Month: September 2022 (Page 3 of 3)

This week we start to go back and fill in the gaps where early episodes of Radio Free Charleston that were once (or twice) online have since gone missing.

From August, 2007, this episode of RFC, “Flaming Skull Shirt,” has been missing in action for thirteen of the last fifteen years.  This episode features a video by the late, legendary darling of Dunbar, The Amazing Delores. You’ll also get to see a performance by Joe Slack, recorded at LiveMix Studio, back in the glory days.

Over the end credits we play one of the most-requested songs from the original radio incarnation of RFC. We also have a very special movie trailer, and animation from Frank Panucci’s movie, “Reperkussionz.”

This show is notable for having two segments directed by my old pal, Danny Boyd. Danny did the video for Delores, and he also did the original short film, “Coal Dust, Fairy Dust,” which I re-edited and bastardized into a cheap parody of “Brokeback Mountain.” The joke was funny fifteen years ago, trust me.

Also, I couldn’t fix it in the remastering, so the credits still have the incorrect songwriting credits for “Love Magic.” They should be Delores Boyd/Michael Lipton/Stan Lynch.

You can read the original production notes HERE.

The PopCulteer
September 9, 2022

It’s bounced around a bit this week due to the holiday, but we have some suggestions for STUFF TO DO in Charleston, Huntington, and other Mountain State locations over the weekend, so let’s just dive in.

Our feature event is something that, sadly I couldn’t work into my schedule.  JoeLanta, the very cool GI Joe-oriented Toy Show in Atlanta grew into ToyLanta a few years ago, but now it’s grown even more and come full circle as a second show, which returns to its roots as a dedicated GI Joe show. It’s happening today through Sunday at the Hilton Atlanta Northeast, and in addition to the great JoeLanta events like the custom figure and diorama contest, the concert by Radio Cult and the terrific GI Joe vendors from around the country, two very special guests will be there: Sgt. Slaughter and Keone Young, the voice of Storm Shadow on the classic GI Joe cartoon. Check out their website for more details. We will try to make it down that way next year.

RibFest is happening at Shawnee Park, between Dunbar and Institute through Sunday. I would tell you all about it, but I hate ribs and BBQ, and can’t even stand the smell of that stuff. Check out their Facebook Event Page for details if that sounds like something you’d be interested in attending.

Live Music is back at Taylor Books. There is no cover charge, and shows start at 7:30 PM. Friday it’s Lil Bren. Saturday sees Ryan Smith at Charleston’s beloved Bookstore/coffeehouse/art gallery institution.

Please remember that the pandemic is not over yet. 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.

If you’re up for going out, here are some suggestions for the rest of this weekend.  We’re grouping them together by day again…

FRIDAY

SATURDAY

SUNDAY

That is this week’s PopCulteer.  We’re still going to be operating in “lite” mode for a few more days while I take care of some other assignments, but you can still check PopCult for all our regular features, with fresh content every day.

Between the Labor Day holiday and looming magazine deadlines, it’s time for a rare Thursday premiere of Radio Free Charleston on The AIR . For just the second time we’re debuting  another one-third-new, three-hour  episode of Radio Free Charleston outside of our regular Tuesday timeslot. 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.

It’s one more hybrid edition of Radio Free Charleston debuting at 2 PM Thursday.  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 late in the run. This time our second and third hours are a mixtape of my favorite music of all time, originally transmitted over The AIR back in January, 2019. I was having deadline issues then, too.

Our first hour, opens with new music from The Heavy Editors.  You’ll also hear cool new music from J. Marinelli, Golden and Catbite . We also have some new tunes from Chicago artists, Al Rose and Nice Motor. We get a little proggy in the last half of the first hour, with music from Six by Six, The Settlement, Chuck Biel and more.

The second and third hours of our show re-present a cool episode of Radio Free Charleston International from January, 2019, when your humble host Took the easy way out and just compiled a mixtape of some of his favorite music of all time.

Next week, this episode will appear in the regular Tuesday timeslot, to lighten the workload of your PopCulteer a bit.

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 102

hour one
The Heavy Editors “Remember”
Golden “Better Weather”
Nice Motor “Overstated”
J Marinelli “Antifa Grandpa”
Audrey Smiley “Baby”
Al Rose “Shooting Straight”
Catbite “Spiral”
Six by Six “Reason To Feel Calm Again”
The Settlement “Extinction”
Joanna Newsom “Cosmia”
Chuck Biel “The Other Side”
Andy Prieboy “Take Her Where The Boys Are”

hour two
Art of Noise “Close (The The Edit)”
YES “Arriving UFO”
ELO “Mr. Blue Sky”
The Beatles “All You Need Is Love”
DEVO “Smart Patrol/Mr. DNA”
Elvis Costello “Green Shirt”
Kate Bush “Suspended in Gaffa”
Oingo Boingo “Nasty Habits”
Emerson Lake and Palmer “Tarkus”

hour three
Mike Batt “Love Makes You Crazy”
Lene Lovich “What Will I Do Without You”
Joe Jackson “Soul Kiss”
Hazel O’Connor “Breaking Glass”
Elvis Costello and Glenn Tilbrook “From A Whisper To A Scream”
The Stranglers “The Raven”
The Aquabats “Play Doh”
Frank Zappa “Flakes”
Franz Ferdinand “Take Me Out”
The Beatles “Hey Bulldog”
Madness “Rise and Fall”
DEVO “Gates of Steel”
Kate Bush “Army Dreamers”
Gary Numan “Cars”
Royal Crown Revue “Hollywood Tale”
Oingo Boingo “Goodbye, Goodbye”

You can hear this episode of Radio Free Charleston Thursday at 2 PM, Friday at 9 AM, Saturday at Noon and Midnight, Monday at 11 AM, and  next Tuesday at 10 AM and 10 PM 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.

Wednesday afternoon The AIR brings you a classic episode of Beatles Blast and a new and very special episode of 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 elsewhere on this page.

At 2 PM Since we brought you an hour of awful covers of Beatles songs last week on Beatles Blast this week we decided to cleanse the pallette with a show that collects some particularly nifty covers of Beatles songs. In this mixtape show you’ll hear everyone from Manfred Mann’s Earth Band to Willie Nelson and all the musical styles between, all doing their versions of Beatle songs.

At 3 PM on Curtain Call, Mel Larch presents an hour that lets you sample four brand-new examples of musical theatre.

Mel opens the show with music from Fantastically great Women Who Changed The World. Based on the picture book by British author Kate Pankhurst, and developed by Kenny Wax, the producer of SIX, this self-described “smash hit kickass-pirational pop musical” is currently touring Britain and is expected to run in London’s East End and possibly transfer to Broadway later.

With numbers by songwriter Miranda Cooper and Jennifer Decilveo, book by Chris Bush and lyrics by the three aforementioned creatives, the piece follows a young woman who leaves class to meet a variety of iconic women from history such as Frida Kahlo, Rosa Parks, Amelia Earhart, Marie Curie, Emmeline Pankhurst to name just a few.

The Visitor is a stage musical with music and lyrics by Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey and a book by Yorkey and Kwame Kwei-Armah, based on the 2007 film of the same name. It premiered at The Public Theater in October 2021. Negotiations are underway for a run on Broadway, Hopefully with its off-Broadway star, David Hyde Pierce, again in the lead role as Walter.

The film focuses on a lonely man in late middle age whose life changes when a chance encounter with an immigrant couple forces him to face issues relating to identity, immigration, and cross-cultural communication in post-9/11 New York City.

Next up is Emma Rice’s musical adaptation of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. This daring new take on the classic novel is currently running at The National Theater in London, and a transfer to Broadway is possible in 2023 or 24.

Finally, from Chicago, Mel has a small sampling of Ed Rutherford’s adaptaion of J.M. Barrie’s spooky stage play, Mary Rose.  Barrie, most famous for creating Peter Pan, tells the story of Mary Rose, a girl who vanishes twice.As a child, Mary Rose was taken by her father to a remote Scottish island. While she is briefly out of her father’s sight, Mary Rose vanishes. The entire island is searched exhaustively. Twenty-one days later, Mary Rose reappears as mysteriously as she disappeared…but she shows no effects of having been gone for three weeks, and she has no knowledge of any gap or missing time. Years later, as a young wife and mother, the adult Mary Rose persuades her husband to take her to the same island. Again she vanishes: this time for a period of decades. When she is found again, she is not a single day older and has no awareness of the passage of time In the interim, her son has grown to adulthood and is now physically older than his mother.

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.

Also on The AIR, Wednesday at 11 PM, we revisit the premiere edition of The Comedy Vault from back in 2016, when the show presented a wide variety of comedic performers, all mashed into one funny hour. The Comedy Vault can be heard every Wednesday at 11 PM, with the new episodes replayed a couple of weeks later, Monday at 8 PM.

It’s Tuesday, and since we’re wrapping up the Labor Day Radio Free Charleston marathon on The AIR, I don’t have a new episode of the show to tell you about here. We are going to premiere a new episode on Thursday, which will run in its usual timeslot next week.

But…I do have a few photos from my recent anniversary excusion up North with Mrs. PopCulteer. Since Amtrak was sold out and we couldn’t celebrate our anniversary with a trip to Chicago, we went low-key and just drove up to the Northern tip of West Virginia. Mel got to visit her new holy land, the FiestaWare Factory Outlet Store (seen right), and I got to enjoy the scenery, witness a roadside attraction, buy some toys and bask in the company of my beloved.

I also took a ton of photos at The Grave Creek Mound Archaeological Complex , which I will share with you next week so I can plug a special event they have coming up.

Aside from that, I didn’t take a lot of pictures. It was supposed to be a non-working trip, after all, but here are a few sights from the weekend before last…

I love this cool view of Ohio from the FiestaWare parking lot.

We decided to make the drive even further North from Newell, to Chester, so we could see the freaking teapot. Are you happy now?  You have to forgive me. I was very disappointed that Nandor, from “What We Do In The Shadows” wasn’t standing in front, like he was on the show.

A view of the Ohio River, just moments after driving around the teapot. They don’t tell you that it’s located in the middle of a highway entrance ramp.

The next day we made a return trip to the Grave Creek Mound. It’s for when you don’t feel like a nut.

Signage contains Mound bragging.

Your PopCulteer, seen in his feral state, posing near the Mound, with The West Virginia Penitentiary in the background. Mel didn’t want to be in any photos, as usual.

This week’s art is a work in progress, sort of. This is a very rough small-scale study for a future painting. I’m calling this one “Sketchy on State Street” because it’s a very sketchy pastel crayon depiction of North State Street in Chicago, based on about a dozen reference photos I took in 2018 and 2019.

This was just slapped out quick to try to get the composition down. I’ll probably rethink the colors, and it’s probable that the finished painting, which I’m hoping to do in high-detail acrylics on a much larger canvas, will not look too much like this.

But it works as a quick sketch, in sort of an expressionistic sort of way.

To see it bigger try clicking HERE.

Meanwhile, Monday on The AIR, we bring you the rest of the Labor Day weekend marathon of Radio Free Charleston. You can listen to The AIR at the website, or on the embedded radio player elsewhere on this page.

The plan is to run this marathon until Tuesday afternoon. If I get back from my holiday excursion in time, I may have a new episode of RFC ready to premiere next Thursday, instead of on our regular day.

I don’t like to repeat the videos I post here in Sunday Evening Video very often, but this this has become a tradition and hardly anybody reads the blog on Labor Day weekend anyway, so here goes.

If you are of a certain age, Labor Day seems synonymous with The Jerry Lewis Labor Day MDA Telethon, which the famed comedian hosted for almost sixty years.

The telethon is gone, as is Jerry, but MDA (the Muscular Dystrophy Association) maintains a YouTube page where they still post highlights from the vaults.

Above you see a playlist with over a hundred videos of musical legends like Frank Sinatra, Aretha Franklin, Smokey Robinson, B.B. King, Diana Ross, Ray Charles, Elton John, Paul McCartney, Tony Bennett, Little Richard, Johnny Cash, Toni Basil and many others. Best of all, you can watch these clips without sitting through four hours of corporate spokespeople droning on in a monotone about how much they care about the kids. I mean, no offense to the guy from 7 11, but I’m pretty sure they play those parts on an endless loop in hell. Above you see the good stuff, the cream of the crop.

Seriously, there are some gems in there like Duran Duran, MC Hammer and Charo. There’s lots of Charo. Lots of MC Hammer, too, now that I think about it.

Enjoy!

With this week’s edition of the RFC Flashback, we have sort of come full circle with our chronological presentation of episodes of the video incarnation of Radio Free Charleston.

Five years ago I  decided to jump ahead about forty episodes in our chronological presentation of episodes of the Radio Free Charleston video progam.  The main reason for this is that your PopCulteer had fallen behind in his remastering of classic episodes, so rather than make a mad dash to get them done,we decided to save them for later. Eventually we caught up to the end of the run, and then we picked up almost where we had left off. Last year we went back and filled in most of that gap.

Starting next week I’m going to try to fill in more gaps and remaster and upload some of the shows that have fallen through the cracks and aren’t currently online. So don’t expect any logical order for a few months.

Meanwhile, this show is the first one that we re-presented, but in the ensuing five years it’s become a bit more important, so we’re running it again.

Radio Free Charelston 120, “Zombie Babies Shirt” was first posted in February 2011 as a tribute to the late David Russell, to promote a benefit show (held at The World Famous Empty Glass) for his memorial fund.

The show featured music from The ButtonFlies, Sierra Ferrell and The Diablo Blues Band, all of whom performed at the benefit. We also brought you the trailer for Porkchop, the Eamon Hardiman-directed movie on which Dave worked as cinematographer.   Since the last time I posted this show here, Sierra has become a world-famous Country Music chanteuse, performing all over the world and selling tons of records. So I thought it might be a good time to revisit this episode of the show.

The PopCulteer

September 2, 2022

It’s a double shot of new internet radio programming this Friday as we offer up shiny new episodes of MIRRORBALL and 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 found on this very page.

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 in dark rooms on cocaine.

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 58

Evelyn “Champagne” King “Love Come Down”
Earth Wind & Fire “Boogie Wonderland”
Eruption “One Way Ticket”
The Jacksons “Dancing Machine”
Teri DeSario “Aint Nothing Gonna Keep You From Me”
Jocelyn Brown “Somebody Else’s Guy”
El Debarge “Rhythm of the Night”
Average White Band “Let’s Go Round Again”
Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes “Don’t Leave Me This Way”
Gloria Gaynor “Reach Out I’ll Be There”
Yarbourough & Peoples “Don’t Stop The Music”
Boogie Box High “Jive Talkin'”
Bonnie Pointer “Heaven Must Have Sent You”
Luthor Vandross “Never Too Much”

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, it’s Big Electric Cat time as Sydney Fileen delivers a special mixtape edition of her show that pays tribute to the band, Blondie.  As with our other Haversham programs this week, we don’t have a full playlist to share with you.  However, we can tell you that this two-hour epic is packed with huge hits, deep album cuts, demos of famous tracks and other rarities from Blondie’s New Wave era albums.

Blonide was the American New Wave band that sprung from the fertile punk spawning grounds of CBGBs in New York and are actually still touring the world today.

The classic line up of Clem Burke, Jimmy Destri, Frank Infante, Nigel Harrison, Chris Stein and of course, Debbie Harry took Blondie to the peaks of chart success, and helped drag New Wave Music into the mainstream.

This show is missing a couple of tracks at my request. I just didn’t feel that “Rapture” and “The Tide is High” were really new wavey enough to fit into the show’s format. Sydney made the call to leave out “Call Me,” because the band, except for Harry, doesn’t really play on that track.  I think Sydney has put together a great show that ought to make every fan of Blondie very happy.

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.

That’s what’s on The AIR Friday, and that is this week’s PopCulteer.  This weekend The AIR will launch a marathon of Radio Free Charleston, to commemorate the debut of the original version of the show on broadcast radio 33 years ago over Labor Day weekend on WVNS radio. We’ll kick things off at 9 PM Saturday, and run until Tuesday morning, with a break Sunday at midnight for seven hours of The Swing Shift.

Check PopCult for all our regular features, with fresh content every day.

We have some suggestions for STUFF TO DO in Charleston, Huntington, and other Mountain State locations over the next few days, so let’s just dive in.

Our lead item is a benefit at The Alban Arts Center Friday night at 7 PM. The Carpenter Ants will present an evening with John Ellison, writer of the smash hit “Some Kind of Wonderful” and member of the West Virginia Music Hall of Fame.  This is a benefit concert for local resident Natasha Morgan who is in need of a multiple organ transplant.

This benefit concert is made possible through the sponsorship of Mr. Frank McCormick of 63 Olde Main Plaza and Mr Ellison. Admission is donation based with all proceeds going directly to Natasha’s transplant fund, so don’t be stingy. You’ll be getting some world-class entertainment out of this, and it’s for a very good cause. You can find more details HERE.

Live Music is back at Taylor Books. There is no cover charge, and shows start at 7:30 PM. Friday it’s Leslie Brooks. Saturday sees Ronald & The RayGunz at Charleston’s beloved Bookstore/coffeehouse/art gallery institution.

Please remember that the pandemic is not over yet. 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.

If you’re up for going out, here are some suggestions for the rest of this week, roughly in order.  Some graphics are for multiple days’ worth of stuff, so they get to go first…