Month: July 2024

The AIR’s eighth anniversary week continues, on Wednesday afternoon, and The AIR brings you great new episodes of Curtain Call and Beatles Blast that are both 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. You might’ve heard the sneak previews a couple of days ago, but now you can see what’s in the shows.

At 2 PM (EDT) Beatles Blast brings you an hour of Beatles without words.  Inspired by Herman Linte’s Prognosis episode that debuted on Monday, I decided to collect The Beatles group and solo tracks that either have the vocals mixed out, or never had them in the first place. We threw in one ringer from the soundtrack of Help, but this is just a fun collection of songs without words.

Check out the playlist…

Beatles Blast 112

The Beatles “She’s Leaving Home”
Paul McCartney “The Squid”
George Harrison ” Dream Scene”
John Lennon “Beef Jerky”
Ringo Starr “Nashville Jam”
The Beatles “Flying” “Within You Without You”
Paul McCartney “Frozen J”
Ken Thorne “A Hard Day’s Night”
The Travelling Wilburys “New Blue Moon”
The Beatles “Now And Then”

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 wraps up her trio of shows devoted to this year’s Tony Award Winners.  This week we bring you highlights from the winner of Best Revival of a Musical, Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along.

This smash hit revival of one of Sondheim’s rare flops stars Jonathan Groff as Frank, Daniel Radcliffe as Charley and Lindsay Mendez as Mary. Directed by Sondheim devotee, Maria Friedman, this revival will soon end its extended limited run on Broadway, but it was recorded for eventual video release, either streaming on theatrically.

This revival was nominated for seven Tony Awards, and took home four of them. The musical tells the story of how three friends’ lives and friendship change over the course of 20 years. With one of the three being a talented composer of musicals who, over those 20 years, abandons his friends and songwriting career to become a producer of Hollywood movies.

Like the play 1934 George S. Kaufman play on which it’s based, the show’s story moves in reverse chronology, beginning in 1976 at the friends’ lowest moment and ending in 1957, at their youthful best.

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 and afternoon 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 a brand-new episode featuring the stand-up comedy of Gabriel Inglesias.

Despite last night’s sneak preview, Tuesday is once again “New Show Day” on The AIR.  As such, we have new episodes of  Radio Free Charleston and The Swing Shift for you. 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 boatloads of replays throughout the week.

Radio Free Charleston opens with “Heads On Fire,” by Clownhole. This was one of the most-requested local tunes on the original broadcast incarnation of RFC back in 1989. However, the song was never properly recorded…until now.

The entire new Clownhole album is out now on all major streaming services and can also be found on vinyl at Sullivan’s Records in Charleston. I even play a second track from it to open our second hour.

Our show is also loaded with new music from Golden, Ricky Fitness, Mediogres, Frenchy & The Punk, The Aquabats, Masser Chups and more. Via our Chicago pipeline, we have great new indie tracks from Red Spot Rhythm Section, Carey Ott featuring The Freaks of Nashville and Joe DiZillo. We also do a dive into the archives and bring you some classic local tracks going back up to thirty-five years.

Our third hour is an encore of an episode of RFC Volume 4, from back when the show was one hour long and all-local. It’s a nifty time-capsule of a time when the music scene was thriving.

The links in the playlist will take you to the pages for most of the artists in this week’s show…

RFC V5 183

hour one
Clownhole “Heads On Fire”
Golden  “Impossible”
The Wombles “Wombling USA”
Ricky Fitness “Stormy Weather”
RSRS (Red Spot Rhythm Section) “Look Up”
Mediogres “River Day”
Frenchy & The Punk “Skip Boom”
Carey Ott featuring The Freaks of Nashville “No Front”
The Aquabats “Sun Blocker”
Messer Chups “The Girl With The Sun In Her Hair”
Unmanned “Arrested”
The Dollyrots “Holding Out For A Hero”
The Dread Crew of Oddwood “The Apple”
The Settlement “Sweetness”

hour two
Clownhole “Dig It”
Joe DiZillo “Lotta Love”
Farnsworth “Erased”
Crazy Jane “Amazing”
Joe Vallina “The Year of the Wicked”
Hawthorne Heights “We Were Never Lost”
Emmalea Deal & The Hot Mess “Chasing You”
Chuck Biel “In A Russian Cathedral”
Brian Diller “And We Said”
Stark Raven  “He Loves To Limbo”
Three Bodies “The Trax”
Under The Radar “Dog Day Dallas Doo Dah Demons”
Feast of Stephen “Urge To Care”
Madness “The Law According to Dr. Kippah”

hour three
John Radcliff “Come Back Down”
Spencer Elliott “The Last Two People On Earth”
Todd Burge “Ask Them To”
Cast of Paradise Park “What Do You Think About”
Fletcher’s Grove “The Thugger”
Beneath “Poultice”
Beggars Clan “Divide and Conquer”
Mediogres “The Ballad of Marla Singer”
The Heavy Editors “On TV”
Emmalea Deal “Sacred”
Gypsy Rhythm “Missing (live)”
Rasta Rafiki “Apathy of the World”
Under The Radar “All Along The Watchtower”

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 offer up a special  episode of The Swing Shift that plays off of a recent compilation album by Ella Fitzgerald, and brings you, in mixtape fashion, songs about places all over the world.

Check out the playlist…

The Swing Shift 161

Ella Fitzgerald “A Night In Tunisia”
Les & Larry Elgart “Harlem Nocturne”
Stephane Grappelii “Chicaco”
Dean Martin “An Evening in Roma”
Joe Jackson’s Jumpin’ Jive “San Francisco Fan”
Pasadena Roof Orchrestra “Home In Pasedena”
Stan Kenton “April In Paris”
Frank Sinatra “I Love Paris”
Benny Goodman “Mission To Moscow”
Count Basie “London Bridge Is Falling Down”
Brian Setzer Orchestra “Hawaii 5-0”
Woody Herman “Broadway’s Gone Hawaii”
Don Redman “Shakin’ The African”
Louis Prima Jr. “New Orleans”
Cherry Poppin’ Daddies “42nd Street”
Glenn Miller “Kalamazoo”
Royal Crown Revue “Hollywood Tale”
Jive Bunny “My Kind of Town (Chicago)”
Big Bad Voodoo Daddy “Basin Street Blues”

 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.

July 1, 2016 was the day that The AIR officially became “The AIR” and was also the day that it became the internet radio arm of the PopCult blog. You know, the thing that you’re reading right now.

Our history predates that a little, though. This internet radio station started life as “Voices of Appalachia,” occasionally called “New Appalachian Radio.” It was a product of the WVSU EDC, back when we called their West Side HG “DigiSo.” VOA was the brainchild of Eric Meadows, who launched the station almost ten years ago.

However, after a couple of years Eric got distracted by his other duties. Technical issues made the station go dark for a couple of months and many of our shows departed for WTSQ, so Eric was ready to throw in the towel.  Before he did that, he gave the folks behind three of the remaining shows the chance to take over. I was one of those three, and was the only one who was really committed to keeping it going. We had changed the name of the station to the rather unwieldy moniker “OnTheAIRadio” at the beginning of 2016, but as soon as I became the sole owner, I decided to shorten it to my original suggestion, and The AIR happily became the not-quite red-headed stepchild of PopCult.

On the day we launched I managed to pull off a programming stunt where we debuted the premiere episodes of all of our shows (except for Radio Free Charleston) which were to air over the next week in their regular timeslots. You can see the post about that HERE.

Many of these shows are still going, and a couple of the ones that aren’t have open invitations for their hosts to return,  but today I decided that the best way to observe eight years of The AIR at PopCult was to recreate that programming stunt. Today on The AIR, you will get a chance to hear this week’s new episodes of every one of our music specialty and comedy shows.

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. These shows will debut in their normal weekly spots, and here’s the playlists for both of them.

First at 2 PM Eastern time, Nigel Pye offers up yet another phantasmagorical sampling of mind-expanding rock music, largely from the era back when even the bad drugs were pretty good for music. Check out the playlist…

Psychedelic Shack 091

Golden Earring “She Flies On Strange Wings”
Grand Funk Railroad “The Railroad”
The James Gang “Lost Woman”
Jefferson Airplane “Eskimo Blue Day”
Jimi Hendrix “Voodoo Chile”
Janis Joplin “I Need A Man To Love”
The Electric Prunes “I Had Too Much To Dream (Last Night)”
The Blues Magoos “Tobacco Road”
Gonn “Blackout of Gretely”

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.

At 3 PM Herman Linte has cooked up a mixtape of instrumental Prog-rock epics. Some of these tracks are new mixes that have the vocals omitted, while other were always meant to be sans vox. I have to admit that I thought this was such a cool idea that I swiped it for this week’s episode of Beatles Blast.

Prognosis 118

YES “Heart of the Sunrise”
Mel Collins, Chris Poland, Ian Paice “21st Century Schizoid Man”
Peter Gabriel “Digging In The Dirt”
Alan Parsons Project “Where’s The Walrus”
Pallas “Stranger On The Edge of Time”
Frank Zappa “Uncle Remus”
Nightwish “Ghost Love Score”
Edison’s Children “A Million Miles Away”
Steve Hackett “Hammer In The Sand”
Dream Theater “Learning To Live”
Porcupine Tree “Harridan”
Gentle Giant “Aspirations”
Genesis “Do The Neurotic”
King Crimson “In The Court of the Crimson King”
David Bowie “Some Are”
Emerson Lake & Palmer “Toccata”

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

At 8 PM you can hear Neil’s Heavy Concept Album on a recent episode of The Comedy Vault. This one’s a treat for fans of The Young Ones. Yes, it’s that Neil.

Tonight at 9 PM for the Monday Marathon we sort of go nuts. For those of you who are loyal enough listeners (or simply self-destructive), you can tune in and hear a sneak preview of BRAND NEW episodes of all of this week’s music specialty shows (plus a new Comedy Vault). You will hear, in order: MIRRORBALL; Curtain Call; Radio Free Charleston; Sydney’s Big Electric Cat; The Swing Shift; The Comedy Vault and Beatles Blast. The masochists and completists among you can stick around right after and listen to the new episodes of Prognosis and Psychedelic Shack in their regular encore timeslots.

I’m not going to go into any more details here. As these shows air in their regular timeslots through the week, I’ll have the production notes and playlists here for you as though this sneak preview never happened. If you want to get a head start on the week, stay up all night and listen!

It doesn’t seem like eight years. Time flies when you’re having fun.

This week I’m back to using the trusty Blackwing Palomino pencil and attempting to draw the female form.

With the nasty heat affecting me over the last couple of weeks, this took several short drawing sessions to complete. I took the pose from an online model page, changed it around a bit and tried to draw an original face and hair on the figure.

Inadvertantly, I think I drew Kate Bush’s face. Had I been trying to do that, I doubt I would’ve gotten this close.

Anyway, this is pencil on regular copy paper. I was using a plastic clipboard to hold it, and with my afflicted fingers, this changed the amount of pressure I could apply. So it’s not really my normal style. I did a lot of erasing to get the white areas on her arms. The only post-scanning changes were to white-balance it to make the scan look more like the original drawing and cropping out my sloppy borders. As with much of my physical art of late, this is just me trying to get my fingers working again.

To see it bigger try clicking HERE.

Instead of telling you about our sister internet radio station, The AIR, in this space like I normally do, I will simply let you know that today is a very big day for The AIR, and I will tell you all about that in a PopCult post that will go live sometime after this post on Monday morning.