Rudy Panucci On Pop Culture

Month: August 2020 (Page 2 of 4)

The RFC Flashback: MINI SHOW number 31

This week we go back to July, 2014 for an RFC MINI SHOW starring The Diablo Blues Band. The members of DBB were Johnny “Hurricane” Compton, John ” The Mud Cat” Chickogee, Tommy Fountaine, Jessica Lowe, Kevin Kidd, Terry Lowry, Billy Hambleton and Morris Hambleton. The band no longer performs together, following the death of Tommy Fountaine, but they left a pretty wild legacy of killer blues performances and some members of the band are still making music, although not so much in these days of the pandemic.

We recorded the band at The Blue Parrot in July, 2014.

 

Sydney’s Got The Beat On Big Electric Cat

The PopCulteer
August 21, 2020

It’s another short PopCulteer this week as we focus on a new episode of Sydney’s Big Electric Cat on The AIR.

A few weeks ago in this space I told you about a great new documentary on Showtime about The Go Gos. It’s helped folks form a new appreciation of this pioneering all-woman group.

Well, the documentary, titled “The Go Gos” has made it all the way across the pond to our friends at Haversham Recording Institute, and this week Sydney Fileen devotes her entire program to Belinda Carlisle, Jane Wiedlin, Charlotte Caffey, Gina Schock and Kathy Valentine and the music of The Go Gos 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…

Friday afternoon at 3 PM, with generous replay options throughout the next week, you can hear all sorts of Go Go-riffic treats, including their entire first album, a rare live concert, Go Gos songs sung by other artists and all of their greatest hits. Sydney Fileen is back from her summer staycation holiday, complete with an air-conditioning cold and a stack of New Wave records, and this week she salutes The Go Gos.

Check out this playlist:

Big Electric Cat 061

The Go Gos “Vacation”
Fun Boy Three “Our Lips Are Sealed”
The Go Gos “Cool Jerk”
The Textones “Vacation”
The Textones “We Don’t Get Along”
The Go Gos “Beatnick Beach”
The Go Gos “Mercenary”

The Go Gos Beauty and the Beat album:
“Our Lips Are Sealed”
“How Much More”
“Tonite”
“Lust to Love”
“This Town”
“We Got the Beat”
“Fading Fast”
“Automatic”
“You Can’t Walk in Your Sleep (If You Can’t Sleep)”
“Skidmarks on My Heart”
“Can’t Stop the World”

The Go Gos “Head Over Heels”

The Go Gos Live At The Greek:
1 “Head Over Heels”
2 “Our Lips Are Sealed”
3 “Forget That Day”
4 “We Got The Beat”
5 “Turn To You”
6 “Tonite”
7 “You Thought”
8 “Yes Or No”
9 “I’m With You”
10 “This Town”
11 “Can’t Stop The World”
12 “Vacation / I’m The Only One”

The Go Gos “We Got The Beat (Stiff Records version”
Jane Wiedlin “Our Lips Are Sealed (unplugged)”

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.

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

Pat McAfee Gets In The Ring…Again

Pat McAfee (seen right) is a sports legend in West Virginia. As the kicker for the WVU Mountaineers he ended his college football career as the team’s all-time leading scorer. He went on to an all-pro career in the NFL with the Indianapolis Colts, before making a seamless transition into broadcasting, working first with Barstool sports before graduating to high-profile gigs with Fox Sports and ESPN, and now also hosts his own syndicated radio show/video podcast, The Pat McAfee Show.

However, Pat always had another dream.

Pat wanted to be a professional wrestler.

This Saturday at NXT Takeover XXX (seen on The WWE Network), Pat will make his debut in a match against former NXT champ, Adam Cole, with whom McAfee has been feuding for some time (seen left).

However, this will not be Pat McAfee’s professional wrestling debut.

On March, 22, 2009, just days before he signed his NFL contract, Pat McAfee wrestled a match against Warpig for IWA East Coast, in South Charleston’s Rec Center. I was able to capture the match in a low-res photo essay for PopCult, and we re-present it for you here…

To set up this match, at an earlier show, McAfee did a run-in while signing autographs. He also did a quick video message for Radio Free Charleston, which was awfully nice of him…

Below you see Pat headed to the ring to confront Dr. Max Graves and his charge, the monster known as “Warpig.”

 

Warpig did not exactly welcome Pat with 0pen arms.

 

In fact, the then-NFL prospect was welcomed with a body slam…..

 

…and was on the receiving end of a nasty kick.

 

The tide turned when McAfee scored his own kick, punting Warpig’s head through the uprights for the pin.

 

If you want to relive the pro wrestling debut of Pat McAfee, and see other wrestlers like Mad Man Pondo, Juggulator, M Dogg 20, Viper and current NXT star, Joaquin Wilde, back when he was known as Shima Xion, you can still order the DVD of IWA East Coast’s “Scarcade” HERE.

Women Cartoonists of The Roaring 20’s

The PopCult Bookshelf

The Flapper Queens: Women Cartoonists Of The Jazz Age
by Trina Robbins
Fantagraphics
ISBN-13: 978-1683963233
$34.99

In The Flapper Queens: Women Cartoonists Of The Jazz Age Trina Robbins takes us back almost a hundred years with a beautifully-produced collection of the work of six women cartoonists who chronicled the early years of the modern era. Well-grounded in the Art Deco style of the day, and with rare perspective and insightful eyes, these women captured the Jazz era with a flair and determination that deserves to be more widely seen.

Robbins, a legendary underground cartoonist in her own right, has spent decades exploring the overlooked contributions of women to the field of cartooning, and this book is a wonderfully curated overview of their work during one of the most exciting times of the last century.

In this full-color, oversized book Robbins sets the tone and provides brief histories of six women cartoonists of the 1920s, but the real treat is the generous sampling of their work, which has not been as readily-available as it should be. The publisher’s blurb explains:

In addition to featuring the more well-known cartoonists of the era, such as Ethel Hays, Nell Brinkley, and Virginia Huget, Eisner award-winning Trina Robbins introduces you to Eleanor Schorer, who started her career in the teens as a flowery art nouveau Nell Brinkley imitator but, by the ’20s, was drawing bold and outrageous art deco illustrations; Edith Stevens, who chronicled the fashion trends, hairstyles, and social manners of the ’20s and ’30s in the pages of The Boston Globe; and Virginia Huget, possibly the flappiest of the Flapper Queens, whose girls, with their angular elbows and knees, seemed to always exist in a euphoric state of Charleston.

The work is amazing, and Eisner Award-winning comics historian Robbins provides plenty of context with mini-biographies of the artists. Much of this work was very influential, yet history has not done a great job in remembering who created it. While there have been entire books devoted to Brinkley and Huget (some written by Robbins), They have not been as celebrated as their male contemporaries.

 

The 1920s was when women finally got the right to vote and it was a very liberated time. With this collection of work by pioneering women cartoonists, Robbins manages to create a time capsule that preserves the work of these amazing cartoonists and also gives us a snapshot of a decade where the world changed dramatically. Jazz was becoming mainstream. Women entered the workforce. Prohibition was in full swing, which romanticized the bending of laws. Women were coming into their own and could hope to be more than just a housewife. It was a chaotic, invigorating era that set the tone for the next century of social revolutions.

This is a gorgeous hardcover collection, measuring 13 1/2 by 10 inches, and with 168 pages, much of them in full color. The design, from the cover to the interior pages and even the endpapers looks wonderful. This will be a welcome addition to any comics history library or collection of artistic coffee-table books. It’s also available digitally, but where’s the fun in that?

The Flapper Queens: Women Cartoonists Of The Jazz Age captures the aura of this era and showcases the work of some incredibly talented cartoonists of the time. This is highly recommended for anyone interested in The Jazz Age, Art Deco, social history, the early days of feminism or brilliant artwork and cartoonists. You should be able to order this from any bookseller, using the ISBN number.

The Swing Shift Swings Again Tuesday Afternoon

Tuesday on The AIR we deliver a brand-new episode of The Swing Shift.  In order to hear this new hour of Suh-Wing, 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 copascetic little embedded radio player…

First off, at 1 PM we have a replay of las week’s MIRRORBALL, wherein Mel Larch makes long to dance the Disco way for one full hour!. Then at 2 PM an encore of Steven Allen Adams’ NOISE BRIGADE makes you want to jump in the mosh pit, the Ska/Punk way for the next hour.

At 3 PM a new hour of The Swing Shift takes you all over the previous century of Swing Music with a new hour of great Swing tunes.  That hour is followed by two more hours of classic Swing Shift episodes. Our new Swing Shift runs a swinging gamut from classics by Glenn Miller, Cab Calloway and Nat King Cole to new tunes by Jack’s Cats, Tyler Pedersen, Megan and her Goody Gooides and more. We even have some Big Band Swing from Phil Collins–I kid you not!  Check out this playlist…

The Swing Shift 098

The Phil Collins Big Band “I Don’t Care Any More”
Louis Jordan “Let The Good Times Roll”
Jaco Patorius Big Band “Pac Man Blues”
Cab Calloway “Jive”
Billie Holliday “He Ain’t Got Rhythm”
Vicki Christina Barcelona “Gun Street Girl”
Bryan Ferry “Lover, Come Back To Me”
Dean Martin “Buena Sera”
Nat KIng Cole Trio “Scotchin’ With The Soda”
Tyler Pedersen “No Looking Back”
Jack’s Cats “A Minor Interruption”
Megan and her Goody Goodies “Somebody Loves Me”
Swing Ninjas “This Time I’m Right”
The Sazerac Swingers “The Sazerac Song”
The Gentlemaen’s Anti-Temperance League “Millenial Blues”
Glenn Miller “Chatanooga Choo Choo”

You can hear The Swing Shift Tuesday at 3 PM, with replays Wednesday at 8 AM and 6 PM, Thursday at 7 PM and Saturday at 5 PM, only on The AIR. You can also hear all-night marathons, seven hours each, starting at Midnight Thursday and Sunday evenings.

New Music And A Trip To The Past In Radio Free Charleston This Week

Tuesday on The AIR we deliver a new episode of Radio Free Charleston, with a first hour that’s loaded with new music from The Empty Hearts, Mark Beckner Group, The Killers, Jay Parade and more. For the second and third hours we bring you a slightly edited encore of the third episode of RFC volume 3, from 2014.  In order to hear the show, you simply have to find your way over and tune in at the website, or you could just stay on this page, and  listen to this neat-o keen embedded radio player…

We have yet another three-hour Radio Free Charleston at 10 AM and 10 PM Tuesday.  This week our first hour is all-new, loaded with great, mostly-new music. Hours two and three bring you a classic episode from early in our Voices of Appalachia Radio run. Hence the old-school graphic at right.

You will hear that episode as it was originally broadcast, with one exception. An artist who was featured on that show has recently spewed forth with some hateful, racist comments, and as a result will never be heard on The AIR again. He has lost all his endorsements and voice-over jobs, and he has only himself to blame. He usually played a misogynistic, ignorant redneck while in character. It’s sad to discover that it wasn’t an act.

However this is still a killer show. Check out the playlist to see all the goodies we bring you this week…

RFCv5 029

hour one
The Empty Hearts “The World’s Gone Insane”
Mark Beckner Group “The Devil”
Oliver Sean “Devil Is Back”
David Bowie “Blue Jean (extended mix)”
The Killers “Dying Breed”
Deep Purple “The Long Way Round”
Jay Parade “Mental Trillness”
Louis Jordan “Beware, Brother, Beware”
Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band “Shake ’em Off Like Fleas”
Humble Pie “I Believe To My Soul”
The Rolling Stones “Harlem Shuffle”
Norah Jones “I’m Alive”
Steve Howe “Imagination”
The Fratellis “Hello Stranger”

hour two
The Big Bad “Shine The Signal”
Time And Distance “Little Disaster”
The Science Fair Explosion “Cosmic Girls”
Joe Vallina “Suzy Said So”
Marcie Bullock “Maybe Just Crazy”
Granny’s 12-Gauge “Dear Devil”
The Boatmen “Another New Year’s Alone”
Ouralias “Daydream”
Scooter Scudieri “Ancient Rituals”
Mother Nang “Fade”
John Radcliff “It’s Not The End”
69 Fingers “Faster and Stronger”
Sarah Schlies “Child, My Child”
Sasha Collete “You Had Me”
Crack The Sky “We Want Mine”

Hour Three (Live from The Empty Glass)
The Bible Beaters “Praise Jesus”
The Living Deads “Right Behind You, Baby”
The Big Bad “Babe We Own This Town”
Scrap Iron Pickers “Spy vs. Spy”
Snakebox “Party on the Roof”
Andrew Hellblinki “Bodies”
Tyler Childers “Charleston Girl”
Crystal Bright and the Silver Hands “Little Name”
Mike Pushkin “Wrecking Ball”
Little Nomad “Take Me Down To The Riverside”
The Nanker Phelge “That’s What She Said”
Elephant in the Room “Ghost Town”
Ovada “Church of Paranoia”
The Company Stores “No Middle Name”

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.

Later today we’ll bring you news on an all-new episode of The Swing Shift.

Monday Morning Art: Big Loo Says ‘Hi’

 

When I was a kid, I never found the cool giant robot toy by Marx, Big Loo, under my Christmas Tree. However, years later I did find one peeking out from under the Christmas Tree at The Marx Toy Museum in Moundsville. The Marx Toy Museum closed over four years ago, but I wanted to recreate that discovery with a quick digital painting. It’s me in Pop Art mode.

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

For more on Big Loo and The Marx Toy Museum, check out this link.

Meanwhile, Monday on The AIR, we bring you 16 episodes of Word Association with Lee & Rudy from 7 AM to 3 PM. This is our podcast surprise discussion show where I spring a mystery topic on Lee Harrah each week. Word Association is probably going on hiatus soon because it’s so hard to get together with anyone during the pandemic. I thought it might be fun to drop a ton of them here so you can enjoy them before they go away for a while.

At 3 PM on Prognosis, Herman Linte brings us a show devoted to King Crimson’s Red. 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…

Sunday Evening Video: The GoGos Live, 1981

This week we are recycling a previous edition of our Sunday Evening Video feature. Right now the punk/pop all-girl band, The GoGos, are riding high again. A couple of weeks ago a terrific documentary on the band debuted on Showtime, and they have a new song which is featured on a new “best of” compilation. That’s the first new GoGos song since 2001.

And I just found out yesterday that this Friday’s new episode of Sydney’s Big Electric Cat on The AIR will be a two-hour retrospective of the band’s New Wave days.

So I decided to re-present this concert video of the band, caught live in concert at Palos Verdes High School in Palos Verdes Estates, California. It’s a great show, and it lets me continue to slack off during my birthday weekend.

The RFC Flashback: MINI SHOW number 30

This week we go back to July, 2014, for an RFC MINI SHOW starring singer/songwriter Dina Hornbaker. We brought you three songs performed by Dina just a week before we posted this show at the Early Open Mic at Taylor Books. The RFC Crew just happened to be there armed with cameras and we decided to snag Dina’s first three-song set before deadline duties forced us to make a hasty retreat. This was true guerilla filmmaking because we forgot to tell anyone we were recording and had to ask permission afterward.

You’ll hear Dina doing a Summertime song with nods to Sam Cooke and George Gershwin, as well as the song that she performed on RFC 196, “Mountain Mama.” We wrap up the show with a lovely song that did not yet have a title.

Disco Keeps This Post From Being Blank

The PopCulteer
August 14, 2020

It’s admission time. Your PopCulteer has been slacking off this week. Because yesterday was my birthday (it was a very nice, low-key day) I dashed off most of this week’s posts early and scheduled them to drop while I was otherwise occupied. My birthday itself was a nice little bright spot in what has turned out to be one of the worst years in history for anybody. I was genuinely humbled by all the kind birthday wishes left for me on social media, and I spent the day with my favorite person.

Speaking of Mrs. PopCulteer, Mel Larch, we did manage to squeak out a new episode of MIRRORBALL, Mel’s series of Disco Music specials for The AIR.

It’s hard to believe, but we’re already up to our eighth edition of MIRRORBALL  Friday afternoon on The AIR. and that’s followed by two great encore epsodes of Sydney’s Big Electric Cat.  You can hear all this good stuff on The AIR website, or just click on this embedded radio player…

MIRRORBALL returns as Mel Larch brings you another collection of the top hits of the Disco era. Back in the days when polyester ruled, Beats Per Minute was the top musical criteria, there were lightbulbs in the floors and it seemed like everybody was born with a silver spoon around their neck, this was the music that ruled the day.

Check out the playlist for this Disco party…

MIRRORBALL 008

Love Unlimited Orchestra “Love’s Theme”
Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band “Cherchez La Femme”
Benny Golson “I’m Always Dancin’ To The Music”
Gino Soccio “Dancer”
Patrice Rushen “Haven’t You Heard”
Yvonne Elliman “If I Can’t Have You”
Earth Wind and Fire “September”
Andrea True Connection “New York You Got Me Dancin’”
The Detroit Spinners “Rubberband Man”
Michael Zager Band “Let’s All Chant”
Chaka Khan “I’m Every Woman”
Edwin Starr “H.A.P.P.Y. Radio”
A Taste of Honey “Boogie Oogie Oogie”
Peaches & Herb “Shake Your Groove Thing”

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 10 PM, Saturday at 7 PM (part of a marathon), Sunday at 11 PM and Tuesday at 1 PM. We’ll probably sneak in a few more airings during the week.

And that wraps up this short, slacky PopCulteer.  Check back for fresh content every day, even if some of it is prepared in advance.

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