I’ve written about this before, but that was decades ago and since today is Earth Day, I thought it might be time to retell the story.

Above you see a flyer for the Earth Day 1990 concert that Radio Free Charleston sponsored, along with the group Project Earth on the campus of West Virginia State College (before it grew up and became a University).  It was the twentieth year that Earth Day was celebrated, and we wanted to observe it with something memorable. The flyer you see is a rare example of yours truly being able to create nearly-legible lettering, back in the days before MG gave me a great excuse for my awful penmanship.

This was a high-water mark for the radio incarnation of RFC.   I had to pull off promoting and organizing a concert on short notice with absolutely no support from the station management.  By this point, the acting general manager was openly hostile towards RFC, and the program director was more interested in sacrificing the show so he could wrest the GM’s job away than he was in helping the station actually make money.

But we pulled off a huge event.  Seven bands took the stage at the Davis Fine Arts building. In between we had speakers and low-level bottom-feeding politicians, some of whom brought their own hecklers (whatever happened to those guys anyway?).  Campus security told me that, by their count, close to two thousand people drifted through the Davis building during the course of the eight-hour show.  I was interviewed by WCHS TV (by a very young Tim Irr, in fact, back in his cub reporter days).  Somehow we managed to provide free Gino’s Pizza and Pepsi products for the audience–who got in free.

I look back and wonder how we wrangled it.  It was an incredible day of music, good vibes, bad political theater and in retrospect, it was a bit of a last hurrah for that initial broadcast incarnation of RFC.  The show was cancelled two weeks later.  That wasn’t really a huge shock.  I was miserable working at the radio station by that point.  Management was so antagonistic towards RFC that they actually refused advertising for the show. The only way I was able to promote this concert on other disc jockey’s shifts was by mislabelling the promo carts.

Which I did, to excesss! I apologize once again to the innocent bystanders in the traffic department.

Anyway, the concert was a triumph.  Many of the musicians involved are still active in the local scene, and have turned up on the video version of RFC and can still be heard on our internet radio version.

Clownhole reformed in 2023/24 and recorded many of their original songs that they performed that day. The Beckner brothers from Go Van Gogh are still making music with their bands: Stephen in Speedsuit and Mark in Nixon Black. Spencer Elliott, from Some Forgotten Color has become a reknown guitar master, with international releases (and a new one in the works).  Sean Richards from Strawfyssh performs in the area regularly and is the man behind the “Sober Curious” venue, Pumzi’s. Two of The Swivels have recently been collaborating, but I’m not at liberty to discuss that project.

Some of the musicians are no longer with us, too.  That’ll happen when you’re talking about an event that transpired thirty-six years ago. We recently lost Brian Young, and I am still compiling a video tribute to him. That one really hurts. Before that we lost Gary Price and Tommy Medvick from The Swivels and Johnny Rock from Go Van Gogh, and the loss of those close friends makes this a bittersweet memory, but still a fond one.

With so many lasting friendships dating back to this special day before many of my readers were born, you can see why I wanted to take another look back. This is sort fo like me looking through a scrapbook at my days as a star high school football player…if I had ever been remotely athletic and didn’t hate going to high school. We all have triumphant memories from our youth. It’s fun to wallow in them once in a while.

Of course, the day could have been even bigger.  Had I put in my request a week earlier, the show would have been headlined by Peter Buck, of R.E.M.  I’d gotten friendly with his manager, who steered a few other acts on his roster my way during while I was doing the radio show.  This concert came together on such short notice that there was no way I was going to be able to land a big name.  I did get to hang out with Peter a year later, the night before R.E.M. appeared on Mountain Stage, but that’s another long rambling nostalgic story with details that still can’t be divulged.

Anyway, this was a great day, and it was nice to go out on a high note.  Within a month, RFC was off the air, I left Project Earth after it was taken over by agents of the Jim Humphey’s campaign (the attraction that the group held for me was that it was non-partisan, when the group was seized by people who wanted me to work the phones for a politician whom I couldn’t possibly hold in lower regard, I was out the door). I don’t even know if the group is still around.  But that night….it was worth it.  We had a huge party for the RFC crowd, raised awareness of environmental issues, and it was the 21st birthday of Little Susan, the official little sister of RFC.  Happy Birthday, Little Susan, where ever you are.

Oh, and we didn’t litter too much either. That would have been bad.

There were folks on hand to record video and audio of the event, but to this day I have not be able to track down either. It remains my great white whale of lost RFC artifacts.

Which is probably not the best anaology to use on Earth Day, now that I think about it.

Anyway, Happy Earth Day. Maybe one of these days we can actually celebrate it by not coming up with new ways to destroy the planet.