For only the second time this year, and the third time since December, 2023, Tuesday is not new show day 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.

This week, however, instead of a sparkly new episode (or partly-new episode), we are going back to January, 2020, to bring you the first episode of Volume Five of Radio Free Charleston, which is the weekly internet radio show that you may have come here looking for today. As I have mentioned, life outside of PopCult has been increasingly hectic, and between running out of town over the weekend and spending Monday finishing up income tax stuff, something had to give. In 2024, I only took one week off from the show, and because of a quirk of the calendar, still delivered 52 editions of our internet radio program.

As I mentioned earlier this year, that’s not going to happen in 2025.

Instead, let me run down the history of Radio Free Charleston for those of you who haven’t been listening since day one (and that’s a lot–listenership on The AIR has nearly doubled in the last 12 months). Since I’m re-running the show, I figure it’s okay to just rerun the history of RFC from the post announcing the change, and then from the production notes for that first episode…

Speaking of Radio Free Charleston…longtime readers know that I do the program as a video show, but also as a couple of radio programs for The AIR, our sister internet radio station.  For some time I have been contemplating a move that would make the current radio incarnations of the show more like the original concept of RFC back in 1989, when it was on broadcast radio.  Starting next week, instead of producing Radio Free Charleston as a one-hour weekly showcase of local music from Charleston and the surrounding areas, and RFC International, as a two-hour show where I play anything I want, I will combine the shows into Radio Free Charleston Volume Five, a weekly three-hour show that will mix local music with the best indpendent, avat-garde and classic music from multiple genres.

The show will debut on Tuesday mornings at 10 AM, with replays Tuesday night at 10 PM, and Thursdays at 2 PM, with even more replays throughout the week, so you’ll have plenty of chances to hear it.

The reason for this is just to shake things up a bit and keep the shows interesting for me. When I started doing RFC on WVNS radio back in 1989, one of the most rewarding bits of feedback I got was when I would play a track by a local band, and follow it with a song by one of that band’s musical heroes. I felt then, and I feel now, that our local music scene produces high-quality artists whose work can stand side-by-side with any musicians from around the world.  While it was cool to produce a one-hour local showcase for so many years, it’s time to mix it up a bit.

Our local music is too good to segregate away from the rest of the world’s music. This is a bolder way to bring local music to the masses.

We’ll see how it works. I think it’ll be fun. I’ll be able to mix local artists with the best music in the world, and you probably won’t be able to tell the difference, until I back announce the whole thing.

In case you’re wondering, RFC Volume One was broadcast on WVNS Radio starting in 1989. RFC Volume Two is the video version of the show, which shines the spotlight on local music. RFC Volume Two is still an ongoing concern, although I produce it much less frequently than I did from 2006 to 20016, when I was diagnosed with Myasthenia Gravis.

In 2014 I began RFC Volume Three as a weekly two-hour local showcase for Voices of Appalachia Radio.  When VOA mutated into The AIR a couple of years later, I re-christened it RFC Volume Four, and cut the running time to one hour per week. That was also when I began doing RFC International, which was where I played whatever I wanted for two hours a week.

Now, I’ve basically combined Radio Free Charleston and RFC International into one three-hour show, which oddly enough makes it almost exactly like the show I did for broadcast radio back three decades ago.

Anyway, the reason for all this naval-gazing and self-explaining is to let you know why I decided to combine the two shows (RFC International will be replaced by a repeat airing of RFC Volume Five on Thursdays at 2 PM).  Frankly, I was getting bored. Not with local music, but with having to segregate all the local music into a one-hour ghetto each week, while at the same time trying to curate a really cool free-form radio show with RFC International. One of the great joys I got back during the original run of the broadcast version of the show was when I’d play a tune by a local band next to a song by one of their favorite bands…and they’d be so thrilled with the association that their exuberance was priceless.

When you have people calling you up, raving about the way you played their music at 3 AM, you know you’re doing something right.

Now I can do that again. I can match up the music better, too. Instead of cramming five kinds of music into one hour, I can spread the local artists out over three hours, and build a nice musical flow where the transitions aren’t so jarrring. It should be more interesting for our listeners, and more fun for the artists.

Of course, I didn’t get rid of ALL of the jarring transitions. I mean, a guy’s got to have some fun.  I’ve also really enjoyed mixing in a healthy dose of new independent music from all over the world. I’m really happy with the way the show sounds these days. I’m not feeling any burn out or fatigue, and my listeners seem to be pleased as punch.

This week there are not links in the playlist to take you to the pages for the artists this week for the same reason that this show is a rerun.

RFCv5001

hour one
Kevin Scarbrough “Impetus Worm”
The Who “All This Music Must Fade”
Frank Zappa “Peaches En Regalia”
Rasta Rafiki “Vicki”
Joy Division “Atrocity Exhibition”
Edgar Winter “Hoochi Coo”
John Radcliff “Here We Go Again”
U2 and A.R. Rahman “Ahisma”
Ann Magnuson “The Sun Don’t Care”
Club Des Belugas and Maya Fadeeva “Love Is like A Legend”
Sparks “Never Turn Your Back On Mother Nature”
Emmalea Deal “Queen”
The Steve Howe Trio “Gilded Splinter”
Peter Gabriel “Sledgehammer (Dance Mix)

hour two
Wang Chung “Everybody Have Fun Tonight (orchestral)”
Beggars Clan “Maiden Voyage”
The Beat “A Good Day For Sunshine”
The Specials “Breaking Point”
Joe Jackson “Kisses”
Sheldon Vance “Keep On Talking”
Adrian Belew “When Is It Coming Back”
Gary Numan “Down In The Park”
David Synn “Blood Moon”
Eddie Jobson “Easy For You To Say”
Cherry Poppin’ Daddies “Schizo”
Rick Wakeman “The Shoot”
Todd Tamenend Clark “Childhood Shadows”
Frenchy And The Punk “Carried Away”

hour three
Fletcher’s Grove “Virgil Burgess”
Andy Partridge & Robyn Hitchcock “Turn Me On Dead Man”
Go Van Gogh “Requiem For Peppeland”
Trevor Horn and Seal “Ashes To Ashes”
Three Bodies “The Trax”
Ringo Starr “Better Days”
Heather Findlay “Cactus”
Howard Jones “Hero In Your Eyes”
John Wetton “New Star Rising”
The Heavy Editors “How The West Was Won”
Todd Burge “On My Knees”
After The Fire “Carry Me Home”
Alien Skin “Charles Dickens”
Jeff Lynne’s ELO “Goin’ Out On Me”
Jon Anderson “Make Me Happy”
Stark Raven “More To Life Than This”

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. I did not start doing this until a few months after the debut, so it’s nice to go back and fill in the blanks without actually having to go back and fill in the blanks…

 

After this special encore of the first three-hour RFC, stick around for replays of last week’s episodes of  MIRRORBALL at 1 PM and Curtain Call at 2 PM.

At 3 PM we give you an encore of two classic episodes of The Swing Shift.

 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.