Broadcasting from the Arctic Tundra of Dunbar Tuesday on The AIR  we manage to carve a partly-new episode of Radio Free Charleston from the ice. 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 kicks off with an hour loaded with great local and independent stuff, and the final two hours bring you the first part of a Beatles Tribute from Radio Free Charleston International that hasn’t been heard in more than nine years.

We open our show this week with Tyler Childers and the song that, just last Sunday night, won the Grammy Award for Best Country Song of 2025.  “Bitin’ List” is a remarkable choice, and is such a great tune that I’m opening the show with it, even though I already played it last year when it came out. It’s that damned good.

And it’s so surreal to realize that this is the guy I ran out to shoot video of in a bowling alley in Dunbar a dozen years ago.

The rest of our first hour is loaded with local and new music, including a couple of tracks featuing the late Lee Harrah. There will be a tribute show for Lee Saturday night at The Blue Parrot, and I will tell you all about that tomorrow in our STUFF TO DO post. We also bring you BRAND-NEW Music from June Swoon, The settlement, Moron Police, 4D Man, Kula Shaker as well as two new tracks from classic punk bands that mark their 50TH (!) anniversaries this year, The Damned and Buzzcocks.

Our second and third hours revive episode five of Radio Free Charleston International, from March, 2016. This was the first of two shows devoted to The Beatles, and it led to the creation of Beatles Blast, my show devoted to the Fab Four. While chunks of this show were recycled into the first four episodes of Beatles Blast, it has not been heard intact in more than nine years. It is loaded with rarities and curiosities from the Beatles canon, as well as some unusual covers.

The second part of the two-episode RFCI Beatles tribute will run the week after next. Next week we’re going to have a Valentine-appropriate show for you.

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

RFC V5 257

hour one
Tyler Childers “Bitin’ List”
HARRAH “Pay The Piper”
CHUM “Headhunter”
Emmalea Deal & The Hot Mess “Thankful”
The Settlement “Do It For You”
Moron Police “Nothing Breaks (A Port of Call)”
The 4D Man  “Revenge of the Gamma People”
June Swoon “Denver”
Heavy Set Paw Paws “Somebody Better (It’s OK)”
Kula Shaker “Lucky Number”
The Damned “Summer In The City”
Payback’s A Bitch “Burnin’ Love”
Buzzcocks “Seeing Daylight”
The Ghosts of Now “Needleface”

hour two
The Beatles “You Know My Name (Look Up The Number)”
John Lennon “Serve Yourself”
Paul McCartney “Return To Pepperland”
George Harrison “When We Was Fab”
Ringo Starr “I Don’t Believe You”
The Wedding Present with Amelia Fletcher “Getting Better”
Sonic Youth “Within You Without You”
Michelle Shocked “Lovely Rita”
The Fall “A Day In The Life”
Tina Turner “Help”
Phil Collins “Tomorrow Mever Knows”
Annie Lennox “Don’t Let Me Down”
The Rutles “Get Up And Go”

hour three
The Beatles “What’s The New Mary Jane”
Mash Up “Only of a Lonely USSR”
Men Without Hats “I Am The Walrus”
New Musik “All You Need Is Love”
Paul Weller “Sexy Sadie”
Adrian Belew “Blackbird”
Kansas “Eleanor Rigby”
Alan Holdsworth “Michelle”

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 of our Swing Music extravaganza.

 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.