Here’s the deal, folks. This is the weekend before Halloween, and there are TONS of cool events happening all over the Charleston and adjacent areas.
However, Mrs. PopCulteer had major surgery on Tuesday. Everything went as expected and we brought her home on Wednesday, but yours truly is still in caregiver mode and not blog-writer mode.
I did preview several of these events on this week’s episode of Radio Free Charleston, which you can hear Thursday afternoon at 2 PM and Friday morning at 9 AM on The AIR, or you can listen any time at THIS POST.
Because of real life happenings, this week we’re skipping the boilerplates, Easter eggs, running gags and all that jazz, and just giving you graphics for those shows whose organizers were wise or kind enough to create images with the important info within them, and then leave those images where I might find them. So here’s a selection of STUFF TO DO the weekend before Halloween, roughly in order…
This week Mel Larch brings you a new edition of Curtain Call devoted to remembering four recently-departed legends of the world of Musical Theatre.
At 3 PM, Wednesday afternoon’s Curtain Call on The AIR follows an encore of a recent edition of Beatles Blast (which airs at 2PM).
The last week of September was particularly cruel to fans of Theatre. Dame Maggie Smith passed away on the 27th, followed three days later by Ken Page and Gavin Creel. More recently, Mitzi Gaynor, who brought Musicals to life on the big screen, passed away at the age of 93.
This week on Curtain Call, Mel lets you sample some of the music of these legends, along with a tribute and brief bio.
In Curtain Call’s 151st episode you will hear:
“Medley We Don’t Want To Lose You” Maggie Smith, Penny Allen from Oh What A Lovely War
“One Perfect Moment” Maggie Smith from New Faces of ’56, a Broadway Revue
“What Do I Need With Love” Gavin Creel from Thoroughly Modern Millie
“Hair” by Gavin Creel and Tribe,from HAIR
“You” by Gavin Creel from Bounce (Road Show) by Stephen Sondheim
“Elegance” by Gavin Creel, Beanie Feldstein, Kate Baldwin, Taylor Tensch from the 2017 revival of Hello Dolly
“I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair” Mitzi Gaynor, from South Pacific soundtrack
“Anything Goes” and “You’re The Top” Mitzi Gaynor and Gaynor with Bing Crosby from the Anything Goes soundtrack
“Ooogie Boogie’s Song” Ken Page, from A Nightmare Before Christmas
“Your Feet’s Too Big,” “The Ladies Who Sing With The Band” and “Honeysuckle Rose” from Ain’t Misbehavin’
“The Moments of Happiness,” “The Ad-Dressing Of Cats” from Cats OBC
“Sit Down You’re Rockin’ The Boat” Ken Page from Guys and Dolls (1976 Revival Cast)
Curtain Call can be heard on The AIR Wednesday at 3 PM, with replays Thursday at 8 AM, Friday at 10 AM, Saturday at 8 PM, Monday at 9 AM and Tuesday at 2 PM. A marathon of classic episodes can be heard Sunday morning beginning at 9 AM, and an all-night marathon of Curtain Call episodes can be heard Wednesday nights, beginning at Midnight.
Tonight at 10 PM we bring you the comedic music of The Bonzo Dog Band on a classic episode of The Comedy Vault. You can hear this replayed Saturday at 6 PM and next Monday at 8 PM.
Hey, it’s a three-hour show. You’d be surprised how much you can cram into a three-hour show!
Tuesday means a new RFC on The AIR. And this week Radio Free Charleston presents three fresh hours of listenting enjoyment 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.
One note this week, we’re having some issues with sticking too many links into one post. I’ve talked to the tech folks and it should be completely resolved next week, but this week we are not linking directly to the artist’s pages from the playlist below. We are able to send you to a few places, but until the issue is fixed, too many links in one post cause them to get corrupted into gobbledy gook.
This week we offer up two hours of new local, independent and alternative music for you, and then we bring you a special mixtape third hour devoted to the genius of WV Native (and inductee into the WVMHOF), the late Bill Withers.
After opening our first hour with a newly-released track from Brian Diller’s vault, we plug a lot of Halloween shows in our first hour…not just in WV, but also in Chicago and Louisville. The RFC reach is international, you know.
The Chicago shows include a cabaret this Sunday featuring Sideshow Villains, who we first told you about last year. Sideshow Villains’ ‘Deviant Cabaret‘ at Alhambra Palace Chicago happens on Sun, Oct 27. Maybe one of these days we’ll be in Chicago when they put on one of their cool shows. The other Chicago show is an album reissue show for McLuhans rare 1972 debut (and sole) release, Anomoly. This band is still performing, and they’ll be at the Montrose Saloon on Wednesday, October 30, to celebrate the vinyl re-release of this lost classic of American progressive rock.
Our second hour is an exquistely moody collection of tunes that might put you in the Halloween spirit, but which, honestly, weren’t even trying.
And our third hour is a mixtape of some of the best music from the legendary Bill Withers. We lost West Virginia Music Hall of Famer, Bill Withers in April, 2020 as the Beckley native succumbed to heart disease at the age of 81. His genuine, everyman soul music touched millions, and he never forgot his roots, returning to West Virgina many times to perform, visit family and mentor young musicians. Even just meeting him fleetingly made a huge impression. He was a great man, and an amazing singer and songwriter.
We paid tribute to him when he passed, but it’s just not enough to eulogize the man. We plan to continue bringing his music to new audiences, and this week’s third hour is just the start.
As I mentioned, due to technical issues that are above my paygrade, there are no links in the playlist this week, but it’s still a handy way to keep track of what you’re hearing.
RFC V5 199
hour one
Brian Diller “Sooner or Later”
Golden “Impossible”
Jerks “OK New Wave”
Mediogres “In The Waste”
Crown The Witch “Deathstar”
Dinosaur Burps “Driftwood”
Sideshow Villains “Monsters”
MCLUHAN “Spiders In The Basement”
The Settlement “Rainbow (Live at Martin’s Downtown)”
Fletcher’s Grove “Mourning Mountaineers (Creek’s Gonna Rise)”
hour two
Jerry Cantrell “I Want Blood”
Dream Theater “Night Terror”
David Synn “Swollen Head”
Propaganda “Dystopian Waltz”
Science of the Mind “Son of Sam”
Masser Chups “The Souvenir of the Witch”
Soul Trash “Now What Am I Going To Do”
Emmaline “Strike”
Concrete Blonde “Mojave”
Ann Magnuson “Sex With The Devil”
Hello June “23”
DEVO “Huboon Stomp”
hour three
Bill Withers
Interview from “Soul Live”
“I’m Her Daddy (live)”
“Grandma’s Hands (live)”
“Ain’t No Sunshine”
“Another Day To Run”
“Harlem”
“Lovely Day”
“Just The Two of Us (with Grover Washington Jr)”
“Use Me”
“Grits Ain’st Groceries (live)”
“Who Is He (And What Is He To You)”
“Lonely Town, Lonely Street”
“Let Me In Your Life”
“Lean On Me”
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 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.
This week is the finished version of a piece I started a couple of months ago. Actually, it’s not “finished.” It’s a study for a potential Hoppereque painting I may do in the future…but it’s finished for now.
This is a pastel crayon (with a little bit of Prismacolor cheating) drawing on illustration board, inspired by a composite of a couple of photos I took on The L in Chicago back when we were there in July. I liked the odd assortment of train and traffic signals seen from an atypical angle, and I decided to drop them into a different neighborhood because I liked the way it looked better. The row houses in the background screamed “Hopper” at me.
It’s mainly an exercise in light, shadow and color composition. Nothing too fancy.
Over in radioland, Monday beginning at 2 PM on The AIR, we bring you a new episode of Psychedelic Shack, and then at 3 PM an also new 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.
These just came in at the last minute, so I don’t have playlists. Nigel promises that his show includes “really trippy cool stuff…as usual,” while Herman relays that this week’s Prognosis is a mixtape salute to the solo work of Steve Howe, of YES and GTR fame.
PsychedelicShack 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 conceptual comedy by The Frantics on a classic episode of TheComedy Vault.
Tonight at 9 PM for the Monday Marathon we devote ten hours to five more episodes of Sydney’s Big Electric Cat. We will be alternating between Prognosis and Sydney’s Big Electric Cat for the next several weeks, because we’re going to be pulling the early episodes of those shows from the server soon to make room for newer programs. After they’ve been offline for a year or so, we’ll bring them back into rotation but for now, you can hear them Monday evening into Tuesday morning, and then those episode will go on hiatus.
In 1972 T Rex was setting the world on fire as the pioneering band of Glam Rock, and Marc Bolan, the guiding force behind the band, was making powerful friends like Elton John and Ringo Starr. Ringo made his directorial debut with Born To Boogie, a surreal concert film that divided critics at the time, but is now seen as a bit of a groundbreaking portrait of a major band on the rise at the peak of their fame.
Concerts staged for the film were held at Wembley on March 18, 1972, just after the bulk of their next abum, The Slider, had been recorded in France. Music historians pinpoint these shows as the peak of T. Rextasy. Starr filmed both the matinee and evening performances for the film, although only songs from the evening performance made the final cut of the movie, with only brief shots of the matinee show seen during the closing credits.
On March 20, Starr filmed Bolan playing guitar in an aircraft hanger at Denim Airfield for the film’s opening. Starr and Bolan were also filmed goofing around in a car on the runway, attempting to sing Elvis’ 1957 hit “Let’s Have a Party.” In addition, a superstar jam session of T. Rex with Ringo on drums and Elton John on piano was filmed on April 6 at Apple Studios in Savile Row, London, which was also a filming location for The Beatles’ Get Back.
The songs seen performed in the film, in order, are “Jeepster”, “Baby Strange”, “Tutti Frutti”, “Children of the Revolution”, “Spaceball Ricochet”, “Telegram Sam”, “Cosmic Dancer”, “Tea Party Medley: Jeepster/Hot Love/Get It On/The Slider”, “Hot Love” and “Get It On”, with “Chariot Choogle” playing at the end credits. Sadly, Marc Bolan’s life was cut short in a car wreck in 1977,but you can still hear bits of his influence today.
At the time, this was widely seen as a Beatles passing the torch to “the next big thing.” After reading about this film for nearly half a century, I was surprised last week when one the folks I follow on Twitter mentioned watching it on YouTube. I’d never thought to look there for it. So I finally got to see it, and now you can too.
From July, 2010, the fourth installment of our FestivAll 2010 coverage included music from Comparsa, Evan Mack, Melanie Larch, T. J. King and Miss Behavin’. You’ll also see Scott Elkins’ entry in the FestivAll Silent Film competition and a montage of the FestivAll Catfish. This is another show with a weird aspect ratio, as we were slowly finding out way to HD.
There are still more episodes of Radio Free Charleston devoted to FestivAll 2010 coming your way in this space, with music from Craig D’Andrea, Option 22, The Velvet Gypsies, Barebones, Actual Rhinocerous, plus more music from Comparsa, Brian Diller and more theater, dance and art from FestivAll.
As promised, this week we bring you another big batch of photos from JoeLanta, the fun toy convention that your PopCulteer attended last month, mainly as a civilian. However, I did grab a few photos, and we’re bringing you the last big batch of them this week. We’ll get a look at a great diorama and a some of the custom figures, and we’ll meet some more of the cool people who attended the show.
The show took place at the Gas South Convention Center in Duluth, Georgia, right outside Atlanta. This will be the location of next March’s ToyLanta show, too. It was a nice venue, the first time the show has been held outside of a hotel. There’s a lot of room for growth here.
There will likely be one more small batch of photos from JoeLanta, but those will be tied in with one our picks for The PopCult Gift Guide, so you’ll just have to be patient with me being cryptic.
Apologies for it taking so long to get these edited and posted, but life has gotten interesting and busy around Stately Radio Free Charleston Manor of late. You can see the first batch of JoeLanta 2024 photos HERE.
Let’s just dive in with the photos.
Not content to dance to “YMCA,” The Astro Commando show exclusive figure was also walking like an Egyptian.
Here we see the Astro Commando/Adventure Commando cousins of the show figure at Steve Stovall’s table. We’ll be seeing more of them at Kentuckiana’s Winterfest in January.
Bridge Day, where folks gather to gawk at and from, and occasional leap off and from, The New River Gorge Bridge happens Saturday, and unfortunately, you couldn’t get farther out of my wheelhouse than something like that. Still, there’s tons of STUFF TO DO in Charleston and the rest of the Mountain State over the next few daysso you can just read below and find out all about it.
With the temperatures finally behaving somewhat autumnly, outdoor festivals are winding down, but there will still be outdoor events, so I will continue to implore you to not be a dick and vape or smoke around other humans who may not share your addictions. Lots of folks get really sick when exposed to that garbage.
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. And if you have a show that you’d like to plug in the future, contact me via Social Media at Facebook or Twitter. Also of note: Today is dangle that preposition day!
I mentioned yesterday that ArtWalk in Charleston happens Thursday evening. We have graphics for some cool post-ArtWalk events below.
FestivFall runs through October 20. You might see graphics for some events below, but you can find the full schedule HERE.
Live Music is on tap at Taylor Books. There is no cover charge, and shows start at 7:30 PM. This week’s shows are not yet announced. Last week they didn’t put up FB event pages until the day of, so think of it as “blind box” musical entertainment.
As always, The World Famous Empty Glass Cafe has some great stuff this week to tell you about. Thursday at 5:30 PM, Swingstein & Robin return with Hot Cub stylings for a good cause. Friday Tim Courts holds down the forts for Happy Hour. Check the graphics dump below for more upcoming 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 now with Fahrvergnügen™. Plus there are nasty seasonal allergies, Wiffle Gnats, extended brain farts, potholes named “Leon” 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.
With your PopCulteer tied up with other projects, and this post from exactly fifteen years ago needing to have its graphics restored, I decided to re-present this photo essay of the October, 2009, Downtown Charleston ArtWalk, to remind you folks that the next ArtWalk happens this Thursday, from 5 PM to 8 PM, in Downtown Charleston. Check out their Facebook Event Page, and while you’re at Facebook, tell them to quit flagging my RFC posts as spam.
The PopCulteer
October 16, 2009,
What A Night!
Last night’s Art Walk may have been the most surreal yet, in more ways than one. First, there was the shock that, on the night of Art Walk, with every participating business being asked to stay open until 10 PM, the city closed off Capitol Street, thus eliminating more than twenty metered parking places as well as access to a parking lot used by many patrons of the Art Walk. And they did this to hold an outdoor event, in October…at night…in the rain. I say we give the city credit for committing an act of ironic municipal performance art, instead of chalking it up to a lapse of common sense on par with “For The Love Of God, I thought Turkeys could Fly!”
However, they could not kill the spirit of Art Walk. This week’s PopCulteer is all photos, from the cool galleries to the daring evening of surreal theater at the Kanawha Players Workshop. You see Kirill Gura, as “You” above at right, from “A Dialogue With On Coming Traffic,” part of the night’s mega-dose of art and performance. Follow me on a photo journey of the beauty that lay hidden in town on an ugly night, weather-wise.
Now….we walk.
Art Emporium
Lots of cool work on display at The Art Emporium, with a full wall from The Charleston Camera Club.
Somehow Tuesday has happened once again on The AIR. As such, we have a partly new episode of Radio Free Charleston 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.
This week we open, as usual with a full hour of new local, independent and alternative music for you, and then we dive into our archives for two episodes of Radio Free Charleston Volume Four from September and October, 2016. These local extravaganzas have not been heard for over seven years.
Our opening track comes from Nashville’s Saycouth, whom you have heard on the show before. Coming to us from our Chicago pipeline, by way of Tennessee, Saycouth consists of: Mikayla Debasio – Vocals; Nick Bilski – Guitar; Frankie Hill – Keys and Sax; Jarred Harris – Bass; and Herschal Van Dyke – Drums. Saycouth has followed up on their singles “Pharoah,” “Miles,” and “Closer” with the new track you hear on this week’s RFC, “Full On.” All four singles are included on the band’s debut EP, A Full Moon Night in Sheffield, which was released last week and can be found on Spotify and other streaming services.
Our first hour also includes newly-released tunes from Brian Diller, Julian Lennon, Emmaline, Tony Levin, Tucker Riggleman & The Cheap Dates, The Surfrajettes, Never Zero and more.
And then we go back into the archives. The reason for this (and the reason I’ll do something like this next week) is that in two weeks I will be dropping the 200th episode of Radio Free Charleston Volume Five. Back in 2020 I re-launched RFC, combining the one-hour all local show with RFC International into a three-hour show that would mix local music with the independent, alternative and progressive free-format concept of RFCI. This was closer to the original concept of Radio Free Charleston Volume One, which was on broadcast radio way back in 1989 and 90.
If you’re scoring at home, RFC Volume Two is our still-running and now annual video program, while RFC Volume Three was produced for Voices of Appalachia internet radio in 2014-15.
November marks ten years of RFC as an internet radio program hitting the web every Tuesday at 10 AM, but I’m not going to bother mentioning that again because I have too damned many anniversaries to write about in this blog already. However, for episode 200, rest assured that I’ll be pulling out all the stops to provide a memorable milestone show.
Back to the contents of our second and third hour: Hour two is an hour of our then-usual collection of local artists, mixing then-new tunes with archive tracks. The third hour was done to promote the much-missed ShockaCon horror convention, and features multiple-song sets by the artists who were set to perform there.
The links in the first hour of the playlist will take you to the pages for the local and independent artists where possible. I will also drop a few links in the last two hours. Be advised that I had to guess at the song titles in the third hour and many of them are probably wrong. …
hour three Mark Beckner Group (Nixon Black) “Sad Delilah”
Charlie Anteater “Kill” Orville Rex “She’s Built” Weird Paul Petroskey “Bone Disease”
“Beach Ball”
“In The Garbage”
“Go Viral” The Renfields “Let’s Go”
“The Last Man On Earth”
“Haddonfield”
“Prom Night” Miniature Giant “Dawn”
“Keep Walking”
“Kill Yr Friends”
“Wendigo” Hurl Brickbat “Don’t Break Me”
“Make You Buy”
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 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.
The PopCulteer
The PopCulteer
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