Month: June 2024 (Page 1 of 3)

PopCult brings you all the raw footage that Mel Larch shot in the dealer’s rooms a few weeks ago at The 2024 Marx Toy & Train Show, which is a great collector’s convention held every year at the The Kruger Street Toy & Train Museum in Wheeling, West Virginia. This was the 25th Marx Toy & Train Show, and it caps off the 25th anniversary year of Kruger Street.  You can see a shorter version with YouTube-approved music as well as footage of the group photo and a snippet of the guest speaker HERE.

This week’s video is a little over twenty-one minutes of people and toys as seen at the show by Mel. Since this video is posted to a private, non-monetized, server, you’ll hear instrumental versions of New Wave classics, simply because it needed some music, and that’s what I was in the mood to use. The music is there because we don’t want to accidentally share anybody’s background conversations. This video is for the die-hard collectors who want a chance to see everything possible, with no editing, color-correction or cropping.

We have a few bonus photos in last week’s post, and you can see more photos from this year’s show HERE.

Our chronological presentation of the Radio Free Charleston video show has fallen just two days shy of letting us milk the cliché, “Christmas in July.”  But we’ll have to settle for June, as we go back to December, 2009, for a Holiday episode of Radio Free Charleston 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.

It’s all Christmas-y and stuff. Seriously, this show has some of our most fun holiday songs in it, and listening to it might help you forget that it’s a hundred-and-forty degrees outside.

Original production notes can be found HERE.

The PopCulteer
June 28, 2024

We’re done with the first half of the year of internet radio programming this Friday as we offer up a classic episode of MIRRORBALL and a BRAND NEW edition of 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 goes back to October, 2022 for a classic episode of MIRRORBALL! The AIR’s showcase of classic Disco music presents a salute to the late OSCAR-winner, Paul Jabara.

Jabara won his OSCAR for the song “Last Dance,” performed in the movie, Thank God It’s Friday, by his friend, Donna Summer. Jabara is also in the movie as Carl, the nearsighted schlub looking for love. Later Jabara co-wrote “It’s Raining Men” with Paul Shaffer for The Weather Girls. and also had a string of club hits as a solo artist. Whitney Houston made her first recorded appearance on one of Jabara’s solo records when she was just 19 years old.

Mel decided to put together a collection to shine the Disco spotlight on this overlooked musical genius, who left us too soon, and we’re glad to present it again this week.

Check out the playlist…

MB 061

Paul Jabara/Donna Summer “Shut Out”
Paul Jabara “Heaven Is A Disco”
The Weather Girls “It’s Raining Men”
Paul Jabara “Trapped In A Stairway”
Paul Jabara “Disco Queen”
Paul Jabara “One Man Ain’t Enough”
Paul Jabara with Donna Summer “Something’s Missing In My Life”
Paul Jabara “Dance”
Paul Jabara “Dancin’”
Paul Jabara “Pleasure Island”
Donna Summer “Last Dance”

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 New Zealand’s greatest musical export, Split Enz.

Sydney focuses on the New Wave career of the band, which was formed in the early 1970s, originally as a progressive rock/art rock band. In 1977 after three semi-successful albums but no major hit, there were several line-up changes. That year Phil Judd departed the band and was replaced by Tim Finn’s brother, Neil, who was only sixteen years old at the tme.

With a newly-energized line-up and the addition of Neil’s vocals and songwriting, the band headed into a new direction and became a worldwide New Wave phenomenon. Sydney brings you a msitape of the music Split Enz made from 1978 to 1984, before continuing line-up changes led to the band morphing into Crowded House. For the bulk of this show’s songs, Split Enz consisted of Time and Neil, the Finn Brothers, plus Eddie Raynor, Nigel Griggs and Noel Crombie & Phil Hester.  It’s the best of Split Enz from 1978’s Frenzy album to 1984’s Conflicting Emotions.

Check out this killer playlist…

BEC 117

Split Enz
“I See Red”
“Mind Over Matter”
“I Got You”
“Shark Attack”
“What’s The Matter With You”
“Missing Person”
“Poor Boy”
“How Can I Resist Her”
“Things”
“Hard Act To Follow”
“One Step Ahead”
“Walking Through The Ruins”
“History Never Repeats”
“I Don’t Want To Dance”
“Clumsy”
“Iris”
“Six Months In A Leaky Boat”
“Dirty Creatures”
“Hello Sandy Allen”
“Never Ceases To Amaze Me”
“Small World”
“Lost For Words”
“Make Sense of It”
“Bullet Brain and Cactus Head”
“I Wake Up Every Night”
“Message To My Girl”
“No Mischief”
“Conflicting Emotions”
“Breakin’ My Back”
“One Mouth Is Fed”
“The Lost Cat”
“Ninnie Knees Up”
“Double 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.

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

It’s oppresively hot and there’s still a lot of  STUFF TO DO this week. Please remember, if you are attending an outdoor event, stay hydrated and if somebody says the floor is made of lava, they probably aren’t just playing a game. Still, when in the course of hooman events the heat and humidity and misery rise to try to keep you down, you must stand defiant and venture forth (unless like me, you prefer to stay in where there’s air conditioning).  What I’m saying is, there’s still plenty of STUFF TO DO in Charleston and all over the Mountain State and beyond as we get hit in the face with the reality that the scientists who warned us about man-made climate change were all right, and the ones paid by oil and gas companies were lying.

As I have been copying and pasting of late, this a good time to remind you that THIS IS NOT A COMPLETE LIST OF EVENTS.  It’s just a starting point, so don’t expect anything comprehensive, and if you feel strongly about me leaving anything out, feel free to mention it in the comments. There’s like, a helluva lotta stuff happening.

This week Mel Larch shines her Curtain Call spotlight on the winner of the Tony Award for Best Play, instead of Best Musical, because this play, Stereophonic, has songs…and they’re by the guy from Arcade Fire!

Wednesday afternoon’s Curtain Call on The AIR follows an encore of the first two episodes of Beatles Blast (which airs at 2PM).

Last week Mel devoted her show to highlights from this year’s Best Musical, The Outsiders, and next week she’ll devote her show to 2024’s Tony winner for Best Revival of a Musical, Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along, but this week we’re doing something we’ve never had the chance to do on Curtain Call before.

This week we bring you highlights from the score of Stereophonic, which won the Tony Award for Best Play. Despite being a play, Sterophonic boasts a collection of songs written by Will Butler from the indie, critic’s darlings band, Arcade Fire. The play tells the story of a fictional rock band in the 1970s as they are in the studio, about to make it big.

As with any drama about romantic misadventures involving a rock band in the 1970s, comparisons to Fleetwood Mac are plentiful. Stereophonic set the record for most Tony nominations for a play, with 13 nods, and took home five Tonys, including one for Best Play.

Following the songs from the show, Mel presents excerpts from Richard Ridge’s Broadway World interview with Stereophonic cast member, Eli Gelb. He pulls back the curtain a bit and talks about the transition of Stereophonic from off-Broadway to Broadway, and the adjustments made along the way.

But this Wednesday at 3 PM, Curtain Call will let you sample Stereophonic.  You can tune in at the website, or you could just stay right here and  listen to the convenient embedded radio player lurking elsewhere on this page.

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 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 brings a hybrid new/archive episode of RFC on The AIR.   Radio Free Charleston, is three hours of great local, independent free-form radio.  To listen to The AIR, 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.  

You can hear Radio Free Charleston Tuesdays at 10 AM and 10 PM, with tons of replays throughout the week.

Our first hour is all-new, with tons of newly-released tracks from Skyflake, William Matheny, Mediogres, Mark Knopfler,  David Synn, John Frusciante, Lindsey Sterling, Andy Summers, John Cale and more.

Our second and third hours revive a couple of episodes of Radio Free Charleston Volume 4 from March, 2019. These were back when RFC was mostly-local and just an hour long. These shows are gems that capture a snapshot of the local music scene, and this is the first time they’ve been heard in over five years.

Links in the artist’s names below will take you to a website (where available) where you can find our more about them and maybe buy their music. Check out the playlist.

RFC V5 182

hour one
SkyFlake “Firmament”
William Matheny “I Hardly Ever Think About You”
Mediogres “In The Waste”
Duran Duran “Like An Angel”
The Paranoid Style “The Interrogator”
Unmanned “Aliens”
Mark Knopfler “Song For Sonny Liston”
David Synn “Purple Eclipse”
John Frusciante “Shelf”
Lindsey Sterling “Kintsugi”
Andy Summers “Into the Blue”
The Settlement “Do It For You (live)”
U2 “Atomic City”
John Cale “Davies and Wales”

hour two
Beneath “Asunder”
Todd Tamenend Clark “Birthright Blues”
Of The Dell “Good Time All of the Time”
Bad Keys of the Mountain “Fell To Pieces”
Todd Burge “Comic Book Sleeve”
The Big Bad “Ghoul Girl”
The Jasons “I Don wanna Be A Mongoloid”
The Stars Revolt “All For Show”
Emmalea Deal “Everything I’m Not”
Foz Rotten “FDA”
Bon Air “So Fashy/Distance1”
Hellblinki“Wiff On Me”
Farnsworth “20 Days”
Stark Raven “Always Come Home”
Under The Radar “Love Sunrise”

hour three
Emmalea Deal “Queen”
Todd Burge “Of The Birds” (For Bill Thompson III)
Half Batch “Long Time Traveller”
William Matheny “Living Half To Death”
The Big Bad “Nobody Makes It Out Of Here Alive”
Neostra  “Obscurity and Release”
Todd Tamenend Clark  “Talons of The Raptor”
Poor Man’s Gravy “Disappoint You”
Beneath “Visage”
Kathy Mattea and Tim “O’Brien “Gentle On My Mind”
Flare Baroshi  “Vampire Mafia”

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 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 classic 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 last week’s episodes of  MIRRORBALL at 1 PM and Curtain Call at 2 PM.

At 3 PM we give you an encore of the first two episodes of The Swing Shift. Monday marks eight years of The AIR, and we have a special programming stunt planned to mark that, but this week we wanted to go back to the first first episodes of The Swing Shift, and tomorrow we’ll bring you the first two episodes of Beatles Blast (which was originally a half-hour show), so you can get the feel of our music speciality shows from day one.

 You can hear The Swing Shift Tuesday at 3 PM, with replays Wednesday at 8 AM, Friday at 10 AM and 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.

This week’s art is a bit of a throwback to the early days of PopCult. What you see above is a digitally assaulted photograph. It may look abstract now, and to be honest, when I took the photo this is based on I had the idea of turning it into a piece of MMA for you, but I’m dropping it here because the heat we’ve been experiencing locally has made it difficult to even attempt to do physical art this week.

I ran the original photo through a variety of filters, some of them custom, changed the aspect ratio, rotated it, and boosted the color saturation.

The end result is what you see above.

To see it bigger try clicking HERE.

In case you’re wondering what the original photo looked like…here it is, a photo of a bin of Jade-colored gravy boats in the seconds room at the FiestaWare factory in Newell.

Over in radioland, Monday at 2 PM on The AIR, we bring you a new episode of Psychedelic Shack, and then at 3 PM 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 elsewhere on this page. As I write this, I do not have the shows in hand. Nigel assures me that his show will be “trippy as hell,” while Herman says that Prognosis is devoted to the prog-rock roots of a band that became known as a one-hit wonder as a New Wave band. I have to admit, I’m really curious, but I won’t know who it is until they send me the shows a few hours before airtime.

{Update: Right before I went off to bed Sunday night, the Haversham crew sent me the following playlists}

Psychedelic Shack 090 2 PM (Eastern)

Jefferson Airplane “J.P.P. McStep Blues”
Marcella Detroit “Cool People”
Mothers of Invention “The Whip”
The Strangeloves “Rhythm of Love”
The Who “Magic Bus”
Captain Beefheart “Moody Liz”
Blue Oyster Cult “Before The Kiss, a Redcap”
The Shaggs “My Companion”
Pink Fairies “Uncle Harry’s Last Freakout”
Leonard Nimoy “Bilbo Baggins”
Big Brother & The Holding Company “Turtle Blues”

Prognosis 117 3 PM (Eastern)
After The Fire

“Dance of the Marionette”
“Back To The Light”
“Now That I’ve Found”
“Signs of Change”
“Jigs”
“Pilgrim”
“Samaritan Woman”
“Hallelujah”
“Dreamway”
“Laser Love”
“Joy”
“Suspended Animation”
“Time To Think”
“1980-F”
“Starflight”
“Frozen Rivers”
“Sailing Ship”
“The Stranger”
“Carry Me Home”
“Space Walking”
“Billy Billy (live)”

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. 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. All times listed are Eastern, so if you’re in another timezone, adjust accordingly.

At 8 PM you can hear The National Lampoon Comedy Hour on a recent episode of The Comedy Vault.

Tonight at 9 PM for the Monday Marathon We bring you ten hours of Beatles Blast, with a focus on Sgt. Pepper, which came out in June back in 1967.

PopCult brings you a quick video with some highlights of the cool toys and cool people at The 2024 Marx Toy & Train Show, a great collector’s convetion held every year at the The Kruger Street Toy & Train Museum in Wheeling, West Virginia. This was the 25th Marx Toy & Train Show, and it caps off the 25th anniversary year of Kruger Street.  Videography is by Mrs. PopCulteer, Mel Larch. I handled the editing and narration (which was once again ad-libbed, so don’t judge it too harshly).

I didn’t take as many photos as usual this year. The oppressive heat is hard on my Myasthenia Gravis, so I had to take it a tad easier than usual, but I did have a great time and got to see some good friends. Mel shot so much video that next week you can expect a “raw footage” compilation as our Sunday Evening Video.

This week’s video is basically an under 10-minute “home movie” of the event, and includes a snippet of special guest, Jay Horowitz, who told us the story of how he came to own the Marx assets.  This is a show that draws people from all over the country each year.  Next year’s show at The Kruger Street Toy & Train Museum is already scheduled. As has become tradition, the video ends with the ever-growing crowd gathering for the group photo. This year’s crowd was the largest in some time.

We have a few bonus photos below, and you can see more photos from this year’s show HERE.

Treasures as far as the eye could see.

I must’ve walked by that vintage Matchbox display a dozen times, and never noticed it until I saw it in Mel’s video.

Another photo of Mr. Horowitz during his presentation.

Need any playsets?

A little bit of everything in the train room.

Vintage Marx trains beckoning your humble blogger to start collecting something else he doesn’t have room for in the house.

Cool little plastic things. There was a lot of that here.

Build a Boone workshop.

Jay Horowitz and James Wozniak, and part of Tom Heaton.

I’m thinking about doing a Hopper-style painting of this scene.

More of those siren-like trains trying to get me to beach myself on the jagged rocks of a new collection.

It’s fun to mix up these three playsets, just to mess with reality.

A couple of Lone Ranger horses and a Stevo’s Toy set that I forgot to go back and ask the price of.

We leave you with a shot of the trains entering the station.

This week we head back to December, 2009 for an episode of Radio Free Charleston hosted from Taylor Books, with music from The Riff Raff Players, and Flare Baroshi. We also have Eamon Hardiman’s trailer for Porkchops, and DEVO Energy Dome animation from Frank Panucci.

The RiffRaff Players feature vocals by Lori McKinney, Kathleen Coffee, Albert Perrone, Douglas Imbrogno and Melissa and Kayla McKinney, with eclectic acoustic and electronic instrumentation by The Captain Lazerblast Band and soundsmithing by Robert Blankenship. This video was created by Douglas Imbrogno to promote “Christmas with The Riff Raff,” which happened in Princeton, WV.

Flare Baroshi is featured in the “Black and White” alternate edit of her song, “Vampire Mafia,” which impressed many on that year’s Halloween special. While this is a cool take on a great song, I think it was included here because I wanted to plug the Riff Raff show and the Porkchops premiere before they happened, and this was the best finished video I had laying around to fill up the remainder of the show.

You can read the original production notes HERE.

The PopCulteer
June 21, 2024

Last weekend saw your humble blogger head to Wheeling for The 2024 Marx Toy Show at The Kruger Street Toy & Train Museum.  A wonderful time was had by all, and today I have the first batch of photos to prove it.

I have to warn you, I didn’t take nearly as many photos as I usually do. I wanted to take a year and enjoy the show as a civilian, but I do have plenty of pics for a photo essay today, and one to accompany the video I’m working on for the event on Sunday. Our local heat wave factored a bit in my smaller selection of photos, too.

The guest of honor this year was Jay Horowitz, the toy executive and author who is the custodian of the Marx Toy molds (among many others). That’s him at the right, beginning his discussion of how he came to own so many incredible toy assets.

There will indeed be a fast-paced video in PopCult this Sunday, so you can get a taste of how much fun this show is. I also found out on this trip that I’ll be heading back to Kruger Street next month for a special MEGO event, about which you will read in the coming weeks.

But now, it’s the Marx Toy Show, in photos…

An aerial view of the registration table, courtesy of a well-placed staircase.

Folks were pouring into the train room to check out the vintage tin-train goodness.

Johnny West collector and wheeler-dealer Dave Roth in the foreground, toy designer Greg Autore in the background.

Tom Heaton’s display after I bought one of his custom figures with custom box.

Jay Horowitz catching up with Francis Turner, the man behind the (late, lamented) Marx Toy Musuem

Jay and Francis posing for the camera (I need to email this photo to those guys).

Part of Jay’s table, filled with product samples and vintage glossies.

A closer look at those glossies.

Jay during the Q&A following his very entertaining talk about how he acquired the Marx molds.

Mark Hegeman had this amazing one-of-a-kind item, the actual sculpted figures from which the molds were struck.

More cool Marx items were lurking in the lobby upstairs.

There were cool playsets everywhere you turned.

I’m not kidding about the playsets.

A small herd of Pancho ponies.

Even more playset coolness.

At the risk of repeating myself…

A wide shot of the “Johnny Room.”

Not only horses, but also some doggies got along.

We will have a few more photos plus video from the Marx show Sunday, so prepare for more fun.

Melting MIRRORBALL And Revisiting A Milestone On The AIR

Friday afternoon Mel Larch returns with a brand-new MIRRORBALL! You can hear this and more cool music Friday on The AIR. The AIR is PopCult‘s sister radio station. You can hear our shows on The AIR website, or just click on the embedded player found elsewhere on this page.

Friday at 2 PM on The AIR, inspired by this week’s weather, Mel Larch devotes her hour of Disco to songs and artists who start out hot, but then cool down, way down, by the end of the show.

It’s a cool(ing) collection of Disco goodies, to get MIRRORBALL’s listeners moving, grooving and staying out of the heat .

Check out the playlist…

MIRRORBALL 102

Bill Summer & Summers Heat “Straight to The Bank”
JB’s “Hot Pants Road”
Mary Wilson “Red Hot”
Jimmy “Bo” Horne “You Get Me Hot”
Johnny & Michael Hill “Too Hot To Stop”
SOFTTOUCH “She’s Hot (Cool Cat)”
Frankie Knuckles “It’s A Cold World”
Boney M “Daddy Cool”
Jerry Butler “(I’m Just Thinking About) Cooling Out”
Earth Wind & Fire “Snow”
Black Ice “Shakedown”

You can hear MIRRORBALL every Friday at 2 PM, with replays throughout the following week Monday at 9 AM and Tuesday at 1 PM and a mini-marathon Saturday nights at 9 PM

At 3 PM, it’s encore time on the Big Electric Cat time as Sydney Fileen revisits her 100th episode from a year-and-a-half ago.

After opening show with her namesake song, Adrian Belew’s “Big Electric Cat,” Sydney assembles a playlist of “Quintessential New Wave Music” for her listeners.

As Sydney explains, “Some of these songs were major hits that defined the era, while others are deep album cuts by the artists who defined the genre. Either way, it’s going to be very New Wave-y here.”

Sydney don’t lie, as you can see from this playlist…

BEC 100

Adrian Belew “Big Electric Cat”
Toyah “Good Morning Universe”
XTC “Sgt. Rock (Is Going To Help Me)”
The Police “Spirits In The Material World”
Madness “Tomorrow’s (Just Another Day)”
Eurythmics “Right By Your Side”
Bronski Beat “Hit That Perfect Beat (12” Mix)”
Thompson Twins “Sister of Mercy”
Elvis Costello “Busy Bodies”
DEVO “Girl U Want”
Lene Lovich “Angels”
Klaus Nomi “Total Eclipse”
Mike Batt “Love Makes You Crazy”
Hazel O’Connor “Decadent Days”
The B-52s “Party Out Of Bounds”
Joe Jackson “Steppin’ Out”
Kate Bush “Army Dreamers”
ABC “Poison Arrow”
Ultravox “We Stand Alone”
Nina Hagen “Blood In The Streets”
Adam & The Ants “Killer In The House”
Pretenders “Birds of Paradise”
New Musik “Science”
Missing Persons “Tears”
Split Enz “I Got You”
Siouxsie and The Banshees “Take Me Back”
The Clash “Death Or Glory”
The Stranglers “Mean To Me”
Gary Numan “Music For Chameleons”
Blondie “Living In The Real World”
The Art of Noise “Close To The Edit”

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. Classic episodes can be heard Sunday morning at 10 AM.

That’s what’s new on The AIR Friday, and that is this week’s PopCulteer. Check back for our regular features every day and be sure to check us out Sunday for the Marx Toy Show video and more photos.