Author: Rudy Panucci (Page 1 of 82)

Fifteen years ago today in PopCult, I had not yet learned never to underestimate the power of stupidity. Looking back, I find this to be a little naive. Enjoy this flashback…

The PopCulteer
September 11, 2009

Living In The Age Of Absurdity

The late 1960s was “The Age Of Aquarius.” The 1980s were “The Me Decade,” Now it’s become clear. We are living in the Age of Absurdity. I think that this is direct result of the subversive humor of the 1970s filtering into the mainstream. Our world today seems to have been shaped by two major influences….Monty Python’s Flying Circus and The National Lampoon. Don’t get me wrong. The Pythons and Lampoon shaped my sensibilities and I have fond memories of them. Unfortunately, I am not alone.

We are paying the price for the sharp, cynical despair of counter-culture comedy finding its way into the mainstream. Not only has it made the original comedy a little less enjoyable, but it’s placed sharpened objects of comedy into the hands of people who lack the wit and ethics to wield them properly. There is still a lot of great cutting-edge humor out there–more than ever, in fact–but there’s also a lot of comedy out there that uses the tools of shock comedy without any concern for what it can do to their audience. The whole point of using shock in the 60s and 70s was to open the minds of the audience and try to change attitudes. Now there are comedians who simply use shock to get cheap attention from stupid people.

The entire culture has become saturated with what would have once been considered “shock humor.” A few months ago, on an Adult Swim cartoon called “Squidbillies,” there was a gag about the lead character buying a pair of “Truck Nuts,” a set of plastic, droopy testicles which you hang under the back bumper of your truck to prove how manly your truck is.

I thought it was a brilliant parody of how moronic and crude redneck culture has become.

Then I found out that they’re real. One of my neighbors has a set hanging off of his truck.

Somehow, it made the joke less funny. Instead of a brilliantly absurd parody, it was merely observational humor.

It made me think how, when I was growing up, The National Lampoon and Monty Python were so cool because hardly anybody else got the humor. You had to be a hip insider to actually understand the jokes. It was funnier because the appeal was not universal. The material was so shocking and outrageous that it offended the sensibilities of the average person. This was special humor for me and a select few special friends who really knew what the score was, and how to laugh at it. We were elite comedy snobs, and that made us special.

The only problem is, we weren’t quite as special as we thought. There were millions of people like us all over the country. Once the counter-culture of the 60s, which included “underground” comedy, became mainstream, everybody wanted in on the fun. By the time Saturday Night Live made it all the way across the country, and The Lampoon movies became hits, everybody was in on the joke.

That’s when the desensitization began. People aren’t fazed by the outrageous any longer. This, coupled by the immediacy of the Internet and the deconstruction of mass media models has lead us to a place where shocking idiocy is no longer mocked or scorned, but instead is celebrated. You got a smokin’ baby? Put him on YouTube! Fat guys embarrasing themselves? Put it on YouTube and sell a shirt based on the clip in Hot Topic.

We have brought sophisticated, edgy, Lenny Bruce-type shock values to lowest-common-denominator humor. A pie in the face has been replaced with oversized plastic genitals bonking someone on the head.

People don’t laugh for the same reason now that they did then. Back then, if a comedian threw out a racist or homophobic crack, it was because they were making fun of how absurd it was that anyone felt that way. Now when a comedian makes a racist or homophobic remark, it’s because he’s pandering to a racist, homophobic audience (I’m looking your way, Larry the Cable Guy). The shock now is not over how horrible it is that anyone feels that way. The shock today is that someone will stand up and say the ugly things that much of his audience agrees with.

Somebody let the morons in the room, and they’re laughing for the wrong reasons. It was so much better when shock comedy was offensive to the common man. Truck Nuts was hysterical when I thought it was just a joke about how stupid people could be. When it became real it was just sad.

Now the average Joe thinks nothing of putting a decal on his car that shows a cartoon character peeing on something he doesn’t like. College elders and grade-school teachers look on and smile as students scream “Beat the shit out of Pitt!” A sportswriter based near the location where a girl was held captive for 18 years writes a column about all the cool sporting events she missed while she was held in isolation. A disgraced lawyer (who probably shouldn’t even be allowed to practice any longer) attempts to win freedom for his accused rapist client by calling the victims “tramps” and “whores.” It’s possible to get famous simply by cramming as many fertilized eggs up you womb as possible.

You can’t make fun of this stuff…..it’s already too absurd.

Back then, bigots were the butt of the jokes. Now they’re the target audience. That takes the fun out of it for people with warped minds like mine.

If you go back and look at the fake news section of 1970s issues of The National Lampoon, you can’t help but be struck by how tame they seem when compared to the real news today. I can’t imagine any harder job than creating material for The Onion. It’s got be daunting to stay ahead of the idiot curve.

It’s permeated politics, as well. Look at the idiocy we’ve endured this summer. On the Far Right we have slick practitioners of Nietzsche’s “Big Lie,” who have managed to obfuscate the issues and redirect the debate away from serious discussion into outright silliness and idiocy. If you’ve ever tried to discuss health care with any of the pre-programmed Obama-haters, you know that it makes you feel like Michael Palin in the Argument Clinic sketch. There’s no substance there, just empty sloganeering and shocking catch phrases like “Death Panels” and “Pulling the plug on Grandma.” Those town hall meetings looked like Andy Kaufmann’s wet dream. It’s not just political theater, it’s political theater of the absurd. Now we have some idiot Congressman yelling at the President during a joint session, and the idiot squad is rallying around him.

Who can listen to a Sarah Palin speech and not think that she’s a refugee from Monty Python’s “Very Silly Party,” perhaps as a running mate for Jethro Q. Walrustitty. That woman makes Dan Quayle sound like William Jennings Bryant.

Part of this is because of the cynicism bred by the comedy of the cutting edge has spawned a generation of political operatives who will do anything to win, rather than do what is best for the country. It goes back to Lee Atwater, the late Republican operative who ran the political campaign of George H.W. Bush with all the subtlety and ethics of the Delta House’s assault on the Founder’s Day parade in the movie National Lampoon’s Animal House. His disciple, Karl Rove, continued with this method of bending the truth and diverting meaningful dialog into hysteria to get his charge, young George W. Bush, swept into office.

I wonder if the editors and writers of The National Lampoon would have been as forthcoming with their “bad boy” comedy if they knew that young Republicans were reading. Well, P.J. O’Rourke probably knew. Michael O’Donahue is probably turning over in his urn.

Of course, the problem isn’t that we live in an absurd world. The problem is trying to figure out what, if anything, can be done about the stupefying of America. Is it cyclical? Can we just wait for the silliness to die off? Are we doomed to a world like that in the movie Idiocracy? Can humor ever be subversive again, or is the dirty joke genie out of the bottle?

My take is that our situation validates the theories of another subversive creative force that sprung up in the 1970s. Look at the progression of anti-intellectualism from Nixon to Reagan to Quayle to W. Bush and now to Sarah Palin. Look at how car decorations have gone from peace symbols to “Baby On Board” signs to peeing Calvins and now to Truck Nuts. We live in an age where people will go out and buy a computer–one that has more computing power in it than every computer in the world had when we went to the moon–and use it to watch video clips of babies farting on YouTube. It’s pretty clear what’s happened.

DEVO was right. We’re devolving. Society is winding down. We can’t get much stupider than this.

Can we?

A couple of years ago Mel and I were driving along Route 16 in Georgia, when we came upon a small, and fun, roadside attraction.  Barbie Beach was founded in 2006 when its owners, Steve and Linda Quick had the beer-fueled idea to put an outrageously tacky display of toys in their front yard to replace rose bushes that a careless highway crew had accidentally destroyed.

A couple of weeks ago word came that Linda had passed away. Steve had died a year earlier, and the family is looking to find some way to commemorate Barbie Beach, but the original property, near Turin, Georgia, will be sold and soon the Beach will be no more in its present location.

Today I’m re-posting our photo essay of Barbie Beach, from March, 2022…

We made a discovery while on our trip to Georgia a couple of weeks ago.  While driving Route 16, between Newnan (Home of Full Circle Toys) and Senoia, both of us caught a fleeing glimpse of something called “Barbie Beach” by the roadside.

Mel and I both thought that we’d seen signs for a roadside attraction, and when we got back to the hotel that night, we checked the Google machine and discovered that we had, in fact, seen the entire actual roadside attraction.

It turns out that Steve and Linda Quick, a couple of residents of Turin (located along Route 16), decided back in 2006, in honor of the Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy, to create a roadside sculpture garden in their front yard. The couple put out some sand, a backdrop, and created scenes using mainly naked Barbies and Kens, along with other inexpensive props.

In the 16 years since they began, they have added more dolls and action figures and Barbie-sized cars, and they change the display to reflect the season, or holiday, or commemorate a big even like the NCAA Tournament.  The scenes generally seems to involve a beach and naked Barbies partying at “Mort’s Bar.” And they seem to keep things fairly topical.

If they have any 12″ Will Smith figures, I imagine he’ll be in there slapping away in no time.

Mel and I knew that we had to go back the next day. Unfortunately, that night the area was hit with wind and rain, and when we got there, what had been set up to be a wild party scene for St. Patrick’s Day instead looked like the hungover morning after a wild St. Patrick’s Day party.  Even disheveled, Barbie Beach is pretty cool.

We got some fun photos to share, and had a blast.  We even found a cool Jem and the Rockers vehicle that’s now on Mel’s wantlist.

I can tell you that Barbie Beach will be a regular stop now, whenever we go to Georgia. It’s loads of fun and it’s also harmless, but it reportedly really pisses off their neighbors, which is an added bonus.

Mrs. PopCulteer even started pondering the idea of creating a SpongeBob display for our front yard, but we know that, in Dunbar, such a display would last approximately ten minutes before the local scavengers would pick it clean.

We’re hoping to go back and meet the Quicks, and maybe donate a few action figures to their display.

To get there, you basically drive down Route 16 in Georgia, between Senoia and Newnan, and when you see it, pull off and park by the tree. There is no admission fee, and you can stay as long as you want (within reason…I don’t think they want people sleeping in Barbie Beach). Don’t forget to visit the Facebook page devoted to Barbie Beach.

Here’s a look at the Beach…

…and here’s a short video profile…

Now let’s look at more pictures of Barbie Beach!

Off to the left, a group of three GI Joes (one of them being a knockoff) guard the perimeter.

I would imagine the St. Patty’s doll looked a bit better before being drenched in the storm the night before.

The view walking from where we parked.

A closer look at the main sign and backdrop. They change the scenes on a regular basis.

Mort’s Bar includes naked Barbies, Kens, a couple of Max Steel figures, a cool jukebox, and frog molesting a Barbie, and a drunken Barbie who has fallen off her drunk horse.

A line of Barbie car traffic (along with a smaller firetruck, and a wind-blown display with scattered dolls around it.

More of the post-storm carnage, plus that really cool Jem car, and some table-dancing leprechauns who managed to survive the wind.

One more look at Barbie Beach.

Barbie Beach was a fun little diversion, and PopCult offers our condolences to the Quick family and to everybody who ever got to experience the joy and humor of Barbie Beach. Later today we will have another “flashback”  to a previously-published PopCult post.

We are back to what passes for normal. Tuesday is once again “New Show Day” on The AIR.  As such, we have new episodes of  Radio Free Charleston and The Swing Shift for you. 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.

UPDATE: A due to a technical glitch, the 10 AM airing did not happen. You can listen to the show below, or at 10 PM or the additional scheduled airings throughout the week.

We have a special RFC for you this week.  We have two hours of our usual free-format blend of local, independent, alternative and progressive music, and in our third hour I attempt to recreate a very cool music sampler cassette from forty years ago.

We open the show with brand-new music from The The, which was quite a shock to me because, for some reason, I was under the impression that Matt Thompson, who essentially IS The The, had passed away a few years ago. Happily, I was very much mistaken and his new music is great.

We also have new tunes from David Synn, Tony Levin, The Queen’s Cartoonists (who also open this week’s new episode of The Swing Shift), Corduroy Brown,  Mercury Rev, The Anchoress, and more. We also dig into our archives again and bring you some music that was new ten years ago, when we first started presenting local music at 10 AM and 10 PM every Tuesday.

Our third hour recreates Warner Brothers’ Survival Sampler cassette from 1984. Identified as “SR-1 Sound Rations” and packaged in a tin can, made to look like a military MRE food can, this package was cool enough to persuade a vinyl snob like yours truly to buy a pre-recorded cassette tape. As you’ll see in the playlist below, and hear in the show, it was a pretty amazing collection of musical artists.

In order to fit the whole thing into our third hour,  I had to replace a couple of 12″ mixes with regular album cuts, but essentially this is the cassette that I paid just under four bucks for forty years ago. The can and accompanying pamphlet are long gone, lost to the tumultuous first marriage, but I do still have the cassette. I was able to swipe the accompanying images from various places on the internet. Rather than dub it over, I replaced every track with a higher-quality digital copy.

I’m still a snob that way, I guess.

The links in the playlist will take you to the pages for the local and independent artists in the first two hours of this week’s show where possible…

RFC V5 193

hour one
The The “Cognitive Dissident”
David Synn “Swollen Head”
Tony Levin “Bringing Down The Bass”
The Queen’s Cartoonists “Kyrie/Dies Irae” from Mozart’s Jazz Requiem
Chuck Biel “Sun, Wind, Bicycle”
Corduroy Brown“Lookin’ Over My Shoulder”
John Radcliff “Chase The Sun”
Mercury Rev “Born Horses”
The Anchoress “Further Down The Line”
The Boatmen “Heartbreak Hangover”
Mediogres w/B.Rude “Evening Essentials”
The Settlement “Serotonin”
Frenchy & The Punk “Immortal”

hour two
Dina Hornbaker “Black Coffee”
The Nanker Phelge “The Killer Took A Holiday”
The Company Stores “Rise”
Miniature Giant “Wendigo”
Renaissance “Trip To The Fair”
Jordan Rudess “Embers”
Mapped By A Forest “Things You Want To Hear”
The Aquabats “Don’t Make Me Run”
Clownhole “Old Man Jumping Over A Fence”
Golden “I Want To Run”
The Defectors “Easy Target”
Velez Manifesto “Blue Air”
Emmalea Deal & The Hot Mess “Ignorant”
Novelty Island “1102”
Buni Muni “Battle Pass”

hour three
Novo Combo “Sorry (For The Delay)”
The Smiths “What Difference Does It Make”
The Church “Electric Lash”
China Crisis “Wishful Thinking”
Scritti Politti “Wood Beez (Pray Like Aretha Franklin)”
Carmel “More, More, More”
King Crimson “Sleepless”
Aztec Camera “Pillar To Post”
The Cure “The Caterpillar”
The Bluebells “I’m Falling”
Modern English “Rainbow’s End”
The Assembly “Never Never”
Depeche Mode “Everything Counts”

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 we offer up a new episode of The Swing Shift that’s loaded with new Swing, classic Swing and everything in between.

Check out the playlist…

The Swing Shift 163

The Queen’s Cartoonists “Sanctus from Mozart’s Jazz Requiem”
Cherry Poppin’ Daddies “Royal Street Swing”
Lester’s Blues “I Want A Little Girl”
Maria Muldaur with Tuba Skinny “Let’s Get Happy Together”
Sassy Swingers “All The Whores”
Squirrel Nut Zippers “Axman Jazz”
Swing Ninjas “Mummy’s Finger”
David Campbell “Beyond The Sea”
Tyler Pedersen “Lap Four 53”
Passepartout ‘Menilmontant’
Megan & Her Goody Goodies “It Had To Be You”
Louis Prima Jr. & The Witnesses “Fame and Glory”
Brian Setzer Orchestra “Kiss Me Deadly”
The Wolverines Big Bad “String of Pearls”
Royal Crown Revue “Sparky’s In The Kitchen”
Wolfgang Parker “It Don’t Mean A Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)”

 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.

This week’s art is a tiny pastel crayon study of a potential future painting…possibly to be re-done in the style of Edward Hopper. Inspired a couple of photos I’ve taken in train yards over the last several years, this was done on the back of an oversized index card, just to try to jot down the composition and colors.

Once scanned, one side was cropped off because I didn’t go all the way to that side, instead using that space to make additional notes.

it’s not much yet, but it should look cool if I ever get around to finishing it. I’ve been putting it off because of all the detail that the gravel will need.

To see it bigger try clicking HERE.

Over in radioland, Monday at 2 PM on The AIR, we bring you encores of a classic episode of Psychedelic Shack, and then at 3 PM a recent edition of 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 an hour of The Flight of The Conchords on a classic episode of The Comedy Vault.

Tonight at 9 PM for the Monday Marathon we devote ten hours to this year’s new episodes of The Swing Shift, just to catch you up because I’m planning to debut a new one tomorrow.

Above you see a new music video of Ann Magnuson’s “The Enchanted Forest,” taken from her Dream Girl album, and animated by Adam Dugas.

The Dream Girl album was made up largely of songs from Ann’s one-woman show, An Evening of SuRURALism™, which debuted during FestivAll in 2015, Ann explored the mysteries of dreams, what they mean, and the world in which they happen. I was proud to have contributed a couple of pieces of artwork to that show (thanks to Mark Wolfe) and was thrilled to see Ann’s dream-based creation.

It’s really cool to see Ann’s Dream Girl visions fleshed out further.

In case you don’t know already, Ann Magnuson is a writer/actress/singer/musician/performer whose eclectic resume traverses the entertainment landscape like few others. She has acted in Hollywood blockbusters, Off-Broadway plays, TV sitcoms and indie films, fronted various bands, written for numerous publications and has presented her original performance art pieces at several major museums.

The credits for the video:

“The Enchanted Forest” by Ann Magnuson [Official Music Video] from the LP Dream Girl
Written by Ann Magnuson Based on an actual dream Ann had.

VIDEO Shot, edited and prompted by Adam Dugas / Lookitnow AI images and footages created with Midjourney and RunwayML
Arzetta doll by Grandma Magnuson ©2024 Ann Magnuson

MUSIC All vocals by Ann Magnuson Organ and synth effect: Ann Magnuson and Mark Wheaton Percussion: Joe Berardi Recorded and engineered by Mark Wheaton at Catasonic ©℗2016 Ann Magnuson

This week we go back to May, 2010 for our 99th show, “Porkchop Shirt.”  This time we produced what was then an extra-long show, with music from Highway Jones, OVADA and HARRAH, plus a visit from IWA East Coast Heavyweight Champion contender, Chris Hero, a short film by Murfmeef and some really cute, but disgusting animation.

This was the first show where we used the Kodak Zi8 video camera, which was then-new, and is today obsolete, but it’s still our weapon of choice, at least for the time being.

It was also the first appearance of HARRAH as a band, although Lee Harrah had been part of the show since episode 19.

The promo for Chris Hero was shot for us by Bo Vance, and is notable because Chris later spent years at WWE’s NXT brand as “Kassius Ohno,” and in this clip he challenges Roderick Strong, who is now a star in AEW, where Hero is now working behind the scenes as a producer.

All  in all, it’s a pretty solid show, loaded with great music and plenty of weird extras to help you pass the time. Original production notes are HERE.

The PopCulteer
September 6, 2024

The clarion call to dance has gone out, so  Mel Larch returns with a brand-new MIRRORBALL! You can hear this and more cool music Friday on The AIR.

The AIR is PopCult‘s sister radio station. You can hear our shows on The AIR website, or just click on the embedded player found elsewhere on this page.

Friday at 2 PM on The AIR, Mel Larch devotes her hour of Disco to a delightful and funky random assortment of classic dance tracks from the golden age of Disco. The focus this week is on extended mixes of some of the grooviest tunes ever created.  The show starts off with The Silver Connection, but by the time Foxy wraps things up, it’s all pure gold.

It’s yet another tasty collection of Disco treats in the grand MIRRORBALL tradition. Check out the playlist…

MIRRORBALL 105

Silver Connection “Get Up And Boogie”
George Benson “Give Me The Night”
Gonzalez “Haven’t Stopped Dancing Yet”
Musique “In The Bush”
Donna Summer “Could It Be Magic”
The Blackbyrds “Walking In Rhythm”
Jigsaw “Sky High”
Average White Band “Pick Up The Pieces”
Foxy “Get Off”

You can hear MIRRORBALL every Friday at 2 PM, with replays Sunday night at 11 PM and throughout the following week Monday at 9 AM and Tuesday at 1 PM plus there’s a mini-marathon that includes the latest episode Saturday nights at 9 PM

At 3 PM, it’s encore time on the Big Electric Cat time as Sydney Fileen graces us with special mixtape-style new episode of Sydney’s Big Electric Cat. This week Sydney presents a salute to the year 1983.

Forty-one years ago we witnessed a very significant year in the New Wave Era. As Sydney says in her intro, “This week, instead of spanning the entire New Wave era, we are going to zero in on one year that many people consider to be the peak of New Wave Music. In this week’s show, we will hear songs that debuted as either singles or album cuts in the year of our Lord, 1983.”

This was when MTV was taking over the nation, but hadn’t yet been corrupted by Hair Metal and crappy reality shows. Music lovers were mainlining innovativeand exciting new musical forms and a generation had their musical expectations turned on its head.

With this episode filling in the blank, Sydney’s Big Electric Cat has devoted entire shows to each year from 1978 to 1984. That means the next time Sydney decides to grace us with a “yearbook” show, she’ll be covering the fringes of the early, either in the very early days, or the very end.  I’m looking forward to seeing what she does.

Check out the playlist…

Sydney’s Big Electric Cat 108

Frankie Goes To Hollywood “Relax”
The Cure “Love Cats”
Orange Juice “Rip It Up”
Eddie Grant “Electric Avenue”
Siouxsie and the Banshees “Dear Prudence”
Madness “Our House”
Bananarama “Cruel Summer”
Tears For Fears “Pale Shelter”
Fun Boy Three “Our Lips Are Sealed”
Style Council “Speak Like A Child”
Kajagoogoo “Too Shy”
Public Image Limited “This Is Not A Love Song”
Yazoo “Nobody’s Diary”
Heaven 17 “Temptation”
New Order “Blue Monday”
Joe Jackson “Steppin’ Out”
Freeze “I O U”
Human League “(Keep Feeling) Fascination”
Nik Kershaw “I Won’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me”
U2 “New Year’s Day”
Duran Duran “Is There Something I Should Know”
The Pretenders “Middle of the Road”
Minor Detail “Columbia”
Re-Flex “The Politics of Dancing”
Art of Noise “Beat Box”
The Stranglers “Midnight Summer Dream”
Ultravox “Hymn”

Sydney’s Big Electric Cat is produced at Haversham Recording Institute in London, and can be heard every Friday at 3 PM, with replays Saturday afternoon,  Monday at 7 AM, Tuesday at 8 PM, Wednesday at Noon and Thursday at 10 AM, exclusively on The AIR.

That’s it for this week’s PopCulteer, check back for all our regular feature, with fresh content, every day.

Summer’s not over. August is done for now, but we are still in the midst of the hottest summer on record.  Yet there’s still  lots of STUFF TO DO, even with Labor Day Weekend in the rear-view mirror.

Remember, if you are attending an outdoor event, stay hydrated and please don’t smoke or vape around any humans who might find the associated stank to be offensive. Be mindful of your health and of those near you. Look for and offer to aid people who might seem frail, look like they’re about to pass out, or have met a sad fate.  With that bit of a caveat, let me tell you about plenty of STUFF TO DO in Charleston and the surrounding area as we trade-in the dog days of August for the red panda days of September.

As I have been copying and pasting for some time now, this a good time to remind you 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. I won’t be offended if you volunteer to do the work I was too busy wallowing in nostalgia to do.

Live Music is on tap at Taylor Books. There is no cover charge, and shows start at 7:30 PM.  After a couple of weeks in the wilderness, we have their line-up of artists.  Friday it’s Ty McClanahan. On Saturday Sean (Richardson) and Bug (Schuyler) take the stage at Charleston literary, art and coffee institution.

The World Famous Empty Glass Cafe has some great stuff this week  to tell you about.  Thursday at 5:30 PM Swingstein and Robin return with music for a cause.  Friday Tim Courts holds down the forts for Happy Hour, and then at 10 PM, Spurgie Hankins Band and Golden celebrate Ron & Marry’s birthdays Sunday evening at 9 PM, Joe’s Cousin and Alan Dale Sizemore take the stage at the Glass. Check the graphics dump below for more weekend events at The Empty Glass.

Please remember that the pandemic is still not entirely over yet. It’s a going concern with the ‘rona still lurking about all robust and reinvigorated and with a chip on its shoulder. And now there are drought-fueled nasty seasonal allergies, Moose bearing ping-pong balls, sentient ham salad sandwiches, skating KGB Agents and other damned good reasons to be careful. 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.

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

Here we go, roughly in order…

THURSDAY

FRIDAY

SATURDAY

SUNDAY

So yesterday I told you all about the 35th Anniversary episode of Radio Free Charleston, and it turns out that a lot of folks who read PopCult and listen to the show were not aware of the history of the show and how it came to be.  So today I’m going to recycle an edition of The PopCulteer that ran in this blog exactly 15 years ago, but I’ll update it a bit and fill in some more details. At the end of it, I will compile a series of posts from 2007 that talk more about the original broadcast incarnation of the show, and provide a few audio snippets.

Be prepared for a long, long post.

IT WAS TWENTY (Thirty-Five) YEARS AGO, TODAY (Yesterday)

Well, sort of. Thirty-five years ago, in 1989, during Labor Day weekend, at 2 AM Sunday Morning September 3, Radio Free Charleston debuted on WVNS, 96.1 FM. It was part of my reward (in lieu of a raise) for working over a hundred consecutive days at the station. After starting out as the night deejay who wasn’t trusted to talk, and winding up as the assistant program director I had become indispensible. Part of my job was filling the weekend schedule with part-timers, and I was having a hard time keeping anyone in the Saturday late night/Sunday early morning spot.

Since the station owed me–I’d been filling up to three shifts a day, sometimes using three different voices and personas–I made a proposition: We had syndicated programming in my regular 7 PM to Midnight shift on Friday nights, so I really wasn’t needed. I offered to give that spot to a part-timer in order to take the Saturday Midnight timeslot…on one condition.

They had to give me total freedom to play anything I wanted.

The station was so poorly managed that they agreed. And I went nuts assembling a four-hour show (starting at 2 AM due to contractually-obligated syndicated programming). Inspired by the 1970s incarnation of WVAF, which had no real format, I put together a show featuring New Wave music from the early 1980s, 70s progressive rock, headphone comedy, local music and bizarre stuff that I did myself. We snuck onto the unsuspecting airwaves that Labor Day weekend, and the in-studio photos in today’s post were taken by Frank Panucci during that very first broadcast.

I should point out that “Radio Free Charleston” was what I wanted to call it. Our program director hated that title and insisted I call it “After Hours,” a title I hated. From the first minute, I called it by both names, but by the second week I’d dropped “After Hours” and re-cut all the promos for the show to omit that part of the name. That was the first of my tiny subversive victories.

The first episode had no local music. It didn’t have a theme song, or interstitials or promotion, either. I just got the okay to do it two days earlier. It was always my intention to include local music but I was timid about asking too much of my unpredictable program director.  When I worked up enough nerve to ask him if I could play Hasil Adkins’ “Big Red Satellite” in the second week of the show, he cut me off first and asked me to play a single by “Cheryl,” a wannabee teen pop singer, and the daughter of a local car dealer who advertised on the station.

I immediately agreed and said, “I’ll even play some other local acts so that it won’t look like we’re playing favorites!”

And a legend was born. By the third week I was playing songs by Stark Raven and Big Money (Michael Lipton’s pre-pre-Carpenter Ants band).  My program director had no idea what he’d unleashed.

Largely because of the local music, at one point we had over ten thousand listeners. That was more than the station’s morning and afternoon drive dayparts…combined. Once the show was successful enough to attract interest (and advertisers), forces within the station conspired to kill it after eight months. I wrote about the man who pulled the trigger a dozen years ago, but in 2022 I finally revealed his name.

It took 16 years for me to revive the show at The Gazz as a video program. In the interim, there had been multiple radio pilot episodes recorded and several false starts, but the video concept, with much help from Brian Young, Frank Panucci and Mel Larch, brought RFC back to stay.  Then, in 2014, I returned to radio–internet radio this time,–via Voices of Appalachia radio, which has since mutated into The AIR. Since November, 2014, Radio Free Charleston has been your source for local music every Tuesday at 10 AM and 10 PM.  At the beginning of 2020 I expanded the show to three hours and began to emulate the free-format style of the original show, mixing local music with national and international artists, including independent and major-label releases.

When I was diagnosed with Myasthenia Gravis in 2016, I cut the video show back to one show a year, and I’ve restarted the count on the radio show with volumes 3, 4 and 5, but we’ve been a Tuesday institution for nearly ten years. All told, there have been over 500 episodes of the RFC radio show, and over 300 video episodes, when you combine the main show with The RFC MINI SHOW.

I think that deserves a little self-horn-tootery, don’t you?

After the jump, let’s wallow in a little more nostalgia, there’s a series of posts from this blog from December, 2007, newly-restored with their little audio clips and compiled into one huge post…

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It snuck up on me, slowly, over the course of three-and-a-half decades, but today (September 3) is the 35th anniversary of the very first broadcast of Radio Free Charleston, over the air, on 96.1 FM, which at the time was an oldies station with absentee owners, which is the only reason I got away with doing free-format radio at 2 AM once a week.  To mark the occasion, in the middle of a 35-hour marathon that began Monday night, we will bring you a new, three hour episode of RFC today in its long-established timeslots, 10 AM and 10 PM.

Of course we have to dig into the archives today on The AIR.  We also mix in some new stuff and some very rare records on this special new episode of  Radio Free Charleston, it’s a load of nostalgia but we still look to the future.  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 tons of replays throughout the week.

I open the show with new music from David Synn. I told David I’d open this week’s show with his music before I realized it was an anniversary show, but it’s a killer track and I didn’t want to make the show a complete throwback, so I have new tunes from David and Bad Keys of the Mountain this week before we jump into the backwards-looking navel-gazing (which hurts, when you think about it).

This episode includes some recordings from the legendary Charleston Playhouse, which was demolished late last year.

Because I was busy with a few other anniversaries last week, it didn’t even hit me that I needed to put this show together until late last week. I ordered a cassette dubbing machine (a cheap one) and it got here Saturday, so I was able to dig out a few archival gems for this show. The insterstitials are all from the third-ever episode of RFC, and the jam session tapes had only be listened to once, if that many times.

Our first hour digs deep and brings you local music from the 1960s to the 1980s, with one track from the 90s.

Our second hour opens with a new recording of “Heads On Fire” by Clownhole, which was widely requested on the broadcast version of the show even though I only had a crappy bootleg recording of it performed live. I even had it remixed and paired with a video by my brother, Frank Panucci, back on the first Halloween episode of RFC volume 2, our long-running video show.

Our second and third hours each include long (possibly too long) excerpts from Charleston Playhouse jam sessions. They are presented for historical and/or hysterical purposes, depending on your point of view. Among the performers you’ll hear are an ersatz line up of The Defectors with Jack Griffith instead of Lynne Sandy; The Hepcats, including Gary Price and Tommy Medvick; the incredible Johnny McIntyre; a extremely drunk girl, and more.

The non-local music this week includes a lot of tracks that I played way back on WVNS on the original incarnation of the show. I hope you folks don’t mind me wallowing in a little nostalgia on this milestone anniversary of Charleston’s longest-running local music radio program.

There are only a few links in the playlist this week. With this many archival recordings, not every artist has a website to send you folks to.

Check out the playlist.

RFC V5 192

hour one
David Synn “Hypomania”
Bad Keys of the Mountain “Free Ride”
Rose Garden “Next Plane To London”
Mind Garage “Reach Out”
Hasil Adkins “She Said”
Amazing Delores “One On One”
Stark Raven “Whiter Shade of Pale”
Go Van Gogh “Shut Up, I Love You”
Three Bodies “Shingles and Tar”
The Swivels “Cinnamon Girl”
Some Forgotten Color “High Chair”
Big Money “Words On The Street”
Brian Diller “Don’t Stop At Anything”
The Defectors“Nightlife In Tokyo”
Velez Manifesto “You’re Too Dark”

hour two
Clownhole “Heads On Fire”
Wolfgang Parker “The Father, The Son”
Government Cheese “Camping On Acid”
Tilting At Windmills “Serve Him Whiskey”
Strawfyssh “Graveyard Shift”
Charleston Playhouse Jam Excerpt #1
Pete Townshend “Rough Boys”
Bill Nelson “Flaming Desire”
The Call “The Walls Come Down”

hour three
John Radcliff “It’s Not A Dream”
Novo Combo “Up Periscope”
Mother Nang“Fuggin'”
Wall of Voodoo “Mexican Radio”
Red Hot Chili Peppers “True Men Don’t Kill Coyotes”
Charleston Playhouse Jam Excerpt #2

You can hear this episode of Radio Free Charleston Tuesday at 10 AM and 10 PM on The AIR, with replays 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 the rest of the 35-hour marathon, which will wrap up Wednesday morning.