Month: May 2022 (Page 1 of 4)

It’s Tuesday on The AIR  and while that usually means new music on The AIR, for the first time in a few months, your humble blogger and radio host has been waylaid by a flare-up of his Myasthenia Gravis.  Rather than just drop in a rerun of RFC today, I opted to go back, record one new intro and then splice three very old and offline editions of our flagship show into one new(ish)  episode of Radio Free Charleston Volume Five. To hear it, you simply have to point your cursor over and tune in at the website, or you could just stay here, and  listen to the cool embedded player seen elswhere on this page.

You can hear this “scrapbook” edition of Radio Free Charleston at 10 AM and 10 PM Tuesday.   This week we compile three episodes of the show from way back in our Voices of Appalachia days, in 2014 and 2015.

This was back when the marching orders for RFC were to present music from the Appalachian Region, and I did that by stretching the definition as far as possible to include not only local WV musicans, but artists as diverse as Dean Martin,  Cherry Poppin’ Daddies, Crack The Sky and others. The structure of the show may be a bit confusing. Back then I’d do an hour of “regional” music, followed by an hour with a distinct theme. Since I was combining three two-hour-long shows into one three-hour program, I just lopped off a couple of the theme hours and smooshed everything together. The second hour of this week’s show is a theme hour devoted to the Shepardstown band, World Without Fear, with the rest of the show excised. This is a rare chance to hear a full-length West Virginia Alternative Rock album from 1989.

These shows have been offline and unheard by human ears for over seven years, so for most of our listeners they’ll be new.

Check out the playlist below to see all the goodies we have in store…

RFCV5 090

hour one
Todd Burge “Longer”
The Nanker Phelge “I’m Coming Home”
Kevin Scarbrough “Divorce”
John Radcliff “It Might Work Out”
The Company Stores “Rollin’ In”
Hellblinki “Row”
Bud Carroll “I’m No Stranger”
Mark Bates and the Vacancies “Spiral Down”
Astromoth “Paranoia Swing, Swing”
John Lancaster “Water Under A Burning Bridge”
Stone Ka Tet “Patton’s Blues”
Science of the Mind “Kaoss”
Stark Raven “Every Time You Say Goodbye”
John Palumbo “Walk On The Wild Side”
Scarlet Hill “Where is Your Heart Tonight”
Hydrogyn “You Ought To Know”

Second hour: World Without Fear

World Without Fear

“Here’s To You (I Love You)”
“What Chance”
“Absolute”
“Look Who Fell”
“Neighbor”
“I Died Today”
“Prayer For The Strategic Defense Initiative”
“The Last Yesterday”
“If Only”
“Agape”
“The Lorax”
“I’ll Be Here”

Cherry Poppin’ Daddies “That’s Life”

hour three
Go Van Gogh “I Am The Walrus”
Miniature Giant “Dawn”
69 Fingers “Die Happy”
Time And Distance “Copperfield”
Whistlepunk 2.0 “Satellite”
Don Baker “Keep On Walking”
The HepCats (Doug and Paul) “I Never Slept With Alan Ginsburg”
Professor Mike “Greater Good”
The Big Bad “The Omen”
HarraH “Blood Moon”
A Place of Solace “Sing”
Against “My Better Half”
Scooter Scudieri “The Price We Pay”

You can hear this episode of Radio Free Charleston Tuesday at 10 AM and 10 PM on The AIR, with replays Thursday at 2 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 two recent episodes of The Swing Shift.

This week’s art is a mixed media piece that basically exists because the old Myasthenia Gravis has flared up with the hot weather, and I needed to take some physical shortcuts. Plus this post will be published on Memorial Day, which is one of those holidays where hardly anybody visits this blog, so I didn’t want to go all-out on something elaborate.

In this case, I created a basic design digitally, then printed it out on cheap matte-finish photo paper, then painted over it with acrylics that I’d watered down to the point where they behaved like watercolors.

And then I microwaved it to speed up the drying, which actually added some distortion to the finished piece that I feel improved it somewhat. If you squint, it looks even better. Close your eyes completely and it looks spectacular.

To see it bigger try clicking HERE.

Meanwhile, Monday at 2 PM on The AIR, we bring you a recent episode of  Psychedelic Shack, followed at 3 PM by a recent 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.

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.

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.

Tonight at 8 PM you can hear an hour of great stand-up by Robin Williams on The Comedy Vault. Wednesday evening at 10 PM, we’ll have another new episode of The Comedy Vault.

Then, at 9 PM we bring you an overnight marathon of Mel Larch’s Musical Theater showcase, Curtain Call, with the first part of it dedicated to Tony Award nominees for this year, and year’s past.

Your PopCulteer is having a particularly rough weekend with Myasthenia Gravis (my first in months), so we’re going to go back and revisit a Sunday Evening Video post that originally ran here in 2015.

Tonight it’s a nifty half-hour compilation of brief clips from Saturday Morning Cartoons and Commercials of the 1960s and 70s.  Just think of it as the TV equivalent of sucking down a bag of sugar, all at once.

This is pretty much the quintessential PopCult post.

If you’re old enough to get every reference in PopCult, you’ll enjoy the heck out of this rapid-fire array of clips. If you’re too young, this is a sample of what you were missing. Kids today have an almost endless supply of high-quality animated programs available on demand. Back then we had to wait until the one weekend morning when we were able to tune into cartoons–many of which were delightfully unwatchable dreck. And we liked it!

This week we flashback to a huge milestone, our one-hundredth episode, from May, 2010.  This edition of the show, titled “M.C.Escher Shirt,” was, at that time, our longest show, with the most bands. It featured the RFC debut of  The Nanker Phelge, the second appearance of Eva Elution,  local superstar Jeff Ellis, the return of Hellblinki Sextet and the kickoff to “Stark Charleston,” an animated travelogue project I’d started with music by David Synn.

My co-host for this show was my imaginary daughter, Kitty Killton.  We shot host segments at Top O Rock, which was in pretty derelict condition at the time, but at least it was still standing, which is no longer the case…dammit.

Who woulda thunk we’d still be doing Radio Free Charleston as a weekly radio show and annual video show twelve years later?

The PopCulteer
May 27, 2022

This week we have a new episode of MIRRORBALL to tell you about, but first I’m going to run a slightly-re-written PopCulteer item from six years ago, by popular demand (two people asked me to do it) and just ramble a little here because we’ve all had a rough week.

This is not the blog to talk about the tragic school shooting earlier this week, and it really sucks that two days later we lost Ray Liotta, Alan White (the drummer for YES, and The Plastic Ono Band) and Andy Fletcher (keyboardist for Depeche Mode).  So I just want to get one thing off my chest: If you think that this week is the perfect time to post on social media that “there are no such things as assault rifles” I just want you to know that you are precisely the type of person who should have a golf umbrella inserted in your ass…and then opened. Now on with The PopCulteer…

 The Memorial Day Shuffle (re-written from May 27, 2016)

It’s Memorial Day weekend, and while there is a ton of stuff going on, this is a holiday weekend that doesn’t really affect me that much. Let me explain.

When I was growing up, Memorial Day always meant traumatic and stressful running around for my family. My aunts and uncles and grandmother all had family buried all over the state. They were all hung up on making sure, each year, that all the graves were decorated. it was a major family obligation. The graves absolutely had to have new (plastic) flowers every Memorial Day, even though we didn’t have a lot of military folks in the family. By the time I came along the holiday had evolved from its original intent to honor veterans and had turned in a generic “honor all dead folks” day, an economic stimulus for florists and Chinese plastic flower factories.

While this was an obligation that my aunts and uncles were intent on keeping, they always had other things to do, so my dad and mom wound up doing the bulk of the Memorial Day heavy-lifting, and that meant picking up flowers in Dunbar to take to Clarksburg, taking my non-English-speaking and very excitable grandmother with them, getting flowers in Clarksburg to take to Shinnston, hitting up the florist in South Charleston to get flowers for the graves at The London Cemetary, buying supplies to make the flower arrangements for the vases in the Mausoleum at Cross Lanes…you get the picture.

My entire extended family felt an obligation to honor the dead, but they were perfectly happy to delegate that obligation, so it fell to my parents to do all the work. Rather than an obligation, my parents felt, deep-down inside, that it was a waste of time and money and also a huge pain in the ass.

As my parents apporached the ends of their lives, they made me and my brother and sisters promise that we would never put flowers on their graves and that we would end the nonsense of driving hundreds of miles to decorate the graves of people we’d never even met.

They basically granted us Memorial Day Amnesty so that we will never have to take flowers to any of our ancestor’s graves again. I still consider this one of the greatest gifts my parents ever gave me. They so hated doing the whole graveyard shuffle every Memorial Day that it would have been an insult to their memory to carry on this grand and wasteful hypocritical tradition.

Thus, free from such inane obligations, I get to enjoy a long weekend, and think fondly of my parents, instead of griping about having to run around throwing money away on plastic flowers and visiting with dead people that, in some cases, I didn’t really want to visit while they were alive. Many of them I never even met.

The best way to celebrate the memories of those you love is by living life the best you can and quietly thanking them for their part in making you who you are. It means way more if you do this while they’re still with us. Plopping plastic flowers on their graves is pretty much an afterthought for most people. If it makes you feel better, then do it. If you think it makes them feel better, somebody needs to explain this whole life/death thing to you.

Ultimately, spending time with the people you love, either at a cookout or watching cars drive around in circles, binging the new Kids In The Hall on Prime or whatever, is a better way to celebrate life than trudging around decorating graves. This holiday is for military families to honor the service of their loved ones. It’s not a mad dash to every grave you can think of.

Fresh Disco For The Living

Why mourn the long-dead when you can tune in for a new episode of MIRRORBALL on The AIR, 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, or scroll down to the bottom of this post on your phone.

At 2 PM, Mel Larch uncorks a new MIRRORBALL! The AIR’s showcase of classic Disco music presents a wild collection of classic Disco tracks from the classic era of people dancing their cares away. This week Mel has a mix of big Disco hits, and latter-day dance classics from the waning days of Disco in the early 1980s. She even opens the show with a vintage Disco tune that she discovered while watching Rocko’s Modern Life.

For one hour you can go back to the Golden Age of Disco, where the sideburns were long, the skirts were short and the dancing was endless.

Check out the playlist…

MB 52

Quango and Sparky “Do The Boogaloo”
Oliver Cheatham “Get Down Saturday Night”
Tavares “Don’t Take Away The Music”
The Bee Gees “Stayin’ Alive”
Hi Gloss “You’ll Never Know”
Freez “Southern Freez”
Earth Wind & Fire “Let’s Groove”
Womak & Womack “Teardrops”
Evelyn Thomas “High Energy”
The Three Degrees “When Will I See You Again”
Sylvester “You Make Me Feel”

You can hear MIRRORBALL every Friday at 2 PM, with replays Saturday at  9 PM (kicking off a mini-marathon), Sunday at 11 PM, Monday at 9 AM, and Tuesday at 1 PM  exclusively on The AIR.

At 3 PM, we are honoring the request of Sydney Fileen and delaying her show for a week. She had opened her program with Depeche Mode, but following the death of Andy Fletcher, she has decided to re-work the episode to be a full-blown tribute to the late Depeche Mode keyboardist.  We’ll run that next week, and in its place this week we’ll be playing her tribute to the New Wave bands of New Zealand.  You can read about that show HERE.

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.

Friday at 9 PM you can tune in for a 12-hour marathon of The Comedy Vault, presenting classic humor from Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner, National Lampoon, Bob Newhart, Brian Posehn, Maria Bamford, Stan Freberg, The Bonzo Dog Band and more. You can also hear The Comedy Vault Mondays at 8 PM and Wednesdays at 11 PM, only on The AIR.

That’s what’s on The AIR Friday, and that is this week’s PopCulteer. Check back every day for fresh content and loads of our regular features.

Okay, it’s time once again for your guide to things you can do in and around Charleston,  during this Memorial Day Weekend in our latest (truncated) edition of STUFF TO DO.

Live Music is back at Taylor Books. There is no cover charge, and shows start at 7:30 PM. Friday it’s Steve Himes and Phil Washington. Saturday sees Sandy Sowell and Gary Collyard at Charleston’s Bookstore/coffeehouse/art gallery institution.

Our lead item next week will be Fairview, the Pulitzer Award-winning play that happens in June at The Alban Arts Center. Mel and I are planning to attend at some point during the run, but I would like to take this time to strongly suggest that all of our local community theater groups give some consideration to designating one performance during the runs of their shows where proof of vaccination and masks are required.  I’m only asking for one show, out of the four, six or eight that they do, have this stipulation. I realize that it’s a huge turn-off for a lot of folks, but for those of us with immunity issues, it’d be a nice gesture to have one performance where we could feel a bit safer.

As far as I know, The Alban is not doing this with Fairview, but Mel and I are willing to take the chance to support the local scene, the director, Stuart Frazier and see an acclaimed play. I do hope the folks in charge of the various local theatre troupes consider implementing one special performance during their runs with extra precautions.

Because…we all need to remember that the pandemic is not over yet, and now only the stupidest of people are going without vaccinations. Many people who have very good reasons are still wearing masks, and many of us, understandably, are still nervous about being in crowds, masked or not. Be kind and understanding  while you’re out.

In the meantime, if you’re up for going out, here are some suggestions from folks who were kind enough to provide graphics and make my job easier…

Friday

Saturday

Until my March trip to ToyLanta I had never heard of Buc-ee’s.

On the way down to begin our trip, as we passed through Richmond, Kentucky on Interstate 75, my lovely wife let out a sqee, the likes of which she usually reserves for spotting a Sephora or something related to SpongeBob, The Walking Dead or the playwright, Tracy Letts (four things which rarely exist in the same spot).

It was a Buc-ee’s store under construction. Apparently Mel was well-acquainted with the chain of humongous convenience stores through YouTube, and she was really excited at the prospect of eventually visiting one, even though this one was clearly, not quite ready to open yet.

A couple of state lines down the road, and with plenty of warning from frequent billboards, we came upon the Buc-ee’s in Calhoun, Georgia, not far North of Atlanta, so we were able to go in and see what all the fuss was about.

Let me explain what Buc-ee’s is. Technically, it’s a convenience store. However, they’re located and laid out sort of like a truck stop, only it seems that they don’t go out of their way to welcome trucks. They are HUGE, maybe one-third to one-half the size of a Walmart. They tend to have between 80 and 120 gas pumps.

And the big attraction is…they have the cleanest restrooms currently available anywhere on the planet Earth. Seriously, they are the number one place to go number one, or two. The stalls are private and clean and as soon as you leave one a team of forty or fifty people rush in to sanitize it.

The chain was founded in Texas in 1982, and in recent years they have started expanding beyond the borders of the Lone Star State.

They are tourist attractions as well. People will get on a bus and ride for hours just to pull up at a Buc-ee’s, relieve themselves, and partake of some of the ridiculous amount of foodstuffs, clothing, toys, and various knick-knackery available at Buc-ee’s twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, all year long forever and for all eternity.

The food is pretty darned impressive. They have their trademark brisket, pulled pork (fine if you like it–personally the smell of pork cooking nauseates me) plus they have roasted nuts, a beef jerky bar, a fudge bar (very nice), Dippin Dots, a bakery and a whole range of their own brand of snacks, including “Beaver Nuggets” or “Buc-ee’s Nuggies,” which, to be honest, don’t sound that appetizing to me. The kitchen (which is out in the middle of the store), the fudge and beef jerky bars and everything in the store is open 24 hours a day. Let me quote their website here…

Fresh hot food is available made to order 24 hours a day. At our travel centers, breakfast starts at 4:00 AM and ends at 11:00 AM. At our travel centers, made to order lunch items are available starting at 11:00 AM. We also have fresh homemade grab and go items available 24 hours a day. Our jerky, bakery, fudge, and Dippin Dots counters are always open!

They have a mascot, Buc-ee Beaver (inspired by the Ipana Toothpaste Beaver, who was just before my time), and he is seen in plush form and on hundreds of items ranging from shirts to shoes to hats to bikinis to chips, dips and soda and maybe even on home pregnancy tests.

When we came upon the Buc-ee’s in Calhoun, all the plush they had in stock was little keychain Buc-ee’s.

Fast-forward a couple of months, and Mel and I were looking for a quick weekend trip that would be less stressful than riding the Amtrak to New York for 31 hours in Manhattan. We’d heard that the Richmond Buc-ee’s had opened in April, and we love the shopping and hotels in Richmond and nearby Lexington, so last weekend we drove down Friday after Mel got off work–and it was a wonderful afternoon to drive–and checked into the hotel, waited two hours and drove to Buc-ee’s after 10 PM.

Why so late? Well, I didn’t mention it much, but Buc-ee’s can get a bit crowded in the daytime. Buses filled with day-trippers who have loaded bladders, and damned near ever single person who saw one of their five hundred or so billboards on the Interstate all converge, and…it was more crowded than going to Yankee Stadium on free bobblehead day.

And we’re still nervous about this pandemic thing. So we wanted to see what it was like late at night, since they are open 24/7. Turns out it’s much more pleasant, but hardly deserted.  Basically we drove almost three hours to wait until after 10 PM to go to a place to pee and buy fudge, and it was worth the trip. Take a look at these photos and see for yourself.

Did I mention they have a lot of gas pumps? These aren’t close to being all of them.

Buc-ee is even more impressive at night, presiding over his petroleum empire.

He’s well-represented inside, too.

Continue reading

For several years, every May Mel Larch would presente a special episode of Curtain Call devoted to the Tony Award Nominees for Best Musical.  Wednesday afternoon on The AIR, you can hear samples of the nominees for this year’s Tony Awards for Best Musical for the first time since 2019, as Broadway gets back to normal, and so does 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. If you’re reading on your phone, scroll down and you’ll find the radio player hiding below the posts.

At 3 PM Mel Larch presents a new hour of great musical theater on Curtain Call. It’s our annual Tony Awards preview, with songs from each of the nominated musicals, which took a bit of doing since some of the shows aren’t releasing their Original Broadway Cast albums until next month.

In this show, you’ll hear four songs from A Strange Loop, three each from Paradise Square and  Girl From The North Country and two from Mr. Saturday Night, and then one each from MJ: The Musical and SIX. The song selection was dictated by what was available to use on the show.

A Strange Loop, written by Michael R. Jackson, who sings on the third song that you’re about to hear, follows Usher, a Black, Queer writer writing a musical about a Black, Queer writer writing a musical about a Black, Queer writer etc. The title refers to a cognitive science term coined by Douglas Hofstadter. It’s a funny and challenging show with incredible songs and a terriffic cast.

Paradise Square is a stage musical, with music by Jason Howland, lyrics by Masi Asare and Nathan Tysen, and a book by Christina Anderson, Marcus Gardley, Larry Kirwan and Craig Lucas. Set in New York City during the Civil War, the musical follows conflict between Irish Americans and Black Americans.

Girl From The North Country is a depression-era tale of a family in trouble, living on the shores of Lake Superior in Minnesota. The story, which is sort of a cross between The Grapes of Wrath and a soap opera, is carried by the songs of Bob Dylan.

Mr Saturday Night is a musical adaptaion of the 1994 Billy Crystal movie, with Crystal reprising his role as an aging comedian with a complicated family life.

MJ: The Musical is a jukebox musical that tells the story of the life of Michael Jackson, using his own music.

SIX is a British musical comedy with book, music, and lyrics by Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss.The musical is a modern retelling of the lives of the six wives of Henry VIII presented as a pop concert, as the Queens take turns singing and telling their story to see who suffered the most due to Henry and should, therefore, become the group’s lead singer. This is a great show, and Mel’s been playing songs from earlier productions of it on Curtain Call for years.

The 2022 Tony Awards will be broadcast on CBS and streamed on Paramount + on June, 12, so you can tune in and see who won this year’s prize.

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 evenings starting at 6 PM, and an all-night marathon of Curtain Call episodes can be heard Wednesday nights, beginning at Midnight.

If you wanna hear something funny,  tune in to The AIR Wednesday night at 11 PM where we will offer up a new episode of The Comedy Vault, this time featuring an hour of random comedy bits by Steve Martin.

It’s Tuesday on The AIR  and you know what that means. Just like last week, it’s time for yet another one-third-new, three-hour  episode of Radio Free Charleston. 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 (If you’re reading PopCult on a desktop, that is. Phone readers have to go to the website).

Yes, it’s one more hybrid edition of Radio Free Charleston at 10 AM and 10 PM Tuesday.   This week we open with a full hour of  local and independent music, and then we hit you with two hours of classic Radio Free Charleston International from January, 2019.

Our first hour, opens with new music from J. Marinelli You’ll also hear cool music from The Heavy Editors (featuring former Feast of Stephen six-stringer, Joe Vallina), The Amos Steel Co., The Settlement and Corduroy Brown. We also have a new music from Julian Lennon and Def Leppard and a song from The Black Keys featuring Sierra Ferrell on backing vocals.

The second and third hours of our show re-present a mixtape edition of Radio Free Charleston International from January, 2019, when yours truly wanted to see how weird he could get.

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

RFC V5 089

hour one
J Marinelli“Are You Terrified”
The Heavy Editors “Alien Lover”
Corduroy Brown“To My Younger Self”
Amos Steel Co. “Dead Man Whiskey”
Aaron Fisher “Drive”
Hello June “Spruce”
Spencer Elliott SE3 “Torque”
Julian Lennon “Every Little Moment”
The Settlement  “Extinction”
Def Leppard “Take What You Want”
Jeff Rosenstock “NO U”
We Are The Union “100 Years”
The Black Keys (with Sierra Ferrell ) “Your Team Is Looking Good”

hour two
Barnes and Barnes “Gumby Jaws Lament”
Tubeway Army “That’s Too Bad”
Skankin’ Pickle “My Hair”
Nina Hagen Band “Superboy”
Midnight Satellites “Long Lost”
Nicky Hopkins “Shout It Out”
Mi Sex “It Only Hurts When I’m Laughing”
Roger Glover “Dreams of Sir Bedivere”
Spazzchow “Cats”
MIKA “Love You When I’m Drunk”
The Parlortones “Skeletons”
Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra “Storm Rider”
Ugly Blondes “Bottom of the Ocean”
Tiki Tonga “Island Paradise”
The Soulutions “Do Right”
Nu Tra “Superhuman”

hour three
Black Dyke Mills Band “Thingumybob”
Small Affairs “Back To China”
Silent Treatment “Life On Earth”
Busty and The Bass “PS, I’m Pregnant”
Macy Gray “Nothing Else Matters”
Polysics “Black Out Fall Out”
Spacehog “Candyman”
Super Furry Animals “Don’t Be A Fool, Billy”
The Dollyrots “The Addiction”
The Woggles “Morituri Te Salutant”
Tracy Bonhom “Your Night Is Wide Open”
Fitz and The Trantrums “Fool”

You can hear this episode of Radio Free Charleston Tuesday at 10 AM and 10 PM on The AIR, with replays Thursday at 2 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. At 3 PM we have two recent episodes of The Swing Shift.

Our art this week is another quick and sloppy small study for a potential large-scale painting later. I’ve been doing these more lately due to a combination of not having enough free time for art, and having a mild resurgence of Myasthenia Gravis that’s been trying my patience a bit.

This is a watercolor and acrylic study based on a series of photos taken in Times Square. When I do this one full-size I’ll go for the high-detail look that I’ve used in the past for Times Square paintings, only this time it’ll be a physical painting, and not digital.

To see a bigger version try clicking HERE.

Meanwhile, Monday at 2 PM on The AIR, we bring you a new episode of  Psychedelic Shack, followed at 3 PM by a new mixtape edition of Herman Linte’s weekly showcase of the Progressive Rock of the past half-century, Prognosis.  Herman will be presenting a three-part tribute to the late prog-rock keyboard legend, Vangelis.  This will include his first group, Aphrodite’s Child, his solo work and his work with Jon Anderson.  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.

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.

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.

Tonight at 8 PM you can hear an hour of the last project by Rik Mayall on The Comedy Vault. Wednesday evening at 10 PM, we’ll have another new episode of The Comedy Vault.

Then, at 9 PM we bring you an overnight marathon of Prognosis, this time with five episodes that feature music by Genesis and the former members thereof.