Month: July 2019 (Page 3 of 4)

We are in the second week the return of Radio Free Charleston International to its original 3 PM Thursday timeslot on The AIR. You can listen at the website, or on this embedded radio player…

With our new schedule, we now have a replay of this week’s Radio Free Charleston at 2 PM, followed by a brand-new episode of Radio Free Charleston International at 3 PM. For you old-timers who remember the original broadcast incarnation of RFC, this combination comes close to recreating the original experience, with your PopCulteer unleashed to play whatever he felt like playing, mixed with a generous helping of great local music.

For this week’s RFC playlist, plus a link for a download, check out this post.

Radio Free Charleston International is the two-hour weekly show where Rudy Panucci (that’s me, by the way) gets to play whatever he wants. It’s our way of revisiting the golden age of free-format radio, which is sort of what inspired us to go into this medium in the first place.

As for this particular episode of Radio Free Charleston International, I’m still trying to conserve my voice a bit. Hosting three other shows and dealing with allergies and a lingering summer cold make it a bit daunting to do a two-hour program at the end of the week, so this week I only talk once, and introduce a mixtape-presentation of some of my favorite music in the world. I hope you guys dig it too. Check out the rather lengthy playlist:

RFC International 069

Yellow Magic Orchrestra “Day Tripper”
Iggy Pop “Ballad of Cookie McBride”
Frank Zappa “Uncle Remus”
DEVO “Smart Patrol/Mr. DNA”
Department of Crooks “What You Wanna Do Now”
Elvis Costello “Two Little Hitlers”
Kate Bush “Sat In Your Lap”
Klaus Nomi “Total Eclipse”
Oingo Boingo “Controller”
Julian Cope “Beautiful Love”
Split Enz “I Don’t Wanna Dance”
The Beautiful South “My Book”
The Stranglers “Punch and Judy”
New Musik “Straight Lines”
Men Without Hats “Dancing In The Moonlight”
Badfinger “Icicles”
The Beatles “Baby You’re A Rich Man”
George Harrison “When We Was Fab”
Paul McCartney “Bogey Music”
John Lennon “Starting Over”
Ringo Starr “Golden Blunders”
Brian Wilson “Love and Mercy”
Heart “Bebe Le Strange”
ELP “Touch And Go”
YES “Don’t Kill The Whales”
Klaatu “Hope”
Lene Lovich “Bird Song”
The Aquabats “Robot Bird Head”
Me First and the Gimme Gimmes “I Believe I Can Fly”
The Moog Cookbook “Are You Gonna Go My Way”
Jellyfish “The Glutton of Sympathy”
The Clash “Rudie Can’t Fail”

You can tune in to RFC International every Thursday at 3 PM on The AIR. If you miss it, you have plenty of chances to catch a replay: Fridays at 1 PM and 10 PM, Saturdays at 1 PM, Sundays at 1 AM and 2 PM, Mondays at 9 PM, and Tuesdays at 11 PM, exclusively on The AIR.

This Wednesday afternoon The AIR, presents new episodes of Beatles Blast and Curtain Call.  You can listen at the website, or on this embedded radio player…

At 2 PM on Beatles Blast, yours truly hosts the sixth of a ten-part look at rare and unreleased music by The Beatles. For most of the summer, Beatles Blast will follow this format and bring you The Lost Beatles Project. This will be a treat for the die-hard fans as we mine the best of the recently-released archive projects by the band, and mix in rare releases and wild remixes from their band and solo years. We won’t be posting playlists for these shows because the whole point is that each of these programs will be a revelatory surprise.

Beatles Blast can be heard every Wednesday at 2 PM, with replays Thursday at 9 PM, Friday at 11 AM, Sunday at 5 PM and Tuesdays at 9 AM, exclusively on The AIR.

At 3 PM Mel Larch presents a new hour of great musical theater on Curtain Call.  This week Mel brings you a terrific mix of songs from shows ranging from The Who’s Tommy to Monty Python’s Spamalot, The Book of Mormon, Hadestown, Beetlejuice The Musical and more. It’s a killer mix of old and new tunes from famous and obscure shows.

Just check out this playlist:

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“Amazing Journey” from The Who’s Tommy
“Find Your Grail” from Monty Python’s Spamalot
“Two By Two” from The Book of Mormon
“My Whisper” from Shiver: A Musical Ghost Story
“No Time At All” from Pippin
“Chant (Reprise)” from Hadestown
“Overture/Big Bright Beautiful World” from Shrek: The Musical
“Live From Hell” from Diva-Live From Hell
“You Took The Words Right Out Of My Mouth” from Bat Out of Hell
“Skid Row(Downtown)” from Little Shop of Horrors
“Upgrade” from Be More Chill
“Big Fun” from Heathers
“Day-O/The Banana Boat Song” from Beetlejuice

After the new hour of Curtain Call, stick around for two additional episodes from the Curtain Call archives. Curtain Call can be heard Wednesday at 3 PM, with replays Thursday at 8 AM and 8 PM, Friday at 10 AM and Saturday at 6 PM. An all-night marathon of Curtain Call episodes can be heard Wednesday nights, beginning at Midnight, and an additional marathon can be heard Sunday evenings from 6 PM to midnight..

Once again on The AIR, PopCult’s adjunct radio station, we have an afternoon of all-new-programming.

Tuesday on The AIR we deliver new episodes of Radio Free Charleston, Psychedelic Shack and The Swing Shift to our loyal listeners. Zip on over and tune in at the website, or you could just take the easy route, and  listen to this embedded radio player…

It all kicks off at 10 AM (with a replay at 10 PM– all times EDT) with a brand-new edition of Radio Free Charleston. This week’s show is once-again loaded with great local music by some of the Charleston area’s finest bands (and a few who were just passing through). We open the show with brand-new music from Spencer Elliott, and continue with great stuff from Fletcher’s Grove, Kevin Scarbrough, Emmalea Deal, The Big Bad and more.

You should be able to click on the episode number above the playlist that follows, and go to a page where you can download a low-res version of this week’s show.

Check out the playlist:

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Spencer Elliott “Viking Lullaby
Fletcher’s Grove “Masterbeast”
Kevin Scarbrough “White Paper, Black Pen”
Emmalea Deal “Just Take”
The Heavy Editors “To The Phonomatic”
Mediogres “Frontwards”
The Big Bad “Nobody Makes It Out Of Here Alive”
John Lancaster “Forever The Alarmist”
Holden Caulfield “End of Wars”
The Jasons “We’re Gonna Kill That Girl”
Todd Burge “Your Punk Is Dead”
Dead For Decades “Lonely Spotlight”
No Rain “Soul For Sale”
The Defectors “Nightlife In Tokyo”

Radio Free Charleston can be heard Tuesday at 10 AM and 10 PM, with replays Thursday at 2 PM, Friday at 9 AM and 7 PM, Saturday at 11 AM and Midnight, Sunday at 1 PM and the next Monday at 8PM, exclusively on The AIR.

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This week’s art, yet another New York City streetscene, started out life as a water color and pastel piece that was too sloppy-looking for my tastes after a couple of days of drying, so it got a heavy going-over in ink, and some additional digital tweaking after it was scanned.

This is a look at the Dali Market, on Mahattan’s lower end. We did not stop and go in, so I don’t know if they sold any melting clocks or anything like that.

Our NYC-themed art will continue next week, since I got a bunch of this stuff laying around.

You can click the image to see it bigger.

Meanwhile, Monday on The AIR, this week we bring you a Monday Marathon of DJ Betty Rock and Radio Coolsvielle. That begins at 7 AM.

At 3 PM Herman Linte’s show, Prognosis, now holds court on Mondays. This Herman brings us another great two-hour program of the best prog-rock of the last fifty years. Just check out this playlist and listen at the website, on on the widget below the playlist:

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Carl Palmers’ ELP Legacy “Knife Edge”
Adrian Belew “Futurevision”
Camel “Lunar Sea”
Steve Wilson “luminol”
Myriad “Beyond The Realm Pt.2”
The Mighty Bard “I Know”
Circuline “Forbidden Planet”
The Buggles “I Am A Camera”
Renaissance “Camera, Camera”
Gandalf’s Fist “Clouds”
ABWH “Quartet”
Lifesigns “Carousel”
Tiras Buck “What We Were”
Marillion “Sounds That Can’t Be Made (live)”

Each week now, Prognosis will be followed by a classic episode at 5 PM, and then by replays of last week’s Psychedelic Shack at 7 PM, Radio Free Charleston at 8 PM and RFC International at 9 PM. Then at 11 PM we kick it back over to Prognosis, with an eight hour marathon of great progressive rock.

You can listen to The AIR at the website, or on this embedded radio player…

Actually, I don’t really want any candy at the moment. After my trip to CJ Buckets in Saint Clairsville, Ohio, a couple of weeks ago, I’m pretty well stocked-up on candy for the next month or so.

However, having all this candy in the house has me wondering how some of it was made. So this evening we’re going to look at a few of the thousands of videos on the YouTube about how they make these wonderous sweet treats that bring smiles, happiness and Type 2 Diabetes to kids of all ages

I’m going to toss in a mix of well-kinown and obscure candy, just to preserve the random nature of this week’s collection of sweet videos.  You can think of it as an unlabelled assortment of surprises. Just don’t take a bite, then put it back in the box because you don’t like the filling.

That’s just gross.

More candy videos below the jump…

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This week we flash back to September, 2013 for the second of our RFC MINI SHOWs. This episode features two songs by local metal legends, Zeroking, recorded at the ECMC Kick Cancer benefit show that happened Summer 2013 at The Eagles Club on Charleston’s West Side. Zeroking made their debut on RFC 189, and we banked a couple of extra songs by them to use as our second MINI SHOW.

This was an interesting in the history of Radio Free Charleston. I had decided to start The RFC MINI SHOW as a stopgap to delay our 200th episode because I couldn’t pull together any big special plans in the short time before that milestone was rapidly approaching.  The plan was to alternate between the shows so that I could bring out something every week. Because my plans often go awry, we blew that schedule two weeks into it. To make up for it, we dropped this show, and then one day later we released the third RFC MINI SHOW, which you will see in this space next week.

The PopCulteer
July 5, 2019

Late in the afternoon on the day before the Fourth of July holiday, word broke that Mad Magazine was going to come to an end…of sorts.

Beginning with issue ten (the book relaunched with new numbering last year), the sixty-seven year old magazine will leave the newsstands, and will be distributed only to the direct market (comic book stores) and subscribers. With the following issue, Mad Magazine will go all-reprint, mining its vast archives to present classic material under a new cover every two months. They still plan to do a new “year in review” issue every year, since those still sell pretty well.

This is very sad for those of us who grew up on Mad Magazine. There’s no denying that Mad helped foster a healthy sense of cynicism and satire that shaped every generation since the 1950s. The cultural impact of Mad cannot be denied, and it will be missed, even if it had been largely irrelevant since the 1970s.  It is apparently the only magazine that the president reads, even if he has to have the jokes explained to him.

The magazine is not completely dead, since it will live on as a reprint title, but for a largely topical humor magazine, that’s as close as you can get to a death sentence without actually taking it behind the barn and shooting it.

The reasons for this change are simple…magazines are not selling well at all anymore. The entire industry has been dealing with plummetting sales for decades. Prices are going up. Frequency of publication is dropping (Entertainment Weekly only comes out once a month now). Long-running publications are shutting down left and right. There is a bit more to it than that, however.

The reason that Mad Magazine is not just being killed completely is pretty complex. First of all, the magazine still has a loyal subscriber base. It’s not large enough to justify the printing of new material, but it’s still sizable enough for Warner Media to want to avoid paying out refunds for unfinished subs. There is also a lot of value in the name. Mad-themed reprint volumes (like the one seen at left) still do well in the bookstore market, and there have been three different TV shows based on the magazine over the years.

There is, however, a more foreboding reason for the actions of Warner Global Entertainment and Experience Brands (the current name of DC Comics’ parent division) this week.

Earlier this year, the future of Mad Magazine was thrown into doubt when it was revealed that Bill Morrison, the high-profile new editor of the magazine, was laid off, along with several other well-respected DC Comics executives (DC has been in charge of Mad since the death of the magazine’s founder, William M. Gaines, in 1992–before that they were sister companies, both owned by Time-Warner).

Since the acquisition of Warner Communications by AT&T last year, the entire company has been placed under the scrutiny of corporate bean-counters. The heads of several of Warner’s divisions, many of them long-serving folks with incredible track records, have been forced out of the company by the new owners. The heads of HBO and Turner Broadcasting left in March. Diane Nelson, who had been running DC Entertainment and Warner Interactive, bailed out last year in advance of the AT&T deal. She’d been the person who shepherded the Harry Potter franchise before that.

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Check out what’s on The AIR, as Friday sees a brand-new episode of  Sydney’s Big Electric Cat. Sydney Fileen presents two hours of New Wave Music gone Hollywood! You can listen at the website, or on this embedded radio player…

We have tinkered with the schedule a bit this week, but Friday at 3 PM you will still get your two-hour dose of crunchy New Wave goodness. This week we bring you New Wave classics that found their way to the big and small screen. You’ll hear hit songs that were used in movies like The Breakfast Club, Rumblefish, Pretty In Pink, Times Square, The Last American Virgin and more, plus you’ll get to relive New Wave moments from TV shows like CPO Sharkey, Teenage Kicks, Cavegirl and Square Pegs.

Some of the songs you’ll hear were only available on soundtrack albums or singles for most of the 1980s. This is a great way to hear some hard-to-find tunes, along with some massive hit songs.

Just check out this epic playlist that Sydney has compiled for you…

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Simple MInds “Don’t You Forget About Me”
The Knack “My Sharona”
Wang Chung “To Live And Die In L.A.”
Bow Wow Wow “Go Wild In The Country”
“The Undertones “Teenage Kicks”
Psychedelic Furs “Pretty In Pink”
New Order “Shell Shock”
Echo and The Bunnymen “Bring On The Dancing Horses”
OMD “If You Leave”
Stan Rideway and Stewart Copeland “Don’t Box Me In”
Oingo Boingo “Weird Science”
The Art of Noise “Dragnet”
The Dickies “Hideous”
DEVO “Peek A Boo”
The Waitresses “Square Pegs”
Elvis Costello and The Attractions “Accidents Will Happen”
Pretenders “Talk of The Town”
Joe Jackson “Pretty Boys”
XTC “Take This Town”
The Ramones “I Wanna Be Sedated”
The Cure “Grinding Halt”
Gary Numan “Down In The Park”
The Human League “Love Action”
The Cars “Since You’ve Gone”
U2 “I Will Follow”
The Gleaming Spires “Are You Ready For The Sex Girls”
Blondie “Call Me”
Frankie Goes To Hollywood “Relax”

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, Tuesday at 7 AM, Wednesday at 8 PM and Thursday at Noon, exclusively on The AIR. Every Monday at 3 PM, we bring you four classic episodes of Sydney’s Big Electric Cat, just so you can be all New Wave-y when you get home from work.

Look for a new PopCulteer later this afternoon.

On this day when we celebrate our independence as a nation, we also celebrate the return of Radio Free Charleston International to its original 3 PM Thursday timeslot on The AIR.  After a year away from Thursdays, RFCI couldn’t help but come back to where it all started. You can listen at the website, or on this embedded radio player…

With our shaken and stired new schedule, we now have a replay of this week’s Radio Free Charleston at 2 PM, followed by a brand-new episode of Radio Free Charleston International at 3 PM. For you old-timers who remember the original broadcast incarnation of RFC, this combination comes close to recreating the original experience, with your PopCulteer unleashed to play whatever he felt like playing, mixed with a generous helping of great local music.

For this week’s RFC playlist, plus a link for a download, check out this post.

Radio Free Charleston International is the two-hour weekly show where Rudy Panucci (that’s me, by the way) gets to play whatever he wants. It’s our way of revisiting the golden age of free-format radio, which is sort of what inspired us to go into this medium in the first place.

As for this particular episode of Radio Free Charleston International, well, unfortunately your humble host has become afflicted with a nasty summer cold. This meant that I needed to minimize my announcing on this show so that I didn’t completely blow out my voice. My ailment is your gain, however, as I put together a show filled with ridiculously long songs. I even managed to throw in a couple of brand-new tunes from The Aristrocrats and The Pornadoes. Check out this very short playlist…

RFC International 068

The Aristocrats “The Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde”
Frank Zappa “The Adventures of Gregory Peccary”
Brian May “Blues Breaker”
YES “Perpetual Change (live)”
The Pornadoes “Trouble’s Gonna Find You”
ELP “Tarkus (live)”
Genesis “Supper’s Ready (live)”

You can tune in to RFC International every Thursday at 3 PM on The AIR. If you miss it, you have plenty of chances to catch a replay: Fridays at 1 PM and 10 PM, Saturdays at 1 PM, Sundays at 1 AM and 2 PM, Mondays at 9 PM, and Tuesdays at 11 PM, exclusively on The AIR.

This Wednesday afternoon, on the eve of a midweek holiday, The AIR, presents new episodes of Beatles Blast and Curtain Call.  You can listen at the website, or on this embedded radio player…

At 2 PM on Beatles Blast, yours truly hosts the fifth of a ten-part look at rare and unreleased music by The Beatles. For most of the summer, Beatles Blast will follow this format and bring you The Lost Beatles Project. This will be a treat for the die-hard fans as we mine the best of the recently-released archive projects by the band, and mix in rare releases and wild remixes from their band and solo years. We won’t be posting playlists for these shows because the whole point is that each of these programs will be a revelatory surprise.

Beatles Blast can be heard every Wednesday at 2 PM, with replays Thursday at 9 PM, Friday at 11 AM, Sunday at 5 PM and Tuesdays at 9 AM, exclusively on The AIR.

At 3 PM Mel Larch presents a new hour of great musical theater on Curtain Call.  This week Mel brings you recordings from the cast album of the 2019 Tony winner for Best Revival of a Musical, Oklahoma. You’ll hear new performances with new arrangements of all the classic songs from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s legendary show, including Tony winner Ali Stroker’s rendition of “I Cain’t Say No.”

After the new hour of Curtain Call, stick around for two additional episodes from the Curtain Call archives. Curtain Call can be heard Wednesday at 3 PM, with replays Thursday at 8 AM and 8 PM, Friday at 10 AM and Saturday at 6 PM. An all-night marathon of Curtain Call episodes can be heard Wednesday nights, beginning at Midnight, and an additional marathon can be heard Sunday evenings from 6 PM to midnight..

Thursday, aside from being the Fourth of July, will see the return of new episodes of Radio Free Charleston International to the 3 PM timeslot. This week should be interesting indeed because in addition to knowing that listenership will be very low due to the holiday, your PopCulteer (and RFCI host) is battling a narsty Summer cold, and will probably throw together a show consisting of the longest songs that he hasn’t played yet, just so he can talk less and conserve his voice. Check PopCult tomorrow to see what I come up with.