Month: August 2022 (Page 2 of 4)

I keep a sketchpad and some pastel crayons on my nightstand, just in case I wake up through the night, or early in the morning, and want to capture an image I’ve dreamt or saw. That’s what this week’s art is.

To see it bigger try clicking HERE.

Meanwhile, Monday on The AIR, we are in the midst of a week of 24 hour marathons of our specialty programming.  You can listen to The AIR at the website, or on the embedded radio player elsewhere on this page.

For the remainder of Monday you can tune in and enjoy some of the best episodes of The Swing Shift. At midnight, we switch over for a full day of Radio Free Charleston Volume 5. It’s all part of our way to let you sample the programming on The AIR and in no way should be considered a cheap stunt to give us the week off from making new radio before our wedding anniversary.

Above you see an embedded playlist that will bring you the music of The Monkey Swingers, This is a band I discovered about three years ago and have included in many episodes of The Swing Shift. This is a four-piece combo, featuring a truly remarkable trumpet player, Matteo Caselli. The playlist begins wit their lockdown video cover of “I Wanna Be Like You” and wraps up with an Italian interview and performance video from March of this year.

The Monkey Swingers were formed in Bologna, Italy in 2015. They play dance Swing music from the 30s with a focus on the early “Lindy Hop” form of Swing. In 2016 they recorded their first EP from which they extracted the song, ‘Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen” by Jacob Jacobs to release as their first video clip. In April 2016 they began a fruitful collaboration with the Lindy Hop Swing For Fun school in Bologna for which they perform regularly.

During the 2016/2017 season they performed a small number of concerts in Northern Italy. In May 2017 they debuted their full album, The Monkey Swingers XL which foresees the occasional expansion of this combo from 4 to 9 members thus giving rise to a “small big band.” A second album, I Love Your Shoes, followed a year later.

Aside from the fact this is is a great little Swing band, I’m also posting this here to remind you that, starting at midnight EDT, Sunday night/Monday morning, The AIR will begin a 24-hour marathon of The Swing Shift, part of our week of 24-hour marathons to give yours truly a bit of a break.

This week we jump back to February, 2011, for an episode of Radio Free Charleston that runs the gamut from musical theater to travelling troubadours to Heavy Metal.

“Not Kool Shirt,” featured music from Fox Elipsus and White Chapel District, plus a preview of a classic Scarpelli/Kehde show from The Contemporary Youth Arts Company.

“Norman Rockwell’s An American Love Story” was a then-new original work with words by Dan Kehde and music by the late Mark Scarpelli. This was Dan and Mark’s second musical based on the works of Rockwell, and we featured a solo performance by Sarah Schleiss, accompanied on piano by Mark Scarpelli. We’ll bring you another song from this show in this space next week.

Next up we had Fox Elipsus, a travelling musician who had a pretty interesting gig going that I can’t really talk about here.  He networked his way around the country playing in spots like Taylor Books (where we recorded him) and he never had to pay for lodging…again for reasons I can’t really talk about here.

We also offered up a wild New Year’s Even performance of their song “Revolution” by White Chapel District. This was an incredibly fun shoot and one of the most high-energy performances we’ve had on RFC. You can find the full production notes for this show HERE.

In other news, remember that we’re starting nine days of 24 hour-marathons on The AIR today. We are in the midst of a day filled with Nigel Pye’s Psychedelic Shack. At Midnight we switch over to Herman Linte’s progressive rock showcase, Prognosis.

The PopCulteer
August 19, 2022

It’s a week for a few random notes, so let’s dive in…

Poor Groucho

Forty-five years ago today, Groucho Marx, one of my personal heroes (as a comedian, not the way he conducted his life) passed away.

And nobody gave a crap because Elvis died two days earlier and was still getting all the press.

Seriously, even the local papers (on the 20th) stuck Groucho’s obit on page 12 and 15, while Elvis was still front page news.

Now, I’m not knocking The King, but 1977 was the year before I got interested in music. Comedy was my bag, and it was pretty galling that my “King” got shunted off to the back pages so that Elvis could be on page one for another two weeks.

I’m not exaggerating here. The death of Elvis was front-page news for more than two weeks. It sold papers, which considering that nothing sells papers anymore is quite remarkable.

Anyway, since I have this blog here I can, just 45 years late, say what I want about Groucho and not waste any more time talking about Elvis.

Man, it really sucks that Groucho died.

I guess that would’ve been more satisfying if more folks had said it back then.

At least Rob Zombie won’t be directing that movie about Groucho now. I don’t think I would’ve been able to watch it with Sherri Zombie as Groucho.

Radio Notes

For the next 8 or 9 days on our sister internet radio station, The AIR, we will be running 24-hour marathons of our specialty programming. If you’re a fan, you can soak in the gloriousness of it all from one midnight to the next.

Why would I pull such a programming stunt? The answer is simple.

I need a week off from making radio so I can catch up on other stuff in the blog, and prepare for a mini trip for my anniversary, which is one week from today.

Starting Saturday at midnight (that’s late Friday night), you can hear 24 hours of Nigel Pye’s Psychedelic Shack. Sunday tune in for Herman Linte’s progressive rock showcase, Prognosis.

Monday will see The Swing Shift, and Tuesday will bring you Radio Free Charleston.

I’ll have posts up each day after that to let you know what program will begin at midnight that night.

You can listen to The AIR at The Website, or on the little embedded player, located elsewhere on this page.

More Stuff To Do

A nagging technical glitch is liimiting the number of graphics I can include in each post here at PopCult, and this week there is a ton of things you can do, so I’ve got a few leftovers.

First, a note about flood relief efforts in Campbell’s Creek, and where folks who need food can get it…

Second, a note about a really cool GI Joe show happening in Hershey, Pennsylvania on Saturday. Mel and I had a blast when we went to this show in 2019, but it wasn’t in the cards or the budget this year. If you’re in the area, check it out…

Finally, Saturday there’s another cool show at The Loud in Huntington, with several great bands for just ten bucks.

And with that, this PopCulteer is in the books. Check back for our regular features and fresh content every day.

This is the last batch of photos I took at The Kentuckiana GI Joe Toy Expo last month.  Apologies for dragging these out, but our technical restraints here at the blog (I can’t currently include more than ten photos in a post) combined with an influx of mundane and time-consuming paying work, caused delays.

I do plan one more photo essay of the cool stuff I got at the show, but that will have to wait until I have time to unpack it and take photos.

It’s been that hectic, juggling the blog with the radio station with the paying gigs and with other obligations, I haven’t had time to even look at the cool figures, playsets and custom stuff that I picked up at the show.

In fact, tomorrow I’ll be telling you about a radio programming stunt for The AIR that is designed to lighten my workload a bit next week so that I can get away to celebrate my eighth wedding anniversary.

But the cool part of today’s photo essay is the inclusion of photos of the prototypes of Super Joe Unlimited. Ths is the revival of the unjustly-overlooked 8-plus inch-tall incarnation of GI Joe that existed between the Adventure Team and the Real American Hero.  New, sturdier, figures are being designed and tooled up, and hopefully we’ll have some exciting news about how you can buy these before the end of the year.

Sadly, most of the photos I took of the prototypes on display fell victim to a defective SD Card, but we got a few good pics, and you can find more images and information at their Facebook Page, along with up-to-date news.

After the Super Joe Unlimited pictures, we have a few more shots of the cool toys at The 2022 Kentuckiana GI Joe Toy Expo…

A slimmer Gor, Darkon and Super Joe, prototypes on display.

Gor, The King of the Terrons!

Prototypes for new characters and helmets.

“We’re getting the band back together!”

More vintage goodness. It was only a lack of space in stately Radio Free Charleston Manor that kept this scramble van from coming home with me.

More recent 12″ figures.

More 3D printed goodies from Brad Curry’s Bee-Active Toys.

Aside from the Action Man and Star Wars stuff, I already had most of this stuff. Still cool to see it in the wild.

Finally we glimpse some Dragon figures and some MEGOs. Good stuff to be found ’round every corner at Kentuckiana.

There is a ton of stuff to do in and around Charleston this week, so let’s dive in.

First, my feature pick is the evening of restored Max Fleischer cartoons that will be screened at The Alban Arts Center on Saturday. You can find full details at the Facebook event page, but I’ll let you know a little more about it here with a quote from that very page:

Join Betty Boop, Popeye, Superman, and pals in this rare opportunity to see classic Fleischer Studios cartoons from the 1920s and 1930s on the big screen – featuring all-new, absolutely stunning prints taken from the best surviving sources!  This event is also a fundraiser to help the Fleischers preserve and restore more of their classic animated shorts, in collaboration with Rockin’ Pins and a group of cartoon enthusiasts and collectors.  You may have seen these shorts before, but you’ve never seen them like this!

Admission is ten dollars, with half the proceeds going toward restoring more Fleischer cartoon classics.

It’s a special day on The AIR  as we premere a new episode of The Swing Shift, plus we have a landmark new Radio Free Charleston too. 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 elsewhere on this page.

Today we had to figure out what to do to celebrate Radio Free Charleston Volume Five #100, which you can hear at 10 AM and 10 PM Tuesday.  I decided to make the whole three-hour show almost all local, and present double-shots of music from all over the RFC Archives of the last 30-plus years.

To be honest, this isn’t quite the milestone that it seems to be. This is the third time Radio Free Charleston has hit episode 100. Heck, our video show (Volume Two) passed 200, and is still running. This is the 100th three-hour episode of the show, which reformatted this way back at the beginning of 2020.

In case you’re wondering, Volume One was the first, broadcast radio, incarnation of RFC, which ran from Labor Day 1989 to May, 1990. Volume Two is the video show, which began in 2006, and is still running as an annual special. Volume Three had about 45 episodes on the internet radio station, Voices of Appalachia, from 2014 to 2015. Voices of Appalachia re-branded as OnTheAIRadio, and then simply “The AIR” in 2016, and that’s when I started the numbering over as Volume 4, which was a solid hour of local music.  I also launched RFC International at that time, which allowed me to return to my free-format radio roots, much like the original broadcast version of the program.

Then in 2020 I decided to combine RFC and RFC International, and make it even more like the original version of the show. One of the joys of the first incarnation of the show was that I could play local musicians side-by-side with their musical heroes. I missed that, and also wanted a little more freedom to make radio anarchy like I did in my youth.

So basically, while this is #100 of Volume Five, if you count The RFC MINI SHOW and RFC International in the mix, I’m probably closing in on 600 radio and video programs under the RFC banner.

For this show, I decided to go all-local, which is something else that I did a few times back in 1989 and 90.

We open the show with a couple of songs from Three Bodies that I co-produced with Spencer Elliott about 31 years ago (and won’t shut up about). We contine with a mix of vintage music from 1987 to 2020, and several new tunes that haven’t been heard on RFC before.  Even the one indie artist we bring you from North Carolina has West Virginia’s William Matheny contributing.

I had so much fun putting this show together, and was a tad frustrated at having to leave out so much good stuff, that our next episode (which may be in two weeks) will follow this format with a totally different line-up of West Virginia musicians.

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 100

hour one
Three Bodies “The Trax” “Shingles and Tar”
Brian Diller & The Ride “Don’t Stop At Anything”
Brian Diller “Days Like These”
The Paranoid Style “The Worst of My Love” “Ten Floors of Basement”
Three’s Company Blues “Steppin’ Out” “Bringing Back The Thrill”
Corduroy Brown “I Know Better” “”Who Am I For Now”
Strawfyssh “Netted Fish” “Graveyard Shift”
Hasil Adkins “Big Red Satellite” “She Said”
J Marinelli“Saturn of Clarksburg” “Kevlar Weather”
Unmanned “Baloney” “Wayward Girls”

hour two
Go Van Gogh “Shut Up, I Love You” “I Can’t Sleep At Night”
Joseph Hale “Time” “Church of Paranoia”
Emmalea Deal “Queen” “The Light”
Stark Raven “More To Life Than This” “Whiter Shade of Pale”
Mark Beckner “Odessa” “With The Scientific Curiosity of Ghouls”
Battleship Battleship “Ad Hominem” “Entropy”
Lady D “Karma Is A Bitch” “Disturbing My Peace”

hour three
Mother Nang “Knee Deep In Wine” “Buy The Farm”
Bane Star “Finality” “You Should Have Seen Her”
Ann Magnuson “The Picture On My Dentist’s Wall” “Disassociation”
John Radcliff “Company Song” “The Enemy”
Todd Burge “Rapid Fire” “Might Be The End”
Hello June “Candy Rain” “Wish I Could Fly”
The Big Bad “Set Sail The Sinking Ship” “Frighteners”

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.

Then at 1 PM we have two hours of  MIRRORBALL.

At 3 PM a new hour of The Swing Shift arrives  with a special mixtape show that I can’t give you a playlist for because that show hasn’t been recorded yet as I write this.

I can tell you that it’s nearly a solid hour of the legendary Duke Ellington collaborating with a wide assortment of legends like Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Rosemary Clooney and even Mahalia Jackson. It’s a sophisticated slice of Swing to help you feel smooth and sophisticated and all that kinda junk.

And of course it ends with Lady Ella singing our tag line, “It Don’t Mean A Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing).

You can hear The Swing Shift Tuesday at 3 PM, with replays Wednesday at 8 AM and 6 PM, Thursday at 2 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.

This week art isn’t that ambitious. It’s a watercolor doodle of clouds in the sky, with some green hills in the distance. I did this a couple of weeks ago, just to limber up the fingers and I liked it enough to use here (with the borders cropped out because they were sloppy). I took the weekend off from doing much resembling work, so this was fine to drop here to get the new week off to a bright and colorful start. For some reason, after scanning it, the texture of the paper made the watercolors look more like oils in places, but this is pure watercolor.

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 elsewhere on this page.

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 hilarious musical comedy from Flight of the Conchords 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 that’s really just a sampler of the most recent episodes of our music specialty shows. It kicks off with last week’s new RFC, just to further whet your appetite for tomorrow’s 100th episode of the lastest incarnation of my thirty-three year old radio program.

A few years ago on the late, lamented (RIP Rhonda) Roku Channel, Bizarre TV, I discovered a couple of horror movie hosts operating out of Cleveland, The Mummy and The Monkey. Featuring Janet Decay, Cleveland’s First horror hostess and Grimm Gorri, Cleveland’s Late Night Missing Link, the duo are the hosts of The Mummy And The Monkey’s Hairy Scary Hangout.

The Mummy And The Monkey have been part of Cleveland Ohio’s horror movie scene since 2014. They host cheesy movies on their Channel on most Friday nights at 9:45 PM (Eastern Time) and you can watch on YouTube or their Facebook Page.  Past episodes are archived, so you can catch up whenever you want. They follow the usual format of the classic horror movie host (think Svengoolie or Elvira) but they put their own spin on it and make it loads of fun to watch.  They even have their own merch and also maintain a cool eBay store, stocked with wild vintage items.

Above you see their latest show, featuring The Death Kiss, a pre-code mystery movie starring none other than Bela Lugosi and a couple of his Dracula co-stars from the year before!

This week we go back to January, 2011, and begin a run of episodes of Radio Free Charleston that may be a little bittersweet. This episode and the next two all prominently feature the music of Mark Scarpelli, the beloved, musican, composer and music educator who passed away earlier this year.

This week we have Mark’s Beatles tribute band, Rubber Soul, as they prepare for a performance of The White Album at The Alban Arts Center, which was a benefit for The Ronald McDonald House.

This edition of the show was a “fly on the wall” preview, showing rehearsals for that benefit show, recorded just days before this show premiered, which was just days before the concert itself.

Mark was always very generous in letting me come in and record his musical projects “in progress” so I could get them posted here in time to promote the actual events.

You’ll get to see three complete songs in this episode of RFC: “Back in the USSR,” with lead vocals by Chris Conard; “Dear Prudence,” sung by Michelle Melton; and “Yer Blues,” sung by Joey Collier. You’ll also see snippets of other White Album classics, with vocal turns by Rubber Soul’s leader, Mark Scarpelli, guitarist, Greg Hunt, and drummer, Brian Holstine.

Other featured instrumentalists seen in the show are Jamie Skeen on bass, Alasha Al-Qudwah on viola, Jeremy Severn on Trumpet and Kathy Coyle on woodwinds.

Because of the nature of how we filmed the band, the audio isn’t up to our usual standards. I felt it was a decent trade-off so that we could get it online quick enough to help promote what turned out to be a sold-out show.