Your humble blogger is hard at work on The 2025 PopCult Gift Guide, so I’ve put together a partly-new Radio Free Charleston  that you can hear today on The AIR.  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.

It’s a free-format extravaganza as this week’s first hour is  mostly newly-released tunes by the likes of Frenchy & The Punk, Golden, Nervous Twich, J. Marinelli, The Paranoid Style, Julian Lennon, The Charlatans and Guided by Voices.   There was a ton of killer new tunes released in the past week, and we crammed ’em all into the first hour for you.

The reason for that is that, after that first hour, I go back into our double time machine and bring you a 2016 episode of RFC Volume 4, which presented two hours of RFC Volume 1 that originally aired on broadcast radio in March, 1990.

What you will get to hear is a little more than half of an original broadcast. I excised the non-entertaining commercials, and a couple of songs for time, but you will get the original Radio Free Charleston experience, complete with live guests in the studio (after 2 AM) and live call-ins, plus our spur-of-the-moment requests and a mix of alternative and punk music with the then-best of the local music scene. You will hear what it was like listening to RFC back in 1990, really late on a Saturday night, starting at 2 AM and running a bit past 4 AM. You will notice that the host runs out of steam a bit as the show progresses. This was all done live on the air.

In the studio we had Gary Price, Tommy Medvick and John Radcliff, of The Swivels. This is pretty bittersweet, since Gary and Tommy are no longer with us, but it is wonderful to hear them at their peak of goofiness, having fun and cutting up with me playing the role of the exasperated host. This was also the show where we rebroadcast the song that we’d recorded live over the phone from Key West the previous Thursday. Kris Cormany and Brian Young called into the station from a pay phone on a streetcorner and serenaded us with the song “Broken Vase” live at 11:35 PM. On this show we replayed the tune and had a phone call from Brian to tell us what all happened that night after we went off the air.

This show also featured the debut of new RFC jingles by my buddy, Bridget, who you may know now as Bridget Lancaster, the newly-minted co-host of America’s Test Kitchen on PBS. Bridget came into the radio studio one night and sang several jingles and we goofed around and did some improv on a bunch of little comedy bits that you will hear sprinkled thoughout the broadcast. It’s a nice little bit of Charleston music and broadcasting history in our second and third hours. And it hasn’t been heard online in over nine years.

Check out the playlist. Links in the first hour will take you to pages for the artists…

RFC V4 247

hour one
Frenchy & The Punk “Not Under Your Spell”
Golden “Just A Ghost”
Nervous Twitch “Minor Characters”
J. Marinelli “Put Some Blood On It”
The Paranoid Style “It’s A Dog’s Breakfast”
John Radcliff“A Place To Grow”
Julian Lennon “I Hope”
Novelty Island “An Orange Goodbye”
The Charlatans “Now Everything”
Guided by Voices “A Glum Swoboda”
Brian Diller “The Finding”
Aliza Hava “When the Children Cry”
Massing “Stay Inside”
Payback’s A Bitch “Searching For Eden”

hour two
Rudy Panucci “The WVNS Disclaimer”
Charleston Playhouse Quartet “Radio Free Charleston Theme”
John Lennon “Cold Turkey”
Three Bodies “Broken Vase”
Lost Luggage “Anything You Like”
Beckner, Price and Panucci “Got Drunk, Got Married, Got Screwed”
Electronic Moog Orchestra “Cantina Band (from Star Wars)”
Wire “Mr. Suit”
Eugene Chadbourne with Camper Van Beethoven “Voodoo Vengence”
David Bowie “Fame 90”
Soul Asylum “Barstool Blues”
The Bounty “Silver and Gold”
The Swivels “Cinnamn Girl”

hour three
Three Bodies “Gardens of Hope”
Go Van Gogh “Shut Up, I Love You”
Captain Beefheart and The Magic Band “Flash Gordon’s Ape”
Crack The Sky “Lost Boys”
Kate Bush “Be Kind To My Mistakes”
Sinead O’Conner “Mandinka”
Jane Siberry “Dog Song”
Brian Young on the phone.
David Bowie “Jene Genie”
The Clash “Lost In The Supermarket”
XTC “Toys”
The Replacements “Talent Show”
The B 52s “Planet Claire”

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.