Sunday is the big day, but there’s still lots of cool things happening leading up to Jesus’s birthday. Let’s tell you about some. Note that there doesn’t seem to be anything going on on Christmas Eve. Suck it up and go spend time with your families.
A special note: ArtWalk happens again in Charleston Thursday from 5 PM to 8 PM. This free event is open to the public as art lovers can walk to all the usual suspects and take in the majesty of the art. Some galleries will have music and/or munchies as well. It’s a really cheap way to support the local scene and get out and mingle a bit…if you are so inclined. This is also a good chance to pick up last minute Christmas gifts from local artists.
Live Music is back at Taylor Books. There is no cover charge, and shows start at 7:30 PM. Friday it’s Ryan Smith.
The Empty Glass has some great stuff through the week to tell you about. From 9 PM to Midnight Wednesday, Grant Jacobs will be at the World Famous Empty Glass. Thursday from 5:30 PM to 7:30 PM, Swingstein and Robin play fiddle and piano and sing swing and early jazz standards. Each week they donate their tips to a local nonprofit. Taking over at 9:30 PM Thursday, Four Chill brings the funk and smooth grooves. Friday from 5 PM to 8 PM Timmy “Courts and Friends hold down the fort at the Glass.
Friday, Minor Swing will be in Saint Albans, at Coal River Coffee Company.
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.
Also, it’s the holiday season, so don’t be a jerk. If you need an extra injection of holiday spirit, tune into The AIR, where we’re in Christmas mode for the rest of the week.
If you’re up for going out, here are a few suggestions for the rest of this week, roughly in order.
The AIR is in Holiday Mode all this week, and Tuesday at 10 AM and 10 PM, replacing RFC on this week’s schedule, you can listen to The AIR Christmas Special 2022 at The AIR website, or on the embedded radio player located elsewhere on this page.
This is an all-new three-hour show where, like last year, your host, Rudy Panucci, and his wife, Mel Larch, banter and play holiday music from lots of cool artists, but this year we have extra guests as our second hour sees Herman Linte, from Prognosis, Sydney Fileen from Sydney’s Big Electric Cat and Nigel Pye from Psychedelic Shack drop by to share Christmas tunes in New Wave, Progressive and Psychedelic styles. They even play a Ska tune for Dexter Checkers, who couldn’t make the taping.
The transAtlantic recording process was something we hadn’t done since I guest-hosted a dozen episodes of Prognosis a few years ago, and production took longer than expected, which is why this post is being written so late (it’s already Tuesday morning). Still it was loads of fun, and will prepare us for a special project early next year.
We have some great new tunes this year, and since I’m not putting links in the playlist, I’ll mention a few of them here.
We open our show with a 33-year old location recording of Clownhole at The Charleston Playhouse. You can see the video of this performance in the Radio Free Charleston video show, which can be viewed HERE. I didn’t mention it in this show, but rumor has it that we’re going to hear new recordings from Clownhole in the new year. About time!
We also have a lovely new track from our Chicago pipeline. Lia Caton is an award-winning country artist and songwriter who splits her time between Naperville, IL and Nashville. Candy Fernaux is a critically acclaimed Music City recording artist whose upcoming album, Make Your Own Magic, is scheduled to be released via streaming platforms and on vinyl in 2023. Lia and Candy have teamed up for a cover of “Beautiful Star of Bethlehem,” a traditional country song written by the late R. Fisher Boyce and popularized by The Judds on their 1987 album Christmas Time With The Judds.
Todd Burge is a WV music legend, and you can find his music on Bandcamp.
Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS is the philanthropic heart of Broadway. They provide groceries and medication, health care and hope to those in all 50 states, Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., affected by HIV/AIDS, COVID-19 and other life-threatening illnesses. Mel’s picks to represent Curtain Call in our third hour come from their Carols For A Cure series of CDS, which you can buy HERE.
And now, the playlist…
The AIR Christmas Special 2022
Clownhole “Deck The Halls”
Lia Caton and Candy Fernaux “Beautiful Star of Bethlehem”
Todd Burge “Santa Canta Getta Down The Chimney This Year”
Diablo Blues Band with Mel Larch “Please Come Home For Christmas”
Donna Summer “Christmas Is Here”
Earth Wind and Fire “Every Day Is Christmas”
Mistletoe Disco Band “Winter Wonderland”
Boney M “Mary’s Boy Child”
Sukkerchok “Hele Julenat Hele Juledag”
Erasure “She Won’t Be Home”
Deni Bonet “It’s You and Me This Christmas”
Dr. Jazz & Dirty Bucks Swing Band “White Christmas”
Erin Harpe & The Delta Swingers “Christmas Swing”
Kate Fagan “Santa, What Do Bad Girls Get”
Brian Stezter Orchestra “Boobie Woogie Santa Claus”
Big Bad Voodoo Daddy “Christmas Is Starting Now”
Royal Crown Revue “Hey Santa”
hour two
Reel Big Fish “Skank For Christmas”
Cyndi Lauper “Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree”
Joey Ramone “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)”
Andy Partidge “Countdown To Christmas Partytime”
The Dickies “Silent Night”
The Damned “There Ain’t No Sanity Claus”
Steve Morse “Carol of the Bells”
Jethro Tull “Birthday Card at Christmas”
Pallas “Christmas on the Edge of Time”
ELP “I Believe In Father Christmas”
The Free Design – Close Your Mouth (It’s Christmas)
Byzantine Empire – Snow Queen
David Santo – Jingle Down A Hill
The Crossbeats – Snow Covered Mountains
Simon and Garfunkel – Star Carol
Hour Three
Mountain Laurel Ensemble “Oh Holy Night”
cast of Beautiful “Christmas Vacation”
cast of Chicago “Christmas in Fishnets”
cast of Jersey Boys “The 12 Days of Christmas”
cast of Million Dollar Quartet “Santa Claus is Coming To Town”
cast of Avenue Q “Ave Maria”
The Dollyrots “Christmas Don’t Be Late”
Cheap Trick “Father Christmas”
The Beatles “Christmas Outtake”
Ella Fitzgerald “We Three Kings/Oh Little Town”
Chuck Berry “Run, Rudolph, Run”
Louis Jordan and his Timpani Five “May Every Day Be Christmas”
Lionel Hampton “Merry Christmas Baby”
Tommy Lee & The Orbits “Jingle Rock”
Big Joe Tunrer “Christmas Date Boogie”
The Beach Bopys “Little Saint Nick”
Aretha Franklin “Joy To The World”
Shakin’ Stevens “Merry Christmas, Everyone”
Leon Redbone “Christmas Ball Blues”
ATHF “‘Twas The Night Before Jesus”
You can hear The AIR Christmas Special 2022 Tuesday at 10 AM and 10 PM on The AIR, with replays Wednesday at 9 AM, Thursday at 3 PM, Friday at 9 AM, Saturday at Noon and Midnight, and Monday at 11 AM, exclusively on The AIR. We’ll also sneak in a few extra airings among our holiday marathons which will take over The AIR for the rest of the week.
Heck, I’ll even embed a low-fi version here so you can listen on demand…
It’s Christmas week, and we’re still in tree mode here at PopCult. What you see above is a digital pastel painting over a quick photo I took of our tree topper this year. After using a spire for the last 20 years or so, I thought it might be time to shake things up a bit, so when Mel picked out a realy cool and huge blown-glass peacock ornament in Chicago, I had the idea that, being so huge, it might make for a good tree topper.
So I took a photo Sunday afternoon, blacked out the background, and did a quick digital painting over it. I would’ve done a physical painting, but the Myasthenia Gravis is being a bit Naughty at the moment, and my fingers are not up to the task.
Later in the week I’ll bring you a photo essay of the whole tree, so you can see what this year’s model looks like.
If you want to see this digital painting bigger, click HERE.
Meanwhile, Monday at 2 PM on The AIR, we bring you a recent episode of Psychedelic Shack, followed at 3 PM by the special Christmas episode 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.
PsychedelicShack 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.
Our AIR Holiday Programming begins today with Prognosis, and will fill up most of the schedule all week long. We’ll have a new AIR Christmas Special in place of RFC tomorrow.
At 9 PM, our holiday programming kicks off in earnestwith a special overnight marathon. All week long we’ll be dropping in holiday treats in The AIR.
After being ousted from his own studio in the early 1940s, animation innovator, Max Fleischer, wound up working for Jam Handy, the Olympic Swimmer turned industrial filmmaker who produced instructional and commercial films.
The Jam Handy Organization produced a lot of films for the Army and Navy during WWII, and after the war, they were hired to produce an animated short for Montgomery Ward. That short turned out to be the first ever adaptation of the poem, Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer that Robert May had written as a giveaway book for Montgomery Ward in 1939.
A year before May’s brother-in-law, Johnny Marks, turned the story of Rudolph into a hit song, and sixteen years before the Rankin-Bass stop-motion-animated TV special that everybody knows, Max Fleischer brought May’s poem to life on the big screen. Above you see a newly-restored version that uses the 35mm print that belongs to The Library of Congress.
This restoration was done by Fabulous Fleischer Cartoons Restored!, who have a Patreon page you can support HERE.
This week and next we will bring you the rest of the best Radio Free Charleston Christmas specials, to help you try to get in the mood. Above you see our 2009 special.
The much-anticipated (at the time) 2009 Christmas episode of Radio Free Charleston, being a Christmas show, had the holiday-apppropriate name ”Terry Funk Shirt.” This extra-long episode is packed with music from Molly Means, Joseph Hale, Todd Burge, and Melanie Larch with The Diablo Blues Band. There’s also some classic animation from the British studio Halas and Batchelor, plus a news flash about a visit from Saint Sputnik.
Coincidentally, Joseph and Todd’s songs were recorded at The Boulevard Tavern. We returned to the Tavern for our 2013 Christmas show, with two festive songs from The Bob Thompson Unit. You can see RFC 194 below. “Hasa Diga Shirt,” was our 2013 Christmas spectacular, with music from The Bob Thompson Unit and Frenchy and The Punk, plus a message from Santa, and animation from Jake Fertig, which opens our show with a commercial for The Bearded Axe.
One more holiday special this week sees us jumping back to 2010. This episode of Radio Free Charleston presents the talented crew from The Contemporary Youth Arts Company singing Christmas Carols and songs from Mary: A Rock Opera.
Okay, so technically it’s not Winter yet, but a week ago today your humble blogger and Mrs. PopCulteer, Mel Larch, began our day by hopping off the Amtrak Cardinal in Charleston, after having spent almost a week in Chicago.
This was a big deal because we haven’t been to our favorite city since right before the pandemic hit, and we haven’t been able to go for Mel’s birthday since 2019.
This year we were determined to go, and we managed to cram in enough cool stuff to make the trip blogworthy. So blogworthy was this trip that I am going to tempt fate and see how many photos I can cram into a single post. I’ve had issues with this since moving to our new location, but I’m feeling lucky (plus I’ve stopped updating the old Gazette-Mail version of PopCult, so I don’t have to worry about the nagging cross-compatibility issues). Tell me in the comments if the photos take too long to load.
It’s probably too late to get this in time for Christmas, but I wanted to let you know that now you can order Jason Brown’s excellent 2019 Documentary short, Them That Work, on DVD.
This documentary on the legacy of John Sayles’ Matewan and the lasting impression it left on the people of West Virginia is included as a bonus on the Criterion Collection edition of Matewan, but now you can own it on a very low-priced DVD for a mere three dollars, plus shipping.
I’d wanted to include this in The 2022 PopCult Gift Guide, but Jason couldn’t get everything in place to sell it it until last week, when your PopCulteer was in Chicago. So since I prodded him into doing this, I’m telling you about it now. It’s a really worthwhile project.
You can also get this documentary on the Criterion Edition of Matewan, but this way you can have a stand-alone copy, in case you want to have a WV Filmmaker film festival in your home.
In Them That Work, we hear from Daniel Boyd, Denise Giardina, Ellen and John Bullock, Pamela Haynes, Dave Brock and many others West Virginians, plus there’s archival footage of James Earl Jones.
The IMDB synopsis is as follows:
John Sayles came to West Virginia to make his film MATEWAN, about the gun fight over labor in the coal fields. The film has had a lasting impact on locals regarding the subject and the filming’s influence on people’s lives.
Snagging a copy of Them That Work is a cool way to support the local scene and learn about how the making of a movie reawakened a part of WV history that had been deliberately downplayed over the years.
It’s that time of the week again, folks. Even with last-minute shopping and holiday parties and churchly gatherings and uncomfortable family dinners, we still have a partial list of stuff you can go do this week in Charleston and Huntington. Much of it is even Christmas-y, so you get that as a bonus!
Live Music is back at Taylor Books. There is no cover charge, and shows start at 7:30 PM. Friday it’s Andrew Pauley. Saturday we actually have a graphic, so check it out below!
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.
Also, it’s the holiday season, so don’t be a jerk.
If you’re up for going out, here are a few suggestions for the rest of this week, roughly in order.
It’s Tuesday on The AIR and that means it’s Radio Free Charleston time, and we’re back from our week wandering around in Chicago with another 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 here, and listen to the cool embedded player found elsewhere on this page.
We have three full hours of music, much of it new, local and not, at 10 AM and 10 PM Tuesday. This week our latest Radio Free Charleston has killer new tunes from Byzantine, John Radcliff, Nina Hagen, The Puncturists and many more artists.
Yours truly is back from the City of Wind, where he had a wonderful time that he will tell you all about this Friday. I think the vacation helped me recharge a bit, and this week’s show is pretty awesome.
Throughout the show we continue our mix of local, independent and major-label artists, just to keep you on your toes. Byzantine’s new EP is incredible and we’re happy to open the show with a track from it. Nick Carter, a New England-based singer/songwriter was brought to our attention by our Chicago connection. The Puncturists contacted us from the UK, and had the perfect song to kick off a punky set in our first hour. The rest of the show has tons of new tunes from Bottle and Bride, John Radcliff, NOFX, Adrian Belew, Frenchy and The Punk, J. Marinelli, Novelty Island and more.
I loaded this week’s show up because next week RFC will be bumped for the premiere of The AIR Christmas Party, which will hopefully include segments introduced by all of our music specialty show hosts.
Check out the playlist below to see all the goodies we have in store. Live links will take you to the artist’s page…
You can hear this episode of Radio Free Charleston Tuesday at 10 AM and 10 PM on The AIR, with replays Wednesday at 9 AM, 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 Curtain Call at 2 PM. At 3 PM we have two recent episodes of The Swing Shift.
So, I was in Chicago most of last week to celebrate my beautiful wife’s birthday, and that’s the real reason we did Marathon Week on The AIR and last week’s posts might’ve seemed off a bit, since they’d all been written a week earlier.
However, I did not cheat for this week’s art. We got back Friday morning, and on Saturday I did this small painting, using thick acrylics and plastic eating utensils for brushes. It’s based on a few photos I took of the Christmas Tree in Union Station in Chicago last Thursday, as we were waiting for our train back home. If you’re looking at this on a computer monitor, you’re probably seeing it at the actual size it was painted, if not a little larger.
I did this on paper for pens and photographed it using a small ring light because it was not dry enough to scan. I also didn’t want to smoosh the brushwork, because I think it looks pretty cool. Once in the computer I cropped the borders and tweaked the white balance to make it look more natural. I usually do some kind of Christmas-y art this time of year.
Meanwhile, Monday at 2 PM on The AIR, we wrap our December marathons with a day split between Nigel Pye’s Psychedelic Shack and yours truly hosting Beatles Blast. Our programming stunt to cover my trip to Chicago is over, so Tuesday we’ll be back to whatever passes for normal on The AIR, with a new RFC that’s loaded with new music.
A special note: ArtWalk happens again in Charleston Thursday from 5 PM to 8 PM. This free event is open to the public as art lovers can walk to all the usual suspects and take in the majesty of the art. Some galleries will have music and/or munchies as well. It’s a really cheap way to support the local scene and get out and mingle a bit…if you are so inclined. This is also a good chance to pick up last minute Christmas gifts from local artists.
The AIR
The PopCulteer
It’s probably too late to get this in time for Christmas, but I wanted to let you know that now you 
It’s that time of the week again, folks. Even with last-minute shopping and holiday parties and churchly gatherings and uncomfortable family dinners, we still have a partial list of stuff you can go do this week in Charleston and Huntington. Much of it is even Christmas-y, so you get that as a bonus!
It’s Tuesday on 
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