As we mark the last day of July on Wednesday afternoon on The AIR , we still manage to bring you a fresh new episode of Beatles Blast filled with great new cool stuff. You can tune in at the website, or just stay right here and listen to the convenient embedded radio player lurking elsewhere on this page.
At 2 PM (EDT)Beatles Blast takes an hour to enjoy what is a great year to be a fan of the Beatles. We bring you tracks from the John Lennon Mind Games Box Set, Paul McCartney’s One Hand Clapping, Ringo Starr’s Crooked Boy and we spice things up with some rarities from George and an encore listen to “Now and Then.”
Mind Games sounds like a whole new album with its updated remix. One Hand Clapping sounds great in its first official release after decades of being bootlegged. Ringo’s latest EP is another gem, and the rest of the show flows, mixtape-style, like a lost Beatles album.
Check out the playlist…
Beatles Blast 113
John Lennon “Out The Blue”
Wings “Maybe I’m Amazed”
Ringo Starr “Adeline”
George Harrison “Miss O’Dell”
The Beatles “Now and Then”
George Harrison “Writings On The Wall”
Paul McCartney “Let Me Roll It”
John Lennon “Bring On The Lucie (Freda Peeple)”
Ringo Starr & Paul McCartney “Grow Old Along With Me”
Wings “Live and Let Die”
Ringo Starr “Crooked Boy”
George Harrison “Lay His Head”
Paul McCartney & Wings “Soily”
John Lennon “Mind Games”
Beatles Blast can be heard every Wednesday at 2 PM, with replays Thursday at 11 PM, Friday at 1 PM, and Saturday afternoon.
At 3 PM (EDT) on Curtain Call, Mel Larch serves up a couple of recent encore episodes, just to keep you on your twinkle-toes.
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 morning starting at 9 AM, 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, The Comedy Vault brings you classic episode that presents a totally different hour from last week’s show, made up of classic stand-up from Bob Newhart.
With your PopCulteer returning from Chicago tomorrow, we have a prepared-in-advance archival show Tuesday on The AIR. Radio Free Charleston, is a time capsule of three episodes of RFC Volume 4 from August, 2019. 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.
This week I went back and dug out three consecutive episodes of our all-local, one-hour incarnation, RFC Volume 4, and combined them into one big supershow. The first hour (RFC V4 117) is a “normal” episode, loaded with great local tracks, while the second and third hours (RFC V4 118 and 119) go back to the 2012 Tribute To The Troops show, put on at the Saint Albans City Park Amphitheater. And yes, I get the year wrong in the introduction to this compilation show.
Some of these songs were heard on a three-part series on the RFC video show, while others were heard here for the first time when these shows first aired. We have previously recycled the two Tribute to the Troops shows, but that was 138 episodes ago, and this time we’re running three shows in consecutive order.
We don’t have links this week, nor do we have a complete playlist for the second and third hours. Your humble blogger is attempting to produce this show, write six days worth of PopCult posts, edit a big photo essay and a short music video, pack and get over a sinus infection before we hop the train on Friday (the 26th). So, let me know if I pulled this off in the comments.
And also check out what we have of the playlist…
RFC V5 187
hour one
The Bounty “Big Love”
Mediogres “Cream Hole”
John Radcliff “Dreaming”
Dead For Decades “Mr. Mouth”
The Big Bad “Bat Repellant”
Fletcher’s Grove “Virgil Burgess”
Emmalea Deal “Everything I’m Not”
Spencer Elliott “Folding Space”
Beggars Clan “Turn It Around”
Rasta Rafiki “Today’s Slop”
The Heavy Editors “Alien Lover”
Kevin Scrabrough “Middle School”
Speedsuit “Roller Coaster of Booze”
Dog Soldier “Blanket Number One”
Corporate Orange “Stay Listening”
hour two
This hour goes back into our video vaults for the first of two shows that bring you highlights of the Tribute To The Troops II show, held at Saint Albans City Park back in the summer of 2012. Some of these songs were heard on a three-part series on the RFC video show, while others are being heard here for the first time. This week we bring you performances by HARRAH, Deck of Fools, The Under Social, Remains Unnamed, Candace Weaver, Breedlove,Point of Jerus and Johnny Compton.
hour three
This hour brings you performances by Everpulse and Point of Jerus. For some reason we had audio recordings of two entire sets by these bands, so we made them the second part of this series.
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, Sunday at 8 PM 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 two classic episodes of The Swing Shift. New episodes will return next week.
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.
I found a piece of black construction paper in my office, and doodled on it with White Out. I was just using it to get a clear line flowing from the brush while I was doing other pieces with it. When it dried, the mess of lines in the middle looked a bit like the female form. I added some grayscale markers to it, and it looks almost like I did that on purpose.
Over in radioland, Monday at 2 PM on The AIR, we bring you encores of a classic episode of Psychedelic Shack, and then at 3 PM 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.
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. 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.
At 8 PM you can hear an hour of classic stand up comedy from the late Bob Newhart on last week’s new episode of TheComedy Vault.
Tonight at 9 PM for the Monday Marathon We bring you ten hours of our music specialty shows from the beginning of 2024, just as a sort of random throwback.
Above you see a music video for this year’s Kentuckiana GI Joe Toy Expo, which was held last weekend in Louisville, Kentucky. As I mentioned Friday, I was able to cobble this together out of the Friday night preview footage because early Saturday our camera died, while pretending to be fine. (UPDATE: The camera is working, but the SD card in it died, which still cost us our footage.)
We still had a great time and can show a little bit of the fun, even though the crowds and all the vendors didn’t show up in earnest until the next day.
Our music, like last year, was provided by Sgt Van and The Highway Dogs. That’s Sgt. Van right below the video, giving us permission to use his music. You can find out more about this musical project of Chuck Van Voorhis at his YouTube and Bandcamp pages.
We will have an additonal, short video, and I’ll try to make up for the loss with more photos essays like we had Friday.
Now we have to figure out if we have to bury the camera card in the backyard, or if we can just flush it down the terlet.
From February, 2010, it’s the 93rd video episode of Radio Free Charleston, “Tofujitsu Shirt.” This edition of the show featured a vintage video of Strawfyssh, from 1991, a music video for The Scrap Iron Pickers set to then-95-year-old animation by pioneering cartoonist, Winsor McCay, and a moody video of Melanie Larch singing an acapella version of the classic tune, “Summertime.”
You’ll also believe that a pig can cuss, and you’ll get to see an animated re-telling of Andy Dick’s nearly-forgotten misadventures in Huntington.
Before we get into today’s photo essay, I have some bad news. One of our cameras, the main one we used to record this event, gave up the ghost early last Saturday morning. I didn’t realize it until I went to edit the files, and 60% of them were unreadable. We will have a music video for you on Sunday, but all the footage is from the Friday night preview.
There will be one more video, an interview we shot Friday night, but another, longer interview that we shot Saturday will have to be redone when we meet up with Greg Autore again at JoeLanta at the end of September. Sorry, Greg.
This is the first time that one of our Kodak Zi8s has failed us. The fact that we’ve been using them for almost fifteen years means it’s probably long past time we replenished our camera arsenal. Apologies to our readers who were looking forward to more video, and to Mel, who worked her butt off Saturday not knowing that the camera was only pretending to work.
We had a great time at the 2024 Kentuckiana GI Joe Toy Expo, and this is just the first photo essay. I’m selecting 20 photos to run before Mel and I head to Chicago for an early anniversary trip. There will be more when we get back. Expect the next photo essay a week from today.
And Sunday, you can come back to PopCult for our music video, featuring a tune by Sgt. Van & The Highway Dogs.
But for now…pictures!
As of last year, the home of The Kentuckiana GI Joe Toy Expo!
This Aztec Amethysts figure was the final project of beloved JoeLanta pastor, Terry Stair Jr, who passed away just a few weeks ago. He was working on this with Greg Autore, and we will re-interview him about this project at JoeLanta.
One of the cool things about Kentuckiana is that gawking is not only permitted, it’s encouraged.
After taking a week off for the first time in years, STUFF TO DO has returned to tell you about the hijinks and shenanigans available for your indulgence in and and around Charleston this weekend. Last week, between the Friends of ‘Berto show and Kentuckiana, your humble blogger’s time was crunched, and something had to go, so I skipped our weekly guide of events and…nobody seemed to miss it. To be honest, the Captain Action post I ran last Thursday brought in about ten times the readers. Still, I will stubbornly persevere this week and tell you about STUFF TO DO, while I’m in Chicago.
Again, remember, if you are attending an outdoor event, stay hydrated and please don’t smoke or vape around any humans who might find the associated stank to be offensive. Let me tell you about plenty of STUFF TO DO in Charleston and all over the Mountain State and beyond as we burn off the last weekend of July.
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. I won’t be offended if you volunteer to do the work I was too lazy to finish.
Live Music is on tap at Taylor Books. There is no cover charge, and shows start at 7:30 PM. Friday it’s Nolan Collins. Saturday Jen Howard takes the stage at the beloved bookstore/cafe/art gallery.
The World Famous Empty Glass Cafe has some great stuff this week to tell you about. Thursday at 5:30 PM Swingstein and Robin return with music for a cause. Friday Tim Courts and friends will fill the Happy Hour with music starting at 5:30 PM. Satruday night at 8 PM The Spurgy Hankins Band and Creek Don’t Rise will be playing for Richard Abdalla’s first day of Medicare eligibilty. Check the graphics below for more weekend shows.
You PopCulteer will be in Chicago for a quick fun trip with his wife as an early tenth anniversary celebration.
Please remember that the pandemic is still not entirely over yet. It’s a going concern with the ‘rona still lurking about. And now there are nasty seasonal allergies, distraught grifters with warehouses full of “FJB” merchandise, walls that bleed ketchup, upended road weiners and other damned good reasons to be careful. 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.
Keep in mind that all shows are subject to change or be cancelled at the last minute.
Here we go, roughly in order, but this week with all the theatre stuff going first…
This week Mel Larch uses Curtain Call to let four shows that closed in the wake of the Tony Awards apocalypse take a final bow.
Wednesday afternoon’s Curtain Call on The AIR follows an encore of a classic edition of Beatles Blast (which airs at 2PM).
Every year one of the sadder aftermaths of the annual Tony Awards is the onslaught of show closing announcements as the non-winners rush to cut their losses when they realize they won’t be getting that big “Tony bump.” This week Mel brings you a mixtape of shows that recently closed, or announced their final dates, in the Summer of 2024. To be fair, one of them threw in the towel before before the nominations were even announced.
Some of these shows are going out on tour, others have reached the end of their Broadway runs, and some just got lost in the glut of new musicals that opened earlier this year.
Mel lets them take one final bow this week on Curtain Call. During the hour you will hear selections from the Neil Diamond musical, A Beautiful Noise; the revival of The Wiz; The Huey Lewis musical, The Heart of Rock and Roll and the biographical show,Lempicka.
Here’s the playlist…
From Lempicka: “Our Time,” “Paris,” and “Speed”
From A Beautiful Noise: “A Beautiful Noise,” “I’m A Believer,” “Sweet Caroline,” and “Brooklyn Roads/America”
From The Wiz: “The Tornado,” “Ease On Down The Road,” “Don’t Nobody Bring Me No Bad News,” “Everybody Rejoice/Brand New Day,” and “Believe In Yourself”
From The Heart of Rock and Roll: “Hip To Be Square,” “The Heart of Rock and Roll,” “I Want A New Drug,” “The Power of Love”
Wednesday at 3 PM, Curtain Call will let you hear what you missed. 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, Monday at 9 AM and Tuesday at 2 PM. A marathon of classic episodes can be heard Sunday morning beginning at 9 AM, and an all-night marathon of Curtain Call episodes can be heard Wednesday nights, beginning at Midnight.
Tonight at 10 PM we have assembled a new hour-long episode of The Comedy Vault filled with the brilliant stand-up comedy of Bob Newhart who left us last week. You can hear this replayed Saturday at 6 PM and next Monday at 8 PM.
Like last week, we have a cool new episode of RFC to help you deal with the hot weather Tuesday on The AIR. Radio Free Charleston, is one-third new/two-third classic RFC this week. 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.
This week we open with a new hour of our usual free-format mix of local, indepedent and whatever else I might feel like playing. Then, for no reason other than living the cliché, we bring you CHRISTMAS IN JULY! I dug out the 2016 RFC Christmas special and dropped it into this week’s second and third hours because…why not?
Our first hour opens with the title track from Frenchy & The Punk’s new album, Midnight Garden, and offers up new music from Clownhole, Messer Chups, Tucker Rigglean & The Cheap Dates, Sierra Ferrell and The Settlement. We also bring you some oldies from the 1960s, 70s and 80s.
Our Christmassy second hour is mostly a collection of local holiday music from our video archives. Hour three is mostly a distillation of our 1989 Christmas show, which was broadcast on WVNS back during the original incarnation of RFC.
I gotta be honest…I was planning to do this last year but I forgot about it until I was working on the first show in August. I almost forgot this year, too.
Links in the artist’s names in the first hour of our playlist below will take you to a website where you can find our more about them and maybe buy their music(where possible). Check out the playlist…
hour two
Melanie Larch/Diablo Blues Band “Please Come Home For Christmas”
Marium Bria “Naughty Christmas”
Frenchy and The Punk “All I Want For Christmas Is A Time Machine”
The Laser Beams “Up On The Rooftop”
The Bob Thompson Unit “Festival”
Charleston Gay Men’s Chorale “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas”
The Renfields “Merry Christmas To All”
Clownhole “Deck The Halls”
Prank Monkey “The Chipmunk Song”
Joseph Hale “Let’s Put The X in Xmas”
2012 Cast of “Mary” “Lord of Mercy”
Rowan Maher “Child, My Child”
Pepper Fandango and Lee Harrah “Baby It’s Cold Outside”
Todd Burge with Joseph Hale “Merry Methmas”
hour three
“Jam theme”-a special rendition of the Radio Free Charleston theme song, recorded at The Charleston Playhouse and featuring most of the Charleston Playhouse Quartet, with the addition of Stephen Beckner, who provides a wintery spoken interlude.
A 1989 commercial for Budget Tapes & Records where your PopCulteer provides all three voices, including the ghost of Bing Crosby.
Go Van Gogh “Santa Claus Is Back In Town”
Stephen Beckner and John and Tim Rock from Go van Gogh, live interview in the studio.
Go Van Gogh attempts at Christmas carols
Three Bodies (Kris Cormany, Brian Young, Brian Lucas) live interview in the studio
Three Bodies “Three Bodies”
“Why Do We Have To Work Skit”
Clownhole (Sham Voodoo, Flair) Christmas message with the accapella punk “Deck The Halls”
Charleston Playhouse Jam Session “Jingle Bells”
Plugs for “The Last Ride,” the final concert by Brian Diller and the Ride, which happened one week after this show first aired.
Mad Scientist Club “I Saw Santa Claus”
Gary Price Christmas wishes from The Swivels
Charleston Playhouse Jam Session interview with John McIntyre leading into “Heaven and Mud/Train Wreck The Halls/Will The Circle Be Unbroken”
Gary Price from The Swivels, pre-taped interview in the production studio
Clownhole in the studio, rambling semi-interview
Go Van Gogh in the studio, going off the rails a bit.
Go Van Gogh “Big Bottom (accapella)”–this was considered appropriate for the holiday for some reason
Melanie Larch “Ave Maria”
Melanie Larch and Mark Scarpelli “Christmas Time Is Here”
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, Sunday at 8 PM 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 two classic episodes of The Swing Shift. New episodes will return in a week or two.
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 tiny acrylic painting of Kate Bush, dressed up and acting like a bat.
I was inspired by one of the photos of Kate Bush taken for (if I recall correctly) the inside gatefold sleeve of her Never For Ever album in 1980. As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago when I accidently drew Kate’s face on a figure in a pencil drawing, if I were trying to do that, I would’ve failed.
To be fair, this painting is a whopping two-inches square. I did it on a sample of kitchen tile that I found in my basement. My dad used to design kitchens, so finding tile samples is not unusual in this house. Because I was working so small, the end result is a bit low-res. I did this using spent watercolor brushes dipped in acrylics. Then it took a week to dry before I could scan it (which, ironically, I had to do at a very high resolution to make up for its tinyness) and you see the end result above.
Over in radioland, Monday at 2 PM on The AIR, we bring you encores of a classic episode of Psychedelic Shack, and then at 3 PM 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.
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. 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.
At 8 PM you can hear an hour of stand up comedy from Steven Wright on a recent episode of TheComedy Vault.
Tonight at 9 PM for the Monday Marathon We bring you ten hours of Prognosis featuring Herman Linte as he presents five shows that start off with and feature some unusual permutations of the band, YES.
As we mark the last day of July on Wednesday afternoon on The AIR , we still manage to bring you a fresh new episode of Beatles Blast filled with great new cool stuff. You can tune in at the website, or just stay right here and listen to the convenient embedded radio player lurking elsewhere on this page.
Comments