Month: July 2020 (Page 3 of 4)

Sometimes we get random here at PopCult, and you can’t get much more random than presenting the 1974 NBC Saturday Morning Preview Special. This half-hour look at the then-upcoming Fall Saturday morning line-up features both Jimmy Osmond AND Johnny Whitaker, plus The World of Sid and Marty Krofft. Not only do we get to see the mind-altering H.R. Pufnstuf (which is spelled about five different ways on the internet), but we also get to see some repurposed “risque” puppets from back in the days when Sid and Marty Krofft did an adult nightclub act, before they did really trippy kids shows.

This was the year that NBC debuted Wheelie and the Chopper Bunch, Run Joe Run (a live-action adventure show starring a dog), Land of the Lost and the second season of the animated Star Trek cartoon. Much of the show is taken up by surreally-horrible song-and-dance numbers featuring Osmond and the Krofft puppets. The audience is mostly made up of costumed cast members from Krofft shows like H.R. Pufnstuf, Lidsville, The Bugaloos and Sigmund and the Sea Monsters. Many fans of these shows grew up to develop serious drug habits and require therapy.

For the younger PopCult readers, back in the days before cable television, when there were only three or four commercial channels in most cities, Saturday morning was reserved for cartoons and other kids programming. Every year there’d be ads in the comic books, and a half-hour special that usually aired the Friday night before the new programming season kicked off.

This is a particularly twisted one of those.

This week we are going to go back just over five years, to our big ninth anniversary show for Radio Free Charleston.

This special anniversary featured music videos by The Company Stores, Close The Hatch and Volt 9000. We also had live performances by Tape Age and Speedsuit and animation from Third Mind Incarnation. We kicked it all off with a trailer for Ann Magnuson’s Dream Puppet Theater.

This was the last anniversary episode of our video show that we’ve produced to date. The following spring I was diagnosed with Myasthenia Gravis, and production of the video program dropped to about one show per year, while I decided to focus my energies on our radio incarnation, which you can hear on The AIR every Tuesday at 10 AM and 10 PM. At some point I’d like to do more with our video version of the show, but my health, combined with the pandemic, has proven to be an obstacle. I actually have footage for two episodes in the can, but still need to produce some finishing elements that haven’t come together yet due to the pandemic.

However, this was a particularly strong episode of the show, and it seems like it was a lifetime ago, instead of just five years. The Company Stores have a new lineup and vocalist. I have not kept up with Close The Hatch and Volt 9000. Tape Age broke up and its lead singer-songwriter, Sam Scholten formed Bon Air. I think Speedsuit is still a going concern, but it’s hard to keep track with the pandemic putting most live performances on hiatus. Life goes on.

The PopCulteer
July 10, 2020

We celebrate the part of the UK that was smart enough to avoid Brexit on a brand-new Sydney’s Big Electric Cat Friday afternoon on The AIR.  You can hear this show and more Friday on The AIR website, or just click on this embedded radio player…

For several months now Sydney Fileen has been promising me a special episode of her show devoted to the insane amount of Punk and New Wave music that came out of Scotland, and this week she has finally delivered.

This week Sydney’s Big Electric Cat is entirely sourced from a recent boxed set, which was inspired by a 2015 British television documentary. BIG GOLD DREAMS documents the vibrant independent music scene to emerge in Scotland across the late 70s and 80s. Initially ignited by punk, labels sprang up in Glasgow, Edinburgh and elsewhere to give a voice to the explosion of new acts across the country. Named after Fire Engines’ memorable single and Grant McPhee’s 2015 TV and DVD documentary, BIG GOLD DREAMS includes many of the Scottish music scene’s most important names as well as countless obscurities.

Sydney has chosen the cream of the crop of what was already an incredible collection of music, to bring us two hours of fantastic Scottish New Wave. Sydney has chosen not to back-announce for this episode, so for those of you scoring at home, here’s the playlist:

BEC 060

Johnny and The Self Abusers “Dead Vandals”
Fire Engines “Big Gold Dream”
The Rezillos “I Can’t Stand My Baby”
The Drive “Jerkin'”
Another Pretty Face “All The Boys Love Carrie”
Shake “Culture Shock”
Altered Images “Dead Pop Stars”
Josef K “Sorry For Laughing”
Cocteau Twins “Feathers Oar-Blades”
The Waterboys “A Girl Called Johnny”
Biff Bang Pow! “There Must Be A Better Life”
The Wee Cherubs “Dreaming”
The Pastels “Baby Honey”
Strawberry Switchblade “BMX Bandits”
The French Impressionists “Pick Up The Rhythm”
The Jesus and Mary Chain “Upside Down”
Simple Minds “Chelsea Girl
Edwynn Collins “Don’t Shilly Shally”
The Skids “Reasons”
Primal Scream “All Fall Down”
The Bluebells “Cath”
The Soup Dragons “Whole Wide World”
The Valves “Robot Love”
Fingerprintz “Dancing With Myself”
The Zips “Take Me Down”
The Visitors “Electric Heat”
Fire Exit “Time Wall”
The Prats “Die Todten Reyton Schnell”
The Cuban Heels “Walk On Water”
The Associates “Tell Me Easter’s On Friday”
The Shamen “Happy Days”
Revolving Paint Dream “Flowers In The Sky”
The Vaselines “Teenage Superstar”
Aztec Camera “All I need Is Everything”

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. You can also hear select episodes of Sydney’s Big Electric Cat as part of the overnight Haversham Recording Institute marathon that starts every Monday at 11 PM. I believe we may expect one more new episode of each of our Haversham programms before the crew knocks off for a couple of weeks of quarantined summer holiday.

And that is it for this week’s PopCulteer. As always, check back for fresh content every day, including all our regular features.

The PopCult Comix Bookshelf

Shazam! The World’s Mightiest Mortal Vol. 2
by E. Nelson Bridwell, Kurt Schaffenberger, Elliot S. Maggin and others
DC Comics
ISBN-13: 978-1779501172
$49.99 (discounted at many booksellers)

I have mentioned many times in PopCult that The Original Captain Marvel is my all-time favorite superhero. I got hooked on the comics in the 1970s when I lucked into a giant tabloid-sized reprint of classic Captain Marvel stories from the 1940s and 50s.

I started buying the “Shazam” comic book (they couldn’t use “Captain Marvel” in the title because Marvel comics had claimed the name), and it was a mix of classic reprints and new stories that attempted to capture the magic of the original stories, which had mostly been written by Otto Binder.

Shazam! The World’s Mightiest Mortal Vol. 2 collects the newly-created material from issues 19 to 35 (completing the original run) and also the tabloid sized Superman vs. Shazam comic book.

All of these were published from 1975 to 1978 (with the exception of five text pages from earlier in the run that are included here). Some of these books were reprinted in black and white in a Showcase Edition a few years ago, but we get to see them in full color in this collection. This is just a terrific collection of fun superhero stories that show what comics were like back before they got all grim and gritty.

This was a curious point in the run of the Shazam comic. By 1975, the Shazam Saturday morning live-action show had debuted and DC Comics (then National Periodical Publications) found themselves in a quandry. Captain Marvel had become one of their top merchandise sellers, but the comic books were lagging far behind.

It’s often said that DC did not understand the characters, and by this time Captain Marvel’s co-creator, C.C. Beck, who had come out of retirement to launch the new book, had left it in a dispute over the quality of the writing. Even with the character being a merchandising powerhouse under the “Shazam” brand, the comic book was selling so poorly that it went to an all-reprint format and was dropped to quarterly publication status while the Shazam TV show was at the top of the Saturday morning ratings.

This collection sort of puts the lie to the idea that DC didn’t understand the characters. It includes one of my all-time favorite Marvel Family stories, and after a year of reprints, the title came back with new material featuring E. Nelson Bridwell, a DC editor with a deep love of the characters, as the writer.

These are, for the most part, family-friendly superhero stories aimed at a younger audience, but they are highly entertaining and address more complicated and adult topics than you migh expect. Most of the art is handled by Kurt Schaffenberger, a veteran of the original Captain Marvel and Marvel Family comics, and there are some interesting interludes with other artists as well.

That story that ranks among my favorites is “The Strange and Terrible Disappearance of Maxwell Zodiac,” written by Elliot S. Maggin with art by Schaffenberger. This is a Bradburyesque tale of a scientist who undertakes a grand experiment to evolve to a higher plane. It’s a gentle story that does not involve world domination or evil. We do get a mob scene, and we get to see Captain Marvel, Mary Marvel and Captain Marvel Jr. do battle with a dragon, a platoon of giant sumo wrestlers and some space robots, so it’s not totally devoid of action. That it tells this story in a mere 18 pages is almost unthinkable considering today’s decompressed storytelling.

A full year elapsed between that story and the next all-new issue of Shazam (we get to see the newly-drawn covers for the reprint issues here), and that new issue was the first to really attempt to cash in on success of the TV show. It featured a crossover with the companion TV show, ISIS (the superheroine, not the terrorist organization). The first half of issue #25 was essentially an Isis story with a cameo by Captain Marvel, and it was drawn in a realistic manner by Dick Giordano.I believe that this story and cover were omitted from the Showcase Edition collection, and that this is the first time this story has ever been reprinted.

The backup story, by Bridwell and Schaffenberger, set up a major story arc, which continued almost to the end of the comic’s 1970s run.

Beginning with issue #26, the Captain’s alter-ego, boy reporter Billy Batson, was sent on a cross-country assignment with the Marvel Family mascot, Uncle Dudley, accompanying him in a custom RV. Uncle Dudley even grew a mustache so he’d look more like Les Tremayne, the “Mentor” who accompanied Billy on the TV show.

This run of stories managed to make the comic book more like the TV show while harkening back to the golden age gimmick that saw Captain Marvel travelling to different cities (in order to boost sales in those cities). Captain Marvel fought Dr. Sivana, and then Mr. Mind, as they went from city to city wreaking havoc. Billy and Uncle Dudley “followed” so they could capture news footage for station WHIZ. Along the way we get to see landmarks and adventures in Detroit, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, Indianapolis and other cities. In this run of stories we also get the post-golden age revival of Black Adam, who has since become quite a major character in the DC Universe.

These are some fun comic books. They’re light adventure and perfect for all ages. The art is interesting because at one point, Schaffenberger, who inked his own pencils almost all of the time, was instead inked by the legendarily-questionable Vince Colletta for a couple of stories. Colletta actually doesn’t butcher Schaffenberger’s work too much, but you can tell that he eliminated a few background buildings and figures. Another story is inked by the then-newcomer Bill Wiacek, and that artwork is almost as good as when Schaffenberger inks himself.

We also get a couple of issues pencilled by Philippino artist Tenny Henson, which represent his only two American superhero pencilling gigs. Both of these are inked by Colletta, but the first one turned out so bad that they had Schaffenberger come in and re-ink all the faces of major characters in the second. Henson went on to a long career in animation, where he worked on He-Man, Blackstar, The X Men, Animaniacs, Exo-Squad and many other series.

Then, near the end of the run of Shazam, in 1977, we had the “Hail Mary” pass of revamping the artistic approach of the series. Instead of presenting the stories in the clean, golden-age style of the original comics, DC decided to update the art to a more modern approach.

They gave the assignment to the team of Alan Weiss and Joe Rubenstein, both then-young talents who have since become respected veterans, and the results were impressive…and jarring…and to be honest, the art on this one story did not age well.

Weiss went on to do the first KISS comic magazine a year later, but with this book he seems to be struggling with integrating his style with the cartoonier aspects of the original Captain Marvel comics, and the end result is a bit awkward. The pages with Captain Nazi, the villain on the issue, look spectacular but when Captain Marvel shows up, things go a little screwy.

With the next (and final) issue (seen left), Weiss and Rubenstein were replaced by the art team of Don Newton and Schaffenberger, and the result were glorious. Newton, a life-long fan of Captain Marvel, continued as the artist of the Shazam feature after this, as it moved to World’s Finest Comics as a back-up strip.

After this run of the Shazam title ended, the Marvel Family of characters moved on to World’s Finest (and then to Adventure Comics) and that run of stories, written by Bridwell and pencilled by Newton, has never been reprinted.

The team of Bridwell and Newton continued telling great adventures that did manage to update the look of the Marvel Family without losing their original charm, and along the way, Bridwell, a comics historian and the first die-hard comics fan to turn pro, managed to weave the history of Kid Eternity, a Quality Comics character that DC Comics had acquired, in with that of Captain Marvel Jr. In the golden age of comics, both features shared a writer, the legendary Otto Binder.

Shazam! The World’s Mightiest Mortal Vol. 2 wraps up with issue #35, leaving those later Bridwell/Newton stories uncollected. I’m hoping that this book does well enough that we can get a third volume that would bring this incarnation of DC’s “Shazam” stories to a close. (Update: Volume Three seems to be on the schedule for January, 2021, but with the recent shake-up in management at DC, that is not guaranteed to happen)

However, that is not all that’s in this collection. In 1976 DC teamed up with Marvel and released a tabloid-sized comic book, Superman vs. The Amazing Spider-man, which sold a ridiculous number of books. A couple of years later DC tried to repeat that formula with several follow up tabloid comics featuring Superman “vs.” Wonder Woman (then on TV), Muhammed Ali and then they published Superman vs. Shazam in 1978, around the time the Shazam comic book was winding down.

The 72-page story from that giant-sized comic is reprinted here in a smaller format, and to be honest, it is probably the least impressive of the Superman tabloid crossover comics. It’s written by Gerry Conway and drawn by Rich Buckler with inks by Dick Giordano, and I don’t think anyone involved would rank this among their best works.

Conway, who wrote the Superman vs. The Amazing Spider-man book, had never written Captain Marvel before, and doesn’t really seem to have a handle on the characters. One gets the impression that this was “just a job” for him. Likewise, the art by Buckler has the look of having been done under a very tight deadline. Both men have done so much great work that it’s probably best not to dwell on what was probably just a quick assignment for both men.

It’s not awful, but it’s underwhelming and mainly has novelty and historical value, but it doesn’t fit in with the rest of this collection. I can understand it’s inclusion, if only to leave enough of the World’s Finest Shazam stories to be collected in a possible third volume.

I hope we do get another volume. Shazam! The World’s Mightiest Mortal Vol. 2 is a great collection of fun comics, and it’s a welcome respite from today’s overly-wraught superhero comics.

So here’s what happened…your PopCulteer had rough drafts of two reviews (one book, one music), one of which was to be finished and posted today. However, before doing this, the plan was to run out early this morning to take care of a pressing errand.

Unfortunately, I didn’t realize how hot and nasty it would be, and what kind of number that would do on my Myasthenia Gravis. When I got home I was pretty much spent, and had to take some meds that make my brain not work good for sentence-making. I promised you guys fresh content every day, but today it’s going to be art.

I decided to crank out a quick digital painting, using a photo of a slick-looking custom car from a Doo Wop Road Run that took place a few years ago (and will take place again after the pandemic is over, but not this year). I have no idea what the car is, so if anybody wants to chime in and tell me, that’s what the comments are for. Meanwhile, enjoy this quick-and-sloppy digital painting that I just slapped against a psychedelic background for your amusement. It was easier and faster than struggling with words today.

And click the image if you want to see it bigger.

I might just have two review posts tomorrow, if I recover enough.

Tuesday on The AIR we deliver a brand-new episodes of Radio Free Charleston, that’s loaded with new music, deep cuts and classic tracks. In order to hear these gems, you simply have to move your cursor over and tune in at the website, or you could just stay on this page, and  listen to this excitable little embedded radio player…

We have yet another three-hour Radio Free Charleston at 10 AM and 10 PM Tuesday.  This week it’s another show jam-packed with great music from Charleston and the whole world.  This week we open with new music from a second-generation RFC band, Ronald And The RayGunz, plus tracks from Jay Parade, Mark Beckner Group and new music from The Lickerish Quartet Threesome, a new band made up of former members of Jellyfish. It’s all part of another three-hour epic collection of cool music.

Check out the playlist to see all the goodies we bring you this week…

RFCv5 023

hour one
Ronald + RayGunz “Black And White”
Jay Parade “Hitchiker”
Bon AIr “Compusure”
Three Bodies “Shingles and Tar”
Plus Many Others “Chris Was Cool”
Battleship Battleship “Cutting Corners”
The Lickerish Quartet Threesome “Lighthouse Spaceship Revised”
Anderson/Ponty Band “Owner of a Lonely Heart”
Aphrodite’s Child “You Always Stand In My Way”
ELO “Mahattan Rumble”
Snakefinger “Trashing All The Loves of History”
Die Roten Rosen “Zwei Mдdchen Aus Germany”
Dweezil Zappa “Cosmik Debris”
The Beach Boys “Vega-Tables”
Shantih Shantih “Winter in September”
Forbidden Planet “Hands Around The Throat”

hour two
Mark Beckner Group “Dear Caroline”
Emmalea Deal “Just Take”
Gentle Giant “The River”
Neil “My White Bicycle”
Peter Gabriel “Down The Dolce Vita”
Kate Bush “Get Out Of My House”
Agent Orange “Tearing Me Apart”
Jellyfish “The Ghost at Number One”
Klaatu “Long Live Politzania”
Jean-Michael Jarre with John Carpenter “A Question of Blood”
John Foxx “Running Across Thin Ice”
Mediogres “The Ballad of Marla Singer”

The Struts “My Machine”
Underdog Blues Revue “Mad River”
Roger Daltrey “Bitter and Twisted”
Lemmy, Phil Campbell and Rocky George “The Trooper”
Killing Joke “Euphonia”
Screamin’ Jay Hawkins “Heart Attack and Vine”
Boomtown Rats “Rat Trap”
Supefetch “Joy”
David Synn “Tolerance 0”
Hellblinki “Wicked World”
Trielement “Slumber”

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 8 PM, exclusively on The AIR.

At 1PM you can hear an encore of last week’s Disco Extravaganza, Mel Larch’s MIRRORBALL. 2 PM brings a special replay of the first episode of Steven Allen Adams’ NOISE BRIGADE. At 3 PM we re-present a couple of recent episodes of The Swing Shift, hosted by yours truly. 6 PM sees a replay of last week’s new Comedy Vault, featuring Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks. Tune in to The AIR for the best alternative radio on the internet.

For our first artwork of July I’m going to take a minor leap from last month’s Op Art tribute to Richard Anuszkiewicz and offer up a piece of Pop Art that combines a little geometric art with an old figure sketch and some digital painting. It’s called “Hurdle” and I intend it to be a representation of man struggling to overcome rampant stupidity. I can’t imagine why that issue is on my mind at the moment.

If you want to see it bigger, just click on the image.

Meanwhile, Monday on The AIR, we have a special marathon of The Comedy Vault from 7 AM to 3 PM. The final hour of that marathon features Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks and The 2000 Year Old Man.  We told you about this show last Friday.

At 3 PM on Prognosis, Herman Linte brings us a show devoted to the music of Kraftwerk. That’s followed by a classic Prognosis and an evening of Psychedelic Shack and Radio Free Charleston.

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

After a less-than-relaxing holiday weekend (due to fireworks), how about we take it easy with some progressive jazz-rock, courtesy of ace drummer, Bill Bruford, and his friends who made up the group, “Bruford;” Jeff Berlin, Allan Holdsworth, Dave Stewart (not the Dave Stewart from The Eurythmics, but the other Dave Stewart who was in National Health and Stewart & Gaskin) and vocalist, Annette Peacock.. This brief concert is from 1979.

This band formed around the core of Bruford and Holdsworth, and performed together before and after the pair had a short sting with prog-rock supergroup UK.

This fusion concert is easy to listen to without being “easy listening.” It’s four amazing musicians at the top of their game. The music is challenging, but not difficult. Bll Bruford retired from performing live in 2009, and earned his Phd. in music at the University of Surrey. You can find his recent books on music theory, reissues of his music and much more at his website. Dave Stewart has made music with Barbara Gaskin since 1981, and has written several books on music theory. Jeff Berlin is one of the most acclaimed fusion bass players of the last four decades. Allan Holdsworth, one of the most influential guitarists of all time, passed away in 2017.

We are going to dig back to almost exactly eleven years ago for a very special episode of Radio Free Charleston from July, 2009. Radio Free Charleston celebrated three years of our video revival with our 75th episode! “Unknown Hinson Shirt.”  Our third-anniversary Rock And Roll Extravaganzawas a pretty ambitious, epic show. This weekend marks 14 years since we brought back RFC in video form, and if it hadn’t been for the pandemic, we would’ve dropped a special anniversary show for the occasion, but since we can’t, we’lll just reflect on past glories.

This landmark edition of RFC featured music by The Pistol Whippers and Unknown Hinson, both legends of honky-tonk psycho-billy stage. We also had a snippet of Princeton’s Option 22 over the end credits.

With this being our third anniversary, we took it upon ourselves to corner a few really cool people with our camera to get them to say nice things about us. Among those who weren’t quick enough to escape are Ann Magnuson, Necrobutcher (and we want to send Necro our best wishes for a full recovery), the late wrestling legend Gypsy Joe and GWAR’s front-man, Oderous Urungus.

The PopCulteer
July 3, 2020

We are still adjusting to this not-so-brave new world of the pandemic. Yours truly, being immunocompromised, is playing it safe, staying at home as much as possible, and trying to come up with interesting things for you to read about in this blog. Next week look for more reviews of books, toys and music, but I’m still on the fence about plugging local shows.

On one hand, it’s what I do to support the local scene. On the other…I think the country has made a mad rush (emphasis on “mad”) to reopen way too soon, and I don’t really feel that I can, in good conscience, recommend anybody attend any event in person.  I love telling my readers about the cool things they can get into locally, but I don’t relish the idea of sending people headlong to their death. So if it seems like I’m not covering as much “Stuff To Do” as usual, it’s because I choose to err on the side of caution.

However, one fun activity you can do today is to listen to a slate of new and/or pertinent episodes of our programming on The AIR.

We offer up our fifth edition of MIRRORBALL  Friday afternoon on The AIR. and that’s followed by two special All-American epsodes of Sydney’s Big Electric Cat. Later tonight you can hear Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks with The 2000 Year Old Man on a new Comedy Vault.  You can hear all these shows on The AIR website, or just click on this embedded radio player…

At 2 PM we present an AIR Music Special, the fifth edition of MIRRORBALL, hosted by Mel Larch. Our unexpected hit seems to have settled into a bi-weekly groove, and this week’s grooves celebrates our weekend holiday with a look at the ultra-patriotic year of 1976, when Disco ruled the world and people weren’t so embarrassed by the president that they pretended to be Canadian.

Check out this masteful playlist of tunes from the year of the Bicentennial…

MIRRORBALL 005

Washington Jamb Band “Bicentennial Muscle”
Kool & The Gang “Open Sesame”
Diana Ross “Love Hangover”
The Trammps “Disco Party”
Ritchie Family “The Best Disco In Town”
Salsoul Orchestra “Chicago Bus Stop (Ooh I Love It)”
Johnnie Taylor “Disco Lady”
Silver Connection “Get Up and Boogie”
KC & The Sunshine Band “(Shake Shake Shake) Shake Your Booty”
Wild Cherry “Play That Funky Music”
Vicki Sue Robinson “Turn The Beat Around”
Tavares “Heaven Must Be Missing An Angel”
The Masqueraders “The Bicentennial”

You can tune in at 2 PM and hear the latest edition of MIRRORBALL. The plan is to drop a new episode roughly every other Friday afternoon, until Mel gets tired of doing it, or people stop listening. Later today, it will go up in the Podcast section of The AIR website, so you can listen on demand.  MIRRORBALL will also be replayed Friday night at 11 PM, Saturday at 5 PM, Sunday at 11 PM and Tuesday at 1 PM. We’ll probably sneak in a few more airings during the week.

At 3 PM, We bring you an encore of a recent All-American mixtape episode of Sydney’s Big Electric Cat. This show from April focussed on American New Wave music, and it’s a pretty killer line-up…

The Cars “My Best Friend’s Girl”
The Ramones “Blitzkrieg Bop”
Mink Deville and Cabretta “Venus of Avenue D”
Missing Persons “Waiting For A Million Years”
Peter Ivers “Even Steven Foster”
Tom Tom Club “Genius Of Love”
The Dickies “Nights In White Satin”
The Dead Kennedys “Holiday In Cambodia”
Romeo Void “Never For Ever”
Johnathan Richman and The Modern Lovers “Roadrunner”
R.E.M. “Radio Free Europe (Live)”
Red Hot Chili Peppers “True Men Don’t Kill Coyotes”
Wall of Voodoo “Call Of The West”
Berlin “The Metro (extended mix)”
Talking Heads “Psycho Killer”
DEVO “Gut Feeling/(Slap Your Mammy)”
Television “Marquee Moon”
Cyndi Lauper “Money Changes Everything”
Tommy Tutone “Jenny (867-5309)”
The B 52s “Rock Lobster”
Sparks “Achoo”
Moon Martin “Bad Case Of Lovin’ You”
Jane Weidlin “I Will Wait For You”
The Humans “I Live In The City”
Marshall Crenshaw “Someday Someway”
Blondie “One Way Or Another”

This is followed at 5 PM by an encore of another episode of Sydney’s Big Electric Cat from 2017, with the same theme, as you can see on this playlist…

The Go Gos “We Got The Beat”
Talking Heads “Burning Down The House”
DEVO “Whip It”
Oingo Boingo “Weird Science”
The Ramones “Pet Cemetary”
The Toasters “Recriminations”
Wall of Voodoo “Far Side of Crazy”
Pere Ubu “Birdies”
Pell Mell “Cinnecitta”
The B 52s “Cake”
Red Hot Chili Peppers “American Ghost Dance”
Moon and Frank Zappa “Valley Girl”
The Tubes “She’s A Beauty”
The Cars “Let’s Go”
The Motels “Suddenly Last Summer”
The Bangles “Walk Like An Egyptian”
Utopia “Hammer In My Heart”
Kid Creole & The Coconuts “Annie, I’m Not Your Daddy”
The Flirts “We Just Want To Dance”
Divine “Shake It Up”
The Dickies “Stukas Over Disneyland”
Agent Orange “Bloodstains”
The Plasmatics “Butcher Baby”
Black Flag “Southern Rise”
The Dead Kennedys “Kill The Poor”
Redd Kross “Linda Blair 1984”
The Units “Tight Fit”

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.  You can also hear select episodes of Sydney’s Big Electric Cat as part of the overnight Haversham Recording Institute marathon that starts every Monday at 11 PM.

At 10 PM Friday, you can hear a special new episode of The Comedy Vault. This time we pay tribute to the late Carl Reiner, who passed away at the age of 98 earlier this week. We bring you an hour of Reiner with his friend, Mel Brooks, and their creation, The 2000 Year Old Man.

You can hear this show at the podcast tab at The AIR, and it will be replayed Saturday at 7 AM and 7 PM, Monday at 2 PM, Tuesday at 6 PM and Wednesday at 11 PM.

And that is our patriotic line up for The AIR, and our PopCulteer this week. Have a safe holiday and check back every day for fresh content.