Month: October 2021 (Page 2 of 4)

Aside from what I’m posting below, there are tons of things in and around Charleston to keep you busy this fine autumn weekend.  However, I am not confident in suggesting anything that happens indoors because I’m still freaked out over the pandemic. So here are some things you can get into Thursday and Sunday that don’t actually involve you getting into a building.

You should know the drill by now. The pandemic is still not over.  In fact, it’s getting slightly better, but it’s still really bad. If you are fully vaccinated and ready to do your best to stay safe, you should go check this stuff out. Outdoor shows were okay for vaccinated folks to go maskless, but maybe not at the moment. Indoor shows I am not ready to plug at the moment. I hate it, but I’d also hate losing any more readers to COVID.

So use your common sense and stay safe…and support the local scene.

Celtic Calling and Blackwater Press will have a table set up at 120 Capitol Street, (opposite The Kanawha Library) at Thursday’s October ArtWalk in Downtown Charleston.

They will be unveiling plans for next year’s 6th Celtic Calling Gathering in March 2022 and will also be selling copies of the book. I Piped, That She Might Dance by Iain MacDonald (with a foreword by Hugh Cheape). It’s an historical novel based on the life of Angus MacKay (1813-1859), first Piper to the Sovereign, appointed by Queen Victoria.

Mackay, who is one of the most significant figures in the history of Scottish music, died after a long battle with physical and mental illness, though he left behind collections of pipe music still played today. This account of his life traces his long journey, from humble origins on the isle of Raasay to the height of fame in Her Majesty’s service and beyond. His story is one that has long deserved to be told, and Iain MacDonald has obliged in style.

Read the book over the winter, and by the time Celtic Calling comes around next March, you’ll be fully in the spirit of things.

Also happening outdoors this week is DoggieFest, Sunday, October 24th. 3-9:00 at Country Roads Pet Resort, 173 Foxhound Lane Charleston WV.

This is an outdoor even with Live Music. Food. Beverages. Prizes for costumed doggies. Bring a blanket or lawn chair to hear the unspecified bands play as the animal folk frolic and bark and meow along.

This is a benefit for area rescue programs such as: CHASE Healing Fund; For the Love of Cats; Maine Coon Rescue; Sonys Place; and Woofie’s University Foundation.

Wednesday afternoon The AIR brings you brand-new episodes of Beatles Blast and Curtain Call!  You can tune in at the website, or if you’re on a laptop or desktop, you could just stay on this page, and  listen to the convenient embedded radio player lurking over in the right-hand column of this blog.

At 2 PM,  it’s time to Get Back on Beatles Blast. Specifically, we’re going to bring you the Glyn Johns version of the Get Back album, which was rejected by The Beatles and Apple, and was then sacrificed at the altar of the Wall of Sound and became the Let It Be album. However, Johns’ version of the album has been widely bootlegged, and it’s great to finally have an official release as part of the brand-new Let It Be Super Deluxe boxed set.  This version of the album compares very favorably to what was eventually released.

And of course, that boxed set has been released to prime the Beatle pump for the premiere of Peter Jackson’s three-part, six-hour Get Back film, which debuts next month on Disney +. That film has been re-edited out of the sixty or so hours of footage leftover from the original Let It Be movie, which has been heavily criticized for showing the worst aspects of the strained filming process while ignoring the joy and fun the band had while working on the project.

In this hour I bring you the entire Glyn Johns version of the Get Back album, along with an extra track mixed by Johns, as well as some other previously-unrleased gems from the Let It Be boxed set. It’s a crisp, clear look at one of the Beatles more controversial works.

Beatles Blast can be heard every Wednesday at 2 PM, with replays Thursday at 10 PM, Friday at 1 PM,  and Saturday afternoon.

At 3 PM on Curtain Call, Mel Larch jumps the gun a little bit on Halloween and presents highlights of the new 2021 Off-Broadway Revival Cast Recording of Little Shop of Horrors. This show is very special to Mel, since she played Audrey in a production in Charleston back in the 1980s, and it remains one of her favorite theatrical experiences. In this recording you’ll hear Jonathan Groff as Seymour and Tammy Blanchard as Audrey, in a fresh, new recording, produced by Alan Menken, the show’s co-creator.

Curtain Call can be heard on The AIR Wednesday at 3 PM, with replays Thursday at 8 AM, Friday at 10 AM, Saturday at 8 PM and Monday at 9 AM. A six-hour marathon of classic episodes can be heard Sunday evening starting at 6 PM, and an all-night marathon of Curtain Call episodes can be heard Wednesday nights, beginning at Midnight.

Once again we have come to Tuesday on The AIR  and you know what that means. Today we deliver unto you brand-new episodes of Radio Free Charleston and The Swing Shift. That’s two all-new programs totalling four new hours of particularly nifty internet radio!  You simply have to poke your cursor over and tune in at the website, or you could just stay on this page, and  listen to the cool embedded player over at the top of the right column (If you’re reading PopCult on a desktop, that is. Phone readers have to go to the website).

We have a  killer new Radio Free Charleston at 10 AM and 10 PM Tuesday.  This week we open with new music from a great new-to-me local band, Safetybelt, and we continue with a pretty darned epic line up of music that includes great local stuff, neato-kee releases from major artists, a few classic tracks and a bunch of stuff from 2017/18 that I just recovered from a once-abandoned hard drive.

It’s a fun show, loaded with great music, and I figure you’ll probably love the holy hell out of it. Our second track this week comes from Julian Daniell, who comes to use from Boulder, Colorado, via Chicago. I think fans of the Quiet Beatle might really get a kick out of his music.

Check out the playlist below to see all the goodies we have in store (live links will take you to the artist’s pages)…

RFC V5 066

hour one
Safetybelt “Sun”
Julian Daniell “Memories”
Andy Prieboy “How Would I Know Love”
Beth Hart and Joe Bonamassa “Black Coffee”
Todd Burge with Joseph Hale “Jesus Night Light”
Bob Dylan “All Along The Watchtower”
Rory Gallagher “Hoodoo Man”
The Dollyrots “Breed”
Lost Decades “No Way Out”
Hot Wheels Monster Trucks “Go Big! Go Hot Wheels”
Herbie Hancock “Rockit”
Red Audio “Plasticland”
Scary Thieves “Tell Me Girl”

hour two
Static Fur “Diaspora”
The Renfields “I Was A Teenage Cthulu Cultist”
Dynamite Thunderpunch “Blood Stallion”
Dopapod “Confabulation”
Hello June “Less Than Nothing”
Madness “I Never Knew Your Name”
The Bounty “Turn”
Cassius At Best “Wait”
Simple Minds “Barrowland Star”
Hello June “Home”
Little Nemo “Blue Years”
Tautologic “The Choirboy”
Utopia “The Up”

hour three
The Vandals “National Brotherhood Week”
Sierra Ferrell “Bells of Every Chapel”
Heavy Set Paw-Paws “Distract My Mind”
James Townsend “Talkin’ Hipster Beer Joint Blues”
Timbuk 3 “The Future’s So Bright I Gotta Wear Shades”
The Madison 2 “Chains”
Oingo Boingo “Country Sweat”
The Settlement “Prelude”
Karen Allen “Where Ever You Go”
Neil Finn “What’s The Matter With You”
The Supervillains “Home Again”
Midge Ure “The Man Who Sold The World”
The Polecats “John, I’m Only Dancing”

You can hear this episode of Radio Free Charleston Tuesday at 10 AM and 10 PM on The AIR, with replays Thursday at 3 PM, Friday at 9 AM, Saturday at Noon and Midnight,  and  Monday at 11 AM, exclusively on The AIR. Now you can also hear a different episode of RFC every weekday at 5 PM, and we bring you a marathon all night long Saturday night/Sunday morning.

I’m also going to  embed a low-fi, mono version of this show right in this post, right here so you can listen on demand.

After RFC, stick around for encores of MIRRORBALL at 1 PM, and Ska Madness at 2 PM.

At 3 PM we have a brand-new episode of The Swing Shift. This week it’sa 1990s Swing Revival mixtape, celebrating 25 years since the release of Mugsy’s Move, the major-label debut of Royal Crown Revue. We open with two tracks from that album, and then bring you double shots from the other top Swing bands from the 90s. And remember, double shots was how they drank ’em back at the Brown Derby.

Check this playlist.

The Swing Shift 120

Royal Crown Revue “Hey Pachuco” “Trouble In Tinseltown”
Cherry Poppin’ Daddies “Zoot Suit Riot” “No Mercy For Swine”
Big Bad Voodoo Daddy “Beggar’s Blues” “Jump With Me Baby”
Lavay Smith and her Red Hot Skillet Lickers “The Busy Woman’s Blues” “Everybody’s Talkin’ ‘Bout Mis Thing”
Brian Setzer Orchestra “The House Is Rockin'” “Jump, Jive and Wail”
The Atomic Fireballs “The Man With The Hex” “Drink, Drank, Drunk”
The Jive Aces “Planet Jive” “Think For Yourself”

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

So I sort of cheated this week for my Inktober entry here in Monday Morning Art. It is indeed an ink drawing, but…it’s one I did forty years ago in a college notebook. This was how I took notes. I’d draw while the professor was talking, then when I’d look at the drawing later, I’d remember everything I heard while I was drawing it.

This is a doodle of a crouching science fiction or superhero guy. I drew it while taking a Criminology course, which I ended up dropping because it bored the living crap out of me. On this day, we were hearing about the psychology of pursuit, which isn’t nearly as interesting a topic as it sounds.

This was done in ball-point pen on notebook paper. I’m still not great at drawing feet. As for why I went back that far to grab an ink drawing…I had deadlines all last week and I wanted to be lazy this weekend. So excuse the heck out of me.

If you want to see it a bit bigger for some ungodly reason, just click on it.

Meanwhile, Monday at 2 PM on The AIR, we bring you a new episode of  Psychedelic Shack, followed at 3 PM by a new edition of Herman Linte’s weekly showcase of the Progressive Rock of the past half-century, Prognosis.  You can listen to The AIR at the website, or on the embedded radio player at the top of the right-hand column of this blog.

Nigel Pye has a trippy party with the latest episode of  Psychedelic Shack! It’s an entire hour filled with trippy-ass music from the golden age of Psychedelic Rock as well as some new, mind-expanding gems from the young hipsters.

Check out this playlist…

Psychedelic Shack 051

Caribou “Every Time She Turns Around”
Nazz “Open My Eyes”
Neu! “Hallogallo”
Black Light Animals “Golden Child”
The Zombies “Time Of The Season”
King Grizzard and the Lizard Wizard “Rattlesnake”
The Olivia Tremor Control “Dine A Transparent Dream”
The Rolling Stones “2000 Light Years From Home”
The Doors “Strange Days”
Jimi Hendrix “If 6 Was 9”
The Velet Underground “I’m Set Free”

Psychedelic Shack can be heard every Monday at 2 PM, with replays Tuesday at 9 AM, Wednesday at 10 PM, Friday at 1 PM,  and Saturday at 9 AM. Classic episodes can be heard Sunday at 9 AM as part of our Sunday Haversham Recording Institute collection.

At 3 PM, Herman Linte offers up a new Prognosis, for which he did not provide a playlist. However, he tells me that this episode features people dressing up as Pink Floyd for Halloween. You will hear an entire concert by Brit Floyd, as well as tracks from a new album that collects jazz renditions of Pink Floyd classics.

You can hear Prognosis on The AIR Monday at 3 PM, with replays Tuesday at 7 AM, Wednesday at 8 PM, Thursday at Noon, and Saturday at 10 AM. You can hear two classic episodes of the show Sunday at 2 PM.

At 8 PM, stick around for an 11-hour marathon of Mel Larch’s MIRRORBALL, so you can disco dance like crazy.

To put you all in the spirit of Halloween, tonight we’re going to look back at five videos that we made of the first four HallowEast Zombie Walks, plus one extra Zombie Walk from the Charleston Town Center. HallowEast abandoned the Zombie Walks when they couldn’t figure out how to use the event to sell beer, but it was fun while it lasted, as you can see here. Happy Halloween, folks!

This week we go back six years to the most recent Halloween episode of Radio Free Charleston. This is a nice coincidence, because for the next two weeks we are going to suspend our normal chronological journey through the past of RFC to bring you some of our Halloween specials.

“Count Rudolf” is your host for Blood Red Shirt which is chock-full-o good Halloween-y stuff. We had music from Hurl Brickbat, The Renfields with Ari Lehman and HARRAH, plus we a plugged Kanawha Player’s production of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and showed footage from the prior weekend’s Zombie Walk. We even had a batch of “weird stuff” that revisited the Pentagram Flowerbox cartoon from our first Halloween special.

Next week week and the week after, we will present all of the Radio Free Charleston Halloween episodes, and we’ll probably devote one or two of our Sunday Evening Video slots to other spooky-holiday-appropriate videos that we’ve made over the years.

The PopCulteer
October 15, 2021

Your PopCulteer is tied up with magazine work again today, so all I got for you is the notes on Friday’s new episode of MIRRORBALL, on The AIR.

Friday afternoon we offer up a new episode of MIRRORBALL and encore a recent Sydney’s Big Electric Cat. The AIR is PopCult‘s sister radio station. You can hear these shows on The AIR website, or just click on the embedded player at the top right column of this blog.

At 2 PM, Mel Larch uncorks a new MIRRORBALL! The AIR’s showcase of classic Disco music presents a solid hour of some of the danciest hits of the classic disco era. It’s a great show, and I’m just going to drop the playlist right here…

MIRRORBALL 034

The Trammps “The Night The Lights Went Out”
Lace “Can’t Play Around”
Blue Magic “Look Me Up”
Stargard “Wear It Out”
George McCrae “Love In Motion”
Mass Production “Love You”
Norma Jean Wright “Sorcerer”
The Undisputed Truth “You + Me = Love”
Janice McClain “Smack Dab In The Middle”

You can hear MIRRORBALL every Friday at 2 PM, with replays Saturday at  8 PM, Sunday at 11 PM, Tuesday at 1 PM and Wednesday at 7 PM, exclusively on The AIR.  This week’s new MIRRORBALL will kick off our weekly Disco Marathon Saturday night running from 9 PM until Midnight.

At 3 PM, Sydney Fileen graces us with an encore of an episode of Sydney’s Big Electric Cat devoted to the quintessential hits of the New Wave era.

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, Monday at 7 AM, Tuesday at 8 PM, Wednesday at Noon and Thursday at 10 AM, exclusively on The AIR. The Haversham shows will return with new episodes next week. YAY!

You can also hear select episodes of Sydney’s Big Electric Cat as part of the Sunday morning and afternoon Haversham showcases, which begin at 9 AM with Psychedelic Shack, and include double shots of Sydney’s Big Electric Cat and Prognosis.

And that is all I got for this week’s PopCulteer. I will be in full PopCult mode next week, with new radio shows, book reviews and maybe even more. This week, thanks for bearing with me while paying work beckoned.

Aside from what I’m posting below, there are tons of things in and around Charleston to keep you busy this early-autumn weekend.  However, I am not confident in suggesting anything that happens indoors because I’m still freaked out over the pandemic. So here are some things you can get into starting Friday that don’t actually involve you getting into a building.

You should know the drill by now. The pandemic is still not over.  In fact, it’s getting slightly better, but it’s still really bad. If you are fully vaccinated and ready to do your best to stay safe, you should go check this stuff out. Outdoor shows were okay for vaccinated folks to go maskless, but maybe not at the moment. Indoor shows I am not ready to plug at the moment. I hate it, but I’d also hate losing any more readers to COVID.

So use your common sense and stay safe…and support the local scene.

Wednesday afternoon The AIR brings you a brand-new episode of Beatles Blast and a couple of encores of recent episodes of Curtain Call!  You can tune in at the website, or or you could just stay on this page, and  listen to the convenient embedded radio player lurking over in the right-hand column of this blog.

At 2 PM, yours truly returns to introduce a special episode of Beatles Blast devoted to the birth of Apple Records.

In May, 1968, John Lennon and Paul McCartney traveled to New York City to officially announce the Beatles’ newly-formed and very non-traditional company, Apple Corps.

This episode of Beatles Blast, after a quick intro, opens with the audio from an interview that was recorded by New York educational television station WNET on May 14th for the program Newsfront. The interview was conducted by host Mitchell Krause.

This interview is a really interesting artifact, and at many points it’s glaringly obvious that the interviewer isn’t very familiar with The Beatles.

In this conversation, Lennon and McCartney are especially candid on the topic of racial issues, and also about the royal family.

Later that evening, following this afternoon interview, Lennon and McCartney also dropped in for a special appearance on TheTonight Show, with guest host Joe Garagiola. We also bring you the audio from that interview before wrapping up with a short interview with David Frost, back in London a couple of days later.

It’s a departure episode, with no full songs, but it’s an absolute treasure for die-hard Beatles fans.  

Beatles Blast can be heard every Wednesday at 2 PM, with replays Thursday at 10 PM, Friday at 1 PM,  and Saturday afternoon.

At 3 PM on Curtain Call, we bring you a couple of recent episodes, including the 100th episode, which attempts to cover ten decades’ worth of musical theater in one hour.

Curtain Call can be heard on The AIR Wednesday at 3 PM, with replays Thursday at 8 AM and 9 PM, Saturday at 8 PM and Monday at 9 AM. A six-hour marathon of classic episodes can be heard Sunday evening starting at 6 PM, and an all-night marathon of Curtain Call episodes can be heard Wednesday nights, beginning at Midnight.

Tuesday on The AIR  we offer up yet another patchwork edition of Radio Free Charleston. A double shot of magazine article deadlines is eating up much of my workday, and even on Columbo Day, when we pay tribute to the late Peter Falk, I was not able to carve out enough time to make new radio.

So instead we’re going back to 2017 to slap togther a show that’s jam-packed with three hours of great local and not-local music. You simply have to point your cursor over and tune in at the website, or you could just stay on this page, and  listen to the cool embedded player over at the top of the right column.

At 10 AM and 10 PM you can hear this combination of RFC volume 4, episode 43 with RFC International number 34, both from early 2017. Both shows are loaded with great music, and neither has been heard anywhere for over four years. I do apologize for not providing any brand-new content for the show this week, but paying work beckons, and these are two great lost gems.

Check out this playlist.

RFCV5 065

hour one
Deni Bonet “A Perfect Storm”
Time And Distance “Live A Lie”
The Swivels “Panama”
The Company Stores “Bottom Out”
Linnfinity “Molly Marr of Rome”
Paul Calicoat “Dylan Stole My Life”
Billy Matheny “I Won’t Be Around”
The Big Bad “Shadowbrook Road”
Wolfgang Parker “Whisper Something German in my Ear”
Frenchy and The Punk “Why Should I?”
QiET “Get Found”
Go Van Gogh “Planet of Pyschotic Women”
Red Audio “Girl From Outer Space”
WATT 4 “I Don’t Deserve You”
The Concept “Guitar Pick In My Kool Aid”

hour two
Oingo Boingo “The Controller”
Neil Young “Sample and Hold”
Dubioza Kolectiv “Alarm Song”
Marc Ribot y Los cubanos postizos “Los Teenagers Bailan Changui”
The Cure “Let’s Go To Bed”
Red Vox “There She Goes”
The High Violets “Bells”
The Enid “Someone Shall Rise”
The Foreign Films “Sweet Sorrow”
The Hillbilly Moon Explosion “Heartbreak Boogie”
Captain Beefheart and The Magic Band “Run Paint Run”
Mike & The Melvins “Dead Canaries”
The Residents “Japanese Watercolor”
St. Vincent “Krokodil”
The Dandy Warhols “Pope Reverend Jim”

hour three
Killing Joke “The Big Buzz”
Brian Eno “The Hour Is Thin”
Escapism “Ship To Shore”
The Range “Superimpose”
Filter “Pride Flag”
Dread Crew of Oddwood “Siren’s Song”
Atomic Rooster “Friday The 13th”
Black Stone Cherry “War”
Emerson Lake and Palmer “Toccata”
Hooverphonic “I Like The Way I Dance”
Danielle DeCosmo “Don’t Know What It Means”
The Buzzcocks “ESP”
Operators “Bring Me The Head”
Spoon “Hot Thoughts”

You can hear this episode of Radio Free Charleston Tuesday at 10 AM and 10 PM on The AIR, with replays Thursday at 3 PM, Friday at 9 AM and 7 PM, Saturday at Noon and Midnight,  and  Monday at 11 AM, exclusively on The AIR. Now you can hear a different episode of RFC every weekday at 5 PM, and we bring you a marathon all night long Saturday night/Sunday morning.

I’m also going to  embed a low-fi, mono version of this show right in this post, right here so you can listen on demand.

After RFC, stick around for encores of MIRRORBALL at 1 PM, and NOISE BRIGADE at 2 PM. At 3 PM we have two recent episodes of The Swing Shift.

My deadline commitments end Friday, so I should be back with a new three-hour episode of RFC next week. If I can squeeze it into the schedule, there might even be a new Beatles Blast tomorrow, too.