 PM. You can expect a healthy dose of other recordings from the marathon show next week on Radio Free Charleston and Beatles Blast. Check back with PopCult for details of the air times and replay schedules.