Month: August 2018 (Page 2 of 4)

Wednesday afternoon on The AIR Mel Larch pays tribute to The Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin, on a very special episode of Curtain Call. You can hear it at 3 PM. Just tune in to the website, or on the embedded player below for this week’s slate of stimulating programs.

At 3 PM Wednesday on Curtain Call, Mel Larch celebrates the life of Aretha Franklin and shines the spotlight on the late singer’s great love of musical theater. In this hour program you will hear The Queen of Soul perform songs from Annie Get Your Gun, A Chorus Line, Funny Girl, West Side Story, Porgy and Bess and other great shows, plus you’ll also hear a couple of her classic hits. For many years Aretha Franklin had been working toward making her life story into a stage musical, and we hope that her dream is realized soon.

Curtain Call can be heard Wednesday at 3 PM, with replays Thursday at 7 AM and 8 PM and Saturday at 6 PM. An all-night marathon of Curtain Call episodes can be heard Wednesday nights, beginning at Midnight.

The rest of our programming day follows the new routine: Our musical morning line-up on Wednesday continues with The Swing Shift at 7 AM, followed by Prognosis at 9 AM, Psychedelic Shack at 11 AM and an encore of a classic Curtain Call at Noon.  We are re-presenting classic episodes of On The Road with Mel at 1 PM.

At 1;30 PM and 7 PM, Life Speaks to Michele Zirkle presents part one of her recent Salt Cave Meditation. At 2 PM Beatles Blast presents one-hour audio blast of music by and about the lads from Liverpool. This week listen to the longest songs the Beatles released, both as a group and solo. 5 PM sees a replay of this week’s hot new episode of The Swing Shift.

At 7:30 PM, we have gone into the AIR Archives and unearthed the missing seven episodes of Word Association with Lee and Rudy. These shows were misplaced on a stray hard drive and have not been heard in more than two years. This week we bring you the last of this batch of missing gems, as Rudy lectures Lee about the history of Harvey Comics.

Stay tuned all day, every day, for incredible music, thought-provoking talk and gut-busting comedy exclusively on The AIR. And check out the full schedule below, including our full day of fine programming…

Yesterday, for only the second time since August 18, 2013, there was no new post here in PopCult. There have been technical issues of late here at the Gazette-Mail blogs, and our servers were down from Monday morning until very early Wednesday. We are sorry for our regular readers who weren’t able to get their daily dose of PopCult, and we apologize to those folks who read PopCult to keep up with our programming on The AIR.

Thursday we will bring you the playlists for Radio Free Charleston and The Swing Shift, since they will both be replayed on The AIR that day, and later today we’ll tell you about a very special episode of Curtain Call that we have on tap for Wednesday afternoon.

Again, we apologize to our regular readers, and are keeping our fingers crossed that the technical issues are behind us.

This week’s art by yours truly is an abstract attempt to evoke the sensory overload of a big city, the way it overwhelms and envelopes you as you try to see everything at once. Unless you already live in a big city, in which case you try to block everything out. It’s a digital painting using some custom brushes. Click to see it bigger.

Meanwhile, over on The AIR, our Monday Marathon is a Lee Harrah Special! Monday, from 7 AM to 5 PM you can hear every episode (so far) of Harrah’s Hard & Heavy. At 5 PM Lee appears as a guest on a two-hour edition of Six Degrees of Separation, and then from 7 PM to 7 AM Tuesday morning, it’s Lee, and Me, discussing pop culture topics in depth as we present 12 hours of Word Association With Lee & Rudy.

You can tune in at the website, or right here on this Gamma-ray infused embedded player…

A couple of weeks ago we told you about how The Aquabats have a Kickstarter campaign to help pay for a revival of The Aquabats Super Show. We’re a little more than half-way through the campaign, and the Aquabats are a little less than half-way to their 1.1 million dollar goal.

You can read all about the campaign, see the first part of a new adventure, and find links so you can donate HERE.

But tonight we’re going to bring you a special treat. The Aquabats have been serializing the exploits of their quest in a series of Kickstarter Updates. To date there have been five entries (counting the first chapter, which you can see in the above link). This is almost like an extra-long episode of The Aquabats Super Show, being doled out in bite-sized chunks every two or three days. Below, we’re going to bring you up to date. You might want to go back and see the first chapter in that link I posted, first.

We’ll bring you more chapters as they appear online.

From late November, 2011, this week’s RFC Flashaback is “Red Popeye Shirt,” episode 148 of Radio Free Charleston. This edition of our show was hosted from a very soggy Veteran’s Memorial in Nitro, and presented music from the rock opera, “MARY” and Frenchy and the Punk.

This episode contains three songs filmed during the rehearsals for the Charleston institution, “Mary.” This was the fifteenth production of “Mary” the Scarpelli/Kehde rock opera from The Contemporary Youth Arts Company. We also had a great music video from our friends, Frenchy and the Punk, plus animation by yours truly, and we also have more confusing superhero action from Turkey, in honor of Thanksgiving.

You can read the full production notes HERE.

The PopCulteer
August 17, 2018

It’s time for a random roundup of minor points and cool news from the balliwick of this here blog, pop culture, starting off with a bit of navel-gazing.

Did You Get That Joke I Sent You?

Over a year ago in this space I wrote an installment of The PopCulteer that poked fun at my love of Tiki culture, despite the fact that I don’t drink, don’t each much of the food, and hate the beach. Just this week, somebody left a comment that indicated that they didn’t get the joke, and that they thought the column was “miserable.”

It’s bad enough that they didn’t get the joke. That’s a risk that anybody who makes a joke has to live with, but to label what was intended as a humor piece as “miserable,” well, that sort of stings.

The idea was that I was making fun of myself, and called myself a “Tiki Poser,” which I thought was a pretty funny term in and of itself. That the piece seemingly failed to convey that is on me. Part of the problem is that I tend to write authoritatively on any subject that I cover, no matter how trivial it may be in the grand scheme of things, and as such, if someone like our commentor comes along who does not know me personally, they may take what I wrote way too seriously. The subtlety of my comedic timing and use of the language appears not to be conducive to making people laugh.

I thought the piece was sufficiently ridiculous and silly enough that people would see it as the subtle satire and self-parody that it was intended to be.  Apparently I thought wrong.

On the other hand, it is possible that the guy who left the comment was just a humorless douchebag.

KISS in MEGO!

This morning, buried in the MEGO Museum Newsletter (subscribe here, it’s free!) was the tiny blockbuster news that Wave 2 of the new MEGO figures due at Target in October will include at least one figure of the band, KISS. See the swiped photo of Paul Stanely at right. (They broke the news at MEGO Museum a couple of days ago, which is why you need to check that site regularly–I missed it due to not being online much for my Birthday Week).

This is a bit of a shocker because Figures Toy Company has been producing MEGO-style KISS figures for years, and this has the potential to completely destroy their market, since the Target figures will be ten to fifteen dollars less per figure, at least.

The Figures Toy Company KISS figures (nine series and counting) are still being sold on their website, so it’s safe to assume that they had a non-exclusive license to produce figures based on the toy-friendly sludge metal band. They do seem to be turning their focus toward 12-inch figures with the KISS line, but that’s just returning to the original MEGO roots for KISS. Vintage MEGO KISS figures are highly-sought-after items by fans of the band.

The interesting twist here is that MEGO originally produced the figures at the 12″ size, not in their trademark 8″ size. So the MEGO figures that hit Target will actually be the same size as the original FTC figures, which were the first KISS figures produced in the traditional MEGO size.

This is also a good sign that Wave 2 of the new Target MEGO figures might offer a much more impressive line-up of characters than Wave 1.

Hairy Scary Hangout

Fans of old-school horror movie hosts should be aware of Cleveland’s The Mummy and The Monkey (seen right), who have hosted a couple of cool retro monster movie shows. I first discovered them on the late, lamented Bizarre TV, and now they’re experimenting with producing their show directly on their Facebook page.

Friday night, at 10 PM (EDT) you can visit their page for a new episode that will include the broadcast premiere of the Indie Flick by “Moron Productions” called This Woods Is Cursed.

According to the event description, in the movie “Some friends go camping and some scary stuff happens.” You can also expect skits, fan mail, live chat comments and the usual spooky fun from The Mummy and The Monkey. It’s good, scary fun for folks who like their cheesy horror movies with a side-serving of laughs.

Friday on The AIR

You know, we have a pretty cool independent internet radio station affiliated with PopCult called The AIR. I think I’ve mentioned it before. Friday we have two brand-new shows that you can listen to at the website, or on this nifty little embedded player…

Today at 1 PM it’s a new episode of Radio Free Charleston International, the show where yours truly gets to play whatever he wants. This week it’s all over the map, with a lot of just-released tunes and some great classics. This is free-format radio at it’s almost-extinct finest. Check out the playlist…

RFCI 057

The Aquabats “Play Doh”
3.2 “What You’re Dreaming”
Mog and the Water Tribe “Sleep”
Tokyo Rankers “Glory Days”
The Payolas “Rose”
Lola + The Cosmic Getaway “Tangerine Dream”
Richard Markowitz “The Wild, Wild West theme”
The Shadows “Apache”
The Shadracks “Every Inch of My Mind”
Ringo Starr “Vertical Man”
Exit Eden “A Question of Time”
Weird Al Yankovic “Uncontrollable Urge”
The Lumerians “Space Curse”
Lily Allen “Everything To Feel Something”
Ghost “Pro Memoria”
The Alarm “Cenotaph”
Weller “Standard”
Jeff Potter & The Rhythm Agents “Pushrod”
Andy Samford “Last Day of the Witch”
Joe Satriani “Super Funky Badass”
Spirit “Mr. Skin”
XTC “Making Plans For Nigel”
The English Beat “I Confess”
Steve Howe “Turbulence”
Elvis Costello “Tokyo Storm Warning”

Immediately following those two hours of musical anarchy, at 3 PM Sydney Fileen checks in with a special edition of Sydney’s Big Electric Cat that finds our presenter in a nostalgic mood, as she revisits the classic New Wave film/album URGH! A Music War.

This is the second time Sydney has paid tribute to URGH!, but this time she does so by playing the entire vinyl album, plus bonus songs from The Dead Kennedys, Splongeness Abounds, The Surf Punks and The Police that were in the film, but didn’t make it to the LP.

Radio Free Charleston International airs Friday at 1 PM and 10 PM, with replays Saturday at 1 PM, Sunday at 1 AM and 3 PM and Tuesday at 10 PM.

Sydney’s Big Electric Cat airs Friday at 3 PM with replays Saturday at 3 , Tuesday at 7 AM, Wednesday at 8 PM and Thursday at Noon.

Bakery Reminder

Don’t forget that the Bakery Construction Parties happen Saturday and Sunday at 8 AM. Details can be found HERE.

That is it for this week’s PopCulteer. Check back for all our regular features, and if all goes according to plan, next week will see us catch up on The PopCult Bookshelf, with mulitple reviews posted all week long.

This weekend, on both Saturday and Sunday, The Bakery (located at 1007 Bigley Avenue, Charleston) is calling for volunteers to gather for construction parties. If you’d like to pitch in to get The Bakery back in shape to reopen and run as a much-needed all-ages venue, this is the time to step up and pitch in. If you have any construction skills, or  can even pitch in with carrying stuff or landscaping, now is the time to show up and volunteer your services.

Starting at 8 AM each day, The Bakery needs volunteers to help with framing, sheetrock installation, electrical work, basic laboring, paint scraping, Landscaping and many other tasks. They can use all the help they can get, and even if you don’t have construction experience, any hands will be appreciated. Since being shut down by the City Fire Inspector last month, the crew at The Bakery have been working diligently to raise the funds to buy the materials needed to bring the building up to code so that they can reopen to the public.

A Bakery Board Member will be on site all day, so if you want to stop by and drop off Cash or Material Donations and check out the Progress of this Project, this is the time to do it. Even if you just want to see what all the fuss is about, the building will be open for inspection so you can get an idea of how cool this venue will be when completed. You can also donate via Facebook.

Right now, they really need volunteers who can help do the work needed to get this space into compliance with the city. As a Very Generous Donation Frank Gonzales III and Mi Cocina de Amor will be providing lunch for the Volunteers. The Bakery and Charleston Music and Arts Collective have released a statment thanking Frank for this and for showing his support for the project.

Charleston desperately needs a reliable all-ages venue. It will be a boon to the local music scene, help keep kids off the streets and revitalize a part of town that could really use some attention. This is a very worthy cause, and if you have some time to spare, it will be well worth the effort

Life Speaks to Michele Zirkle and Curtain Call are all-new Wednesday on The AIR! Tune in to the website, or on the embedded player below for this week’s slate of stimulating programs.

Our musical morning line-up on Wednesday continues with The Swing Shift at 7 AM, followed by Prognosis at 9 AM, Psychedelic Shack at 11 AM and an encore of a classic Curtain Call at Noon.  We are re-presenting classic episodes of On The Road with Mel at 1 PM.

At 1;30 PM, Life Speaks to Michele Zirkle presents an impromptu show that Michele recorded while out on a walk over the weekend. Last week we told you about how Michele would be stepping back from the weekly grind of producing a radio show, but we left the door open for her to return any time she wanted to, and this week the opportunity presented itself, so she offers up a new verbal essay on doing things your own way.

Life Speaks to Michele Zirkle can be heard this Wednesday at 1:30 PM and 7 PM, with replays on The AIR Friday at 9:30 AM and Sunday at 7 PM.

At 2 PM Beatles Blast presents one-hour audio blast of music by and about the lads from Liverpool. This week listen to the novelty oldies band, Big Daddy, cover the entire Sgt. Pepper album.  Beatles Blast can be heard Wednesday at 2 PM, Thursday at 11 AM and 9 PM, Friday at 5 PM, and Tuesday at 9 AM.

At 3 PM Wednesday on Curtain Call, we bring you a brand-new episode featuring a random assortment of show tunes. This week it’s totally random, as Mel jumps wildly from Broadway classics to obscure productions, off-Broadway hits and maybe a few flops, along the way. Among the musicals you will hear sampled on this week’s program are The Rhythm Club, The scarlet Pimpernel, A Letter To Harvey Milk, Camelot, Cannibal The Musical, Can-Can and more.

Curtain Call can be heard Wednesday at 3 PM, with replays Thursday at 7 AM and 8 PM and Saturday at 6 PM. An all-night marathon of Curtain Call episodes can be heard Wednesday nights, beginning at Midnight.

At 7:30 PM, we have gone into the AIR Archives and unearthed the missing seven episodes of Word Association with Lee and Rudy. These shows were misplaced on a stray hard drive and have not been heard in more than two years. We’ll bring them to you over the next seven weeks, and hopefully follow these with some new shows.

This week you can hear Lee Harrah and Rudy Panucci speak with reverence about the legacy of The Marx Toy Company in a show that was recorded just days after the announcement that the Marx Toy Museum would close back in early 2016.

Stay tuned all day, every day, for incredible music, thought-provoking talk and gut-busting comedy exclusively on The AIR. And check out the full schedule below, including our full day of fine programming…

Like I told you last week, Tuesday is our most-listened-to day on The AIR so we try to load it up with new episodes of our most popular shows, and once again that’s exactly what we did this week as we bring you more great local music and other goodies like Swing and Psychedelica. This week all three of our music programs feature new episodes, and they’re all pretty life-elevatingly terrific.  You can tune in at The AIR website, or listen in on this swell embedded radio player…

Today at 10 AM we are bringing you yet another brand-new episode of Radio Free Charleston, opening with brand new music from Jeff Ellis (his new single, “The Destroyer, seen below), and continuing with a great mix of new music and stuff from our archives, including Ann Magnuson, Stonebeard, In The Company of Wolves, Karma To Burn and more.

We also have a special treat courtesy of Jay Silverman, the co-host of The Third Shift (heard every Friday night on The AIR).  Jay shot a video of the band Shine performing a cover of Led Zepplin’s “Dazed and Confused” when they played Live on the Levee back in June, and he gave us the okay to use the audio from his video clip, so we could shine the light on Shine, one of Charleston’s best bands.

We’ll post the full playlist at the bottom of this post, after the jump.

Radio Free Charleston can be heard Tuesday at 10 AM and 10 PM, with replays Thursday at 2 PM, Friday at 8 PM and Saturday at 11 AM and Midnight, exclusively on The AIR.

At 2 PM it’s time for Nigel Pye and his psychedelic mixtape program, Psychedelic Shack. This week we get yet another new episode of Psychedelic Shack in its new one-hour format, bringing you Nigel and his weekly hour-long mix of mind-blowing psychedelic music. In this week’s show you’ll hear vintage Grateful Dead and more classic acid-trippy music, but again this week Nigel didn’t send us a playlist this week, so you’ll have to tune in to find out what he has up his Nehru-jacketed sleeve for you.

Psychedelic Shack can be heard Tuesday’s at 2 PM, with replays Wednesday at 11 AM, Thursday at 5 PM and Saturday at 7 AM.

At 3 PM The Swing Shift brings you a special themed-episode where the Swing bands attempt to go legit by applying the style of Swing to some of the most recognizable melodies of Classical Music. In one corner you have Glenn Miller, Les Brown, Benny Goodman and Brian Setzer, and in the other corner you have Bizet, Beethoven, Chopin and Wagner. It’s a Classical/Swing mash-up and both sides come out swinging. You’ll find the playlist at the bottom of this post, after the jump.

You can hear The Swing Shift Tuesday at 3 PM, with replays Wednesday at 7 AM, Thursday at 7 PM and Saturday at 9 AM, only on The AIR. You can also hear all-night marathons, seven hours each, starting at Midnight Thursday and Sunday evenings.

Remember, you can tune in to The AIR at all hours of the day and night for a variety and quality of programming that you will not find anywhere else.

Continue reading

Your PopCulteer celebrates his birthday today, and since I’m planning to enjoy myself, I just slapped up an old self-portrait that I ran in this space eleven years ago. It’s a bunch of me in different styles and colors, Warhol-style. I thought about doing a new one, but I pretty much look the same. At least I do when I have goatee, like I did back in June. I’m gonna read comics, play with toys, eat Graziano’s Pizza and cheesecake and watch wrestling today. So don’t expect any extra posts until tomorrow. Click the image to see a bigger version.

Meanwhile, Monday on our sister internet radio station, The AIR, the Monday Marathon keeps you up with the best of our local music scene with a full day of Radio Free Charleston, beginning at 7 AM and running through Tuesday morning. That’s our signature show on The AIR, and it’s my birthday present to you.  Tune in at the website, or listen on this handy embedded player…