Month: September 2025 (Page 2 of 3)

Tuesday is always a great day to tune into The AIR  with a new episode of Radio Free Charleston to plonk your magic twanger. 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 is all-new this week and we open with an advance listen to the new single by Dropcoat, “Geezer,” which will be streaming out the wazoo this coming Friday. You may even be able to pre-save it on the wazoo of your choice.

We alo have some great new stuff from our Nashville via Chicago pipeline, with new tracks from Scott Collins and Aliza Hava, plus Vinto Van Go, who are just from Chicago, and not Nashville, for those of you scoring at home.

On top of that we have killer new local tunes from Of The Dell, Gardenn and Erik Woods, plus a set of Americana and a tribute to Buddy Holly, nine days after what would have been his 89th birthday.

Check out this playlist, with links to the artist’s page, where available…

Radio Free Charleston V5 241

hour one
Dropcoat “Geezer”
Of The Dell “Yes I Will”
The Paranoid Style “Tearing The Ticket”
Vinto Van Go“Cards On The Table”
The Settlement “Sweetness”
Aliza Hava “Love Who You Are”
Scott Collins “Extinguish The Flame”
The Surfrajettes “Satan’s Holiday”
The Darkness “The Battle For Gadget Land”
Red Audio “Edgar”
The Renfields “Prom Night”
Temtris “Murder of Crows”
Byzantine “Harbinger”

hour two
Gardenn “Mountain Mama”
Erik Woods “Tigers”
A Tale of Two “Is It Me”
Tyler Childers “Down Under”
Ringo Starr “String Theory”
Sierra Ferrell w/Nikki Lane “A Lesson In Leavin”
Sheryl Crow “The New Normal”
The M.F.B “P.H. Steve”
The Heavy Hitters Band “Smoke ’em”
Lady D“Times Like These”
Gary Moore with Phil Lynott “Still In Love With You”
Marc Ribot “Map of a Blue City”
Ron Sowell “Everything That Goes Round comes Round”

hour three
Emmalea Deal & The Hot Mess  “Invisible”
M Robin Scott “Crossfire”
Messer Chups “Son of Chupacabra”
Dice Johnson “Caravan”
Matt Berry/Project Gemini “Stay On The Ground (Woodland Get-Down Version)”
Joy Viver “How”
Ghoulbox “Dead, White & Gloom”
Brian Diller “Crying, Waiting, Hoping”
Shoes “Words of Love”
John Lennon “Peggy Sue”
Paul McCartney “It’s So Easy”
The Purple Helmets “Not Fade Away”

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  The Swing Shift is an encore of two recent episodes.

 You can hear The Swing Shift Tuesday at 3 PM, with replays Wednesday at 8 AM, Thursday at 9 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 Thursdays and Sundays.

Your humble blogger’s hands were actually working this weekend, and a pressing deadline was dealt with and finished early, so you get some fresh off the easel art this week, dashed off Sunday evening as dusk fell with a clunk.

This is a small color rough for an image I’ve been wanting to paint for a while. It’s based on a couple of photos I took last June while riding the Brown line around Chicago’s famed Loop District. I was able to capture the point where you can look out the window as you go around a turn and see the end of the train you’re riding.

Yay!

This is acrylic on illustration board, and I did it so fast that I didn’t bother to fix the big smudge near the middle. I’m going to repeat this on a larger canvas eventually anyway. I just wanted to see if I could capture the color and the lighting while not painting all the reflections and the dirt on the windows.

If you want to see this image larger, click HERE.

Meanwhile, over in radioland, Monday beginning at 2 PM on The AIR, we bring you an encore of a classic episode of Psychedelic Shack, and then at 3 PM we do the same with 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.

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.

At 8 PM you can hear a classic episode of The Comedy Vault that delivers a boot to the head, courtesy of the Canadian comedy troupe, The Frantics.

Tonight at 9 PM we bring you our new Monday night line-up featuring two hours each of Curtain Call and Beatles Blast, plus six hours overnight with an assortment of our programming from Haversham Recording Institute: Psychedelic Shack, Sydney’s Big Electric Cat and Prognosis.

Your humble blogger is under deadline pressure, but two spectacular music videos with local connections have fallen into my lap to bring you this week.

Above you see “Harbingers,” the title track of the recently-released new album by Byzantine.

About this video, Byzantine’s guiding light, Chris Ojeda, says:

This video has taken months for us curate. We wanted to continue our path of handmade original artwork for this new album.

My daughter Mallory Ojeda and I wrote the script for the story, hired a young Claymation artist from Mexico named Adrian Venti to hand build every scene out of clay and brought Holly Grayson with Screaming Butterfly Entertainment (Justinian Code, The Cicada Tree, The Agonies) to edit all the footage to make this beautiful music video about a boy who, after losing his father, searches for his importance in life, only to be lured in by a voracious Wolf who steers the boy down a path of greed and selfishness. The boy is eventually saved by one random act of kindness towards a lone Raven. Ravens never forget.

Mallory and I are fans of all things stop motion. Movies like Fantastic Mr. Fox, Coraline, James And The Giant Peach, and music videos from Peter Gabriel, Bjork, Tool, and Primus. We modelled the main character after my six-year-old son, Henry. I hope you guys enjoy this labor of love and appreciate the amount of work and symbolism that has gone into the script, the Claymation, and the brilliant editing. Our team decided to push the creative aspect as far as we can and tell this story of a boy who just wants to be important.

As you can see, it’s an amazing piece of work.

Another amazing piece of work is at the bottom of this post.

It’s the second collaboration between Sirius Bluray and my old friend (and RFC fave) David Synn, called “The Oak Tree.”

I don’t have as much info about the production, but it’s a terrific piece of music and great video, so we get the rare treat of having two locally-connected music videos turn up within a day of each other.

Check it out…

From March, 2012 we bring you RFC 152, “Machine of Madness Shirt,” with music from Linework, The Tom McGees and the team of Chad Foss and Sean Sydnor. There;s also a couple of weird short films and some animation, and Lee Harrah is on hand to plug a then-upcoming all-ages show.

Our first musical guest this week was Linework, a veteran metal band from Charleston for whom I created a music video using footage shot at Mission Coalition the previous fall, and set to their studio recording, “The Finishers.” We also featured live footage of The Tom McGees, recorded at The Blue Parrot, performing their song, “The Choice.”  Wrapping up the music on this show we ended with Chad Foss and Sean Sydnor performing the Bill Withers classic, “Ain’t No Sunshine.

Also on hand in this show, which was hosted from various locations on Charleston’s West Side, are a couple of short films and the aforementioned Mr. Harrah. You can find the original production notes HERE.

The PopCulteer
September 12, 2025

Today’s PopCulteer was supposed to be a special preview of a cool new pop culture item with an exciting launch and a local connection. I had it pre-written, and timed to go live with the offical press conference launch.

Then, twenty minutes before my pre-written post was set to go live, I got a frantic phone call telling me that the project has been delayed at least three months, and to please not run any information or images about it yet.

The timing wasn’t great, but I don’t want to burn a source or unintentionally leak anything early that might screw things up for anybody. So I spiked that post for now.

And that left me without a post for today.  I am not prepared to run an appropriate obituary for Anne Saville, which she most assuradely deserves. That will wait until I have the time to do it right.

I’m also not inclined to cover any third-rail current events that folks might be coming to this blog to avoid.

Luckily, I have a stockpile of stuff to run to in case of such an event as this. So, here are some hastily-assembled photos from my recent travels that I haven’t posted here yet….

I have dozens of photos from the model contest at WonderFest in Louisville  that haven’t seen the light of day yet. Here’s one of them.

It was cool to visit Rotofugi in Chicago again, for what must have been the first time in three or four years, back in June.

While I posted a photo of the giant traditional Big Boy from The American Sign Museum in Cinncinnati, I forgot to share this pic of the slimmer, Frisch’s Big Boy that they also have.

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It’s still technically summer, even though some recent cool days and a month-long drout has leaves changing early in places, and it just seems sort of Autumnal.  However, rest assured that unberable heat is back in the forecast for the next week or so, so it’ll feel like July again soon.  And now with the ersatz weather report out of the way, how about we jump all over the state for even more STUFF TO DO?

As always, you should remember 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. Also, if you have a show that you’d like to plug in the future, contact me via Social Media at Facebook, BlueSky , Spoutible, Instagram or possibly Elon’s beast, if it should ever choose to forgive me.  I dont charge for this, so you might as well send me something if you have an event to promote. Note that some links look like they shouldn’t work because they have lines through them, but that’s just a WordPress glitch, so click on them anyway. They should still work.

We are also very happy to remind you that Cristen Michael has created an interactive calendar that is way more comprehensive than this list of STUFF TO DO, and you can find it HERE. Just click on the day and the event and you’ll be whisked away to a page with more details about loads of area events.

City Center Live at Slack Plaza in Charleston has announced their schedule for the summer.  You can find their schedule HERE.

You can find live music in and around town every night of the week. You just have to know where to look.

Most Fridays and Saturdays you can find live music at Taylor Books. There is no cover charge, and shows start at 7:30 PM. This weekend they have Steve Himes on Friday, and Ken Kruger with Anne McConnell on Saturday.  Sunday at 2 PM you can hear Ray + Jon during the open house memorial for Taylor Books’ founder, Anne Saville, who passed away earlier this week.

You can find live music every night at The World Famous Empty Glass Cafe. Mondays feature open mic night. The first Tuesday of every month sees the legendary Spurgie Hankins Band perform. There’s both Happy Hour music and local or touring bands on Thursday and Friday, and live bands Saturday nights.  On Sundays when there’s a new Mountain Stage, musicians from the legendary WV Public Radio show migrate to The Glass for the Post-Mountain Stage jam.

Live at The Shop in Dunbar hosts local and touring bands on most weekends, and is a nice break away from the downtown bar scene.

Louie’s, at Mardi Gras Casino & Resort, regularly brings in local bands on weekends.

In Huntington, local institution, The Loud (formerly The V Club), brings in great touring and local acts three or four nights a week.

The Wandering Wind Meadery holds several events each week, from live piano karaoke to bands to comedy to burlesque.

The multitude of breweries and distilleries that have popped up in Charleston of late bring in live musical acts as well. I tend to miss a lot of these because, being a non-drinker, they fly under my radar.

Roger Rablais hosts Songwriter’s stage at different venues around the area, often at 813 Penn, next door to Fret ‘n’ Fiddle in Saint Albans and also at The Empty Glass many Tuesday evenings. You might also find cool musical events at Route 60 Music in Barboursville and Folklore Music Exchange in Charleston.

To hear music in an alcohol-free enviroment, see what’s happening at Pumzi’s, on Charleston’s West Side. Pumzi’s looks to be beefing up their offerings in the coming weeks and months, so be sure to check that link in case we miss something.

You can also visit Coal River Coffee in Saint Albans for live music in an alcohol-free environment. This Friday at 7 PM  Coal River Coffee features Minor SwingI am looking to expand this list, so please contact me through the social media sites above if you know about more alcohol-free performance venues. The Huntington Music Collective has recently started hosting all ages shows at Event Horizon.

For cutting-edge independent art films, downstairs from Taylor Books you’ll find the Floralee Hark Cohen Cinema by WVIFF. Each week they program several amazing movies in their intimate viewing room that you aren’t likely to see anywhere else.

Please remember that viral illlnesses are still a going concern and 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. And if you’re at an outdoor event, please remember that it’s awfully inconsiderate to smoke or vape around people who become ill when exposed to that stuff. If somebody asks you to refrain, don’t be a jerk about it.

Keep in mind that all shows are subject to change or be cancelled at the last minute.

Here we go, roughly in order, it’s graphics for local events happening over the next several days that I was able to scrounge up online…

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To be clear here, today I’m going to bring you a post from exactly twenty years…and one day…ago in this blog. For some reason (and this was just in the second week of yours truly blogging), I had four posts go live on September 9, 2005, and then no more for a few days afterward. But this is an important one, so I’m going to revisit it here, with newly-restored graphics. PopCult shares a birthday with Jack Kirby, the man who created the bulk of the Marvel Comics Universe. In this post, I was a little timid about challenging the claims that Stan Lee was the main creator, but I’ve since corrected the record. 

This early in the blog, I was trying to establish my take on pop culture with my readers, and this was the first mention of Jack Kirby, and I thought that, since I’ve got outside work tying me up today, it might be a good time to look back at what I was writing two decades ago. 

Okay, there are few things cooler in this world than the creative legacy of Jack Kirby (1917-1994).

This is the guy who co-created Captain America in the 1940s, and gave the comic book world loads of memorable characters like The Newsboy Legion, The Vision, Sandman, The Challengers Of The Unknown, among other classics.

With his partner Joe Simon, he was responsible for the first horror and romance comics. Simon and Kirby split up in the 1950s, and on his own, Kirby was responsible for great work for DC, Marvel, and newspaper comics.

Kirby teamed with Stan Lee at Marvel Comics in the 1960s, and together, they created the Fantastic Four, and laid the groundwork for the Marvel Comics empire. When you see The X Men, The Fantastic Four, The Silver Surfer, The Hulk, and almost all the other Marvel heroes, you’re looking at Jack Kirby creations.

When he left Marvel to work for DC Comics, at an age when most cartoonists are contemplating retirement, he still had enough left in his tank to bring us classics like Kamandi, The New Gods, Mister Miracle, and Etrigan, the Demon.

Perhaps because he’s not the one whose uncle owned the company, Kirby gets a bit of a short shrift when it comes to things like putting his name on blockbuster movies based on his Marvel co-creations (Fantastic Four, Hulk, X Men), and his estate doesn’t even get paid royalties when Marvel reprints his classic work. Even when they do it in a coffee-table book called “Marvel Visionaries: Jack Kirby.”

DC treats Kirby better, but he’s responsible for so much of what makes up comic books today that he really deserves more acclaim.

So, it’s really cool that Kirby now has a museum dedicated to his work. It’s about time the guy got the credit he deserves. This is a guy who was creating memorable characters from the 1930s to the 1980s. Most of the modern-day universes of both Marvel and DC Comics are deeply-rooted in Kirby’s concepts and creations.

The museum is an online presence for now, with the stated goal of developing a traveling retrospective of Kirby’s work. Brought to life by Randolph Hoppe, Kirby’s daughter, Lisa, and John Morrow (publisher of JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR ,along with other great books and magazines that preserve comic book history), the Jack Kirby Museum is a long overdue honor for the man who almost single-handedly created the modern comic book. Check out the Kirby Museum here

It’s a good start when it comes to recognizing the plucky little Brooklynite, without whom we would not have two-thirds of today’s most recognizable comic book favorites. And think how cool it would be if the Avampato Museum at the Clay Center could sign on to host the traveling retrospective when it starts in 2007. {Update: It hasn’t happened yet}

Tuesday is another great day to tune into The AIR  with a new episode of Radio Free Charleston to tickle your fancy! 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.

While today is a great day to tune into The AIR, yesterday wasn’t such a great day to record a radio show. The city decided that Monday was a great day to rip up and replace the sidewalk across the street from my office (where I record the show), so I only did one hour of new stuff, and then reached deep into my archvies for a two-hour edition of RFC Volume 3, that originally ran over ten years ago on Voices of Appalachia/New Appalachian Radio.  This is a gem of a show that I’ve been saving for when it was most needed, and that time is now.

Before we get there, our first hour opens with a new tune from Ron Sowell.  Following that we have the RFC return of Dropcoat, plus some great new tracks from Emmalea Deal & The Hot Mess, The Settlement, M, Vinto Van Go, Blood Orange, The Surfrajettes, The M.F.B., Brian Diller and more. It is our usual combination of excellent local, independent and cult musical artistes.

Our second and third hours take us back to May, 2015, when we wer doing the show as a podcast while waiting for technical issues to be worked out at Voices of Appalachia. This was a show with a mix of then-new and archive music from local and regional musical artists for the first half, while the second half was a solid block of Boone County’s own, Hasil Adkins.

So this week our third hour celebrates the music of Hasil Adkins. Born in 1937 and gone for just over twenty years now, Hasil Adkins was a West Virginia original. Acording to Wikipedia, the Boone County native’s songs “explored an affinity for chicken, sexual intercourse and decapitation, and were isolated in obscurity until being unearthed in the 1980s.”

That’s a pretty good bonus, you know, getting an hour of The Haze because it was too loud for me to record a whole, three-hour show. You should thank the City of Dunbar.

Hasil was the second local artist played on the RFC broadcast radio show, back in 1989.  The first was the daughter of a car dealer who advertised on the station, so Hasil was the first local music I played of my own choosing.

Check out this playlist, with links to the artist’s page, where available…

RFC V5 240

hour one
Ron Sowell “Dance Till The Music Stops”
Dropcoat “It Can Only Go Up From Here”
Emmalea Deal & The Hot Mes “Lie To Me”
The Settlement “The One That Got Away”
Vinto Van Go“Zelda Outside Havana 1939”
Neil Finn “The Rest of the Day Off”
A Tale of Two ” “Gun Street Girl”
Brian Diller “Heroes”
The M.F.B. “Dr. Feel”
Blood Orange “The Train (King’s Cross)”
M Robin Scott “Cut The Cards”
The Surfrajettes “Banshee Bop”
June Swoon “Marrying Kind”
Cold Slither “Zartan’s Revenge”

hour two
Crystal Bright and The Silver Hands “Earth Above My Roots”
Byzantine “You Sleep, We Wake”
The Lunatic Society “Dead Inside”
No Pretty Pictures “Go Mart Crack Lighter”
Alan Griffith “Blowin’ In The Wind”
Alan Griffith “Samson and Delilah”
Go Van Gogh “I Don’t Want To Be Your Hero”
Go Van Gogh “I Can’t Sleep At Night”
J Marinelli “Month of Mondays”
The Company Stores “Silence”
Radio Cult “Ace of Spades”
Wolfgang Parker “Mata Hari”
The Renfields “Killer Klowns”
Under Surveillance “I Don’t Think It’s Me”
Pepper Fandango “Wishbone Blues”
William Matheny “If You See Him Tonight”

hour three

Hasil Adkins

“The Hunch”
“Chicken Walk”
“Ugly Woman”
“If You Want to Be My Baby, Baby”
“Get Out of My Car”
“Rock The Blues”
“Jenny Lou”
“Donnie Boogie”
“I Don’t Love You”
“No More Hot Dogs”
“Truly Ruly”
“Rock N Roll Tonight”
“She Said”
“Shake That Thing”
“Let’s Stop Tonight”
“Tell Me Baby”
“Big Fat Mama”
“Walk and Talk With Me”
“I Need Your Head”
“I Want Some Lovin’”
“Shake With Me”

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  The Swing Shift is an encore of two classic episodes.

 You can hear The Swing Shift Tuesday at 3 PM, with replays Wednesday at 8 AM, Thursday at 9 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 Thursdays and Sundays.

So, thirty days ago I was sitting in an ice cream parlor inside Cinncinnati’s Union Terminal Station/Museum Center, and being in ground central of Art Deco, I was struck by the elegance of the light fixtures in said ice cream parlor. So I decided to paint them.

This is a small study, mixed media (but mostly acrylic) on illustration board. I used some of the lessons I’ve learned imitating Hopper, but tried to put a bit of my own spin on it.

I have not yet decided if I want to take this to a larger canvas. I’m a little skittish about spending my art copying somebody else’s art, and that’s basically what I’m doing here–copying the cool Art Deco designs.

You can expect to see a lot more pieces inspired by the Union Terminal, though. It’s so visually stunning I have to try to capture it. I mean, these are just the lights in the ice cream parlor and they look like something out of Metropolis.

If you want to see this image larger, click HERE.

Meanwhile, over in radioland, Monday beginning at 2 PM on The AIR, we bring you an encore of a classic episode of Psychedelic Shack, and then at 3 PM we do the same with 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.

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.

At 8 PM you can hear a classic episode of The Comedy Vault devoted to live performances by Monty Python.

Tonight at 9 PM we bring you our new Monday night line-up featuring two hours each of Curtain Call and Beatles Blast, plus six hours overnight with an assortment of our programming from Haversham Recording Institute: Psychedelic Shack, Sydney’s Big Electric Cat and Prognosis.

Forty-seven years ago today, the world lost Keith Moon, the irrational force of nature that played drums for The Who.

To commemorate his life, this week we present The Who, live in concert, at Tanglewood in Lenox, MA on July 7th, 1970. This is a compilation of several bootleg films and videos of the show. This is when the band was touring o suppot the Tommy album, and they perform it, pretty much intact, here.

The set list:

Heaven and Hell
I Can’t Explain
Water
I Don’t Even Know Myself
Young Man Blues
Overture
It’s a Boy
1921
Amazing Journey
Sparks
Eyesight to the Blind
Christmas
The Acid Queen
Pinball Wizard
Do You Think It’s Alright?
Fiddle About
Tommy Can You Hear Me?
There’s a Doctor
Go to the Mirror!
Smash the Mirror
Miracle Cure
I’m Free
Tommy’s Holiday Camp
We’re Not Gonna Take It
See Me, Feel Me
My Generation
Cinnamon Girl Jam