Author: Rudy Panucci (Page 89 of 125)

Your PopCulteer is pinched between deadlines, doctor’s appointments and projects this week, so we have a smaller than usual list of suggestions for your local amusement this week. We’ll feature a bonus thing to do tomorrow. Meanwhile, here are a few suggestions of things worth leaving the house for in and around Charleston this weekend…

Live Music is back at Taylor Books. There is no cover charge, and shows start at 7:30 PM.  Friday it’s Sonia Tavi. Saturday nathon Foster entertains the crowd at Charleston’s beloved Bookstore/Coffee Shop/Art Gallery.

The World Famous Empty Glass Cafe has some great stuff this weekend to tell you about. Thursday at 5:30 PM, Swingstein and Robin return with Swing for a good cause. Friday Tim Courts plays during happy hour.  Later on Friday the Glass presents American Jetset, and the first fifteen people through the door get a free CD!  Saturday at 9:30, Virginia groove trio Threesound comes to The Empty Glass. Sunday, Jonathan Foster makes his way from Taylor Books to The Glass at 10 PM. Next Monday it’s Open Mic Night at 9 PM.

Please remember that the pandemic is not over yet. It’s still a going concern. And now there are seasonal allergies, the flu, heatstroke, crazed political candidates, intelligent dogs in flying doghouses, people who care about college sports 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.

If you’re up for going out, here are a few suggestions for Friday and Saturday, roughly in order…

We’re in the middle of July, and once again we’re bringing you our regular Tuesday programming on The AIR that means it’s time for a new  Radio Free Charleston and a classic edition of The Swing Shift. 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.  

We have three full hours of new stuff (sorta) this week. We do go way back and revive 20 minutes of a March, 1990 show in our third hour, but that was due to popular demand, so our hands were sort of tied in the matter.

We open the show with a newly-released tune from our old friend, Brian Diller. This one dates back to 1989/90, and the basic tracks were recorded above Gorby’s Music Shop. We then have new music from Buni Muni, and great local tracks from Sean Richardson, Massing, The Tom Batchelor Band, Matt Mullins & The Bringdowns, Jim Lange and more. Our first hour veers a bit into Americana/Country for a set that includes a couple of memorable cover tunes.

In our second hour, during a set of instrumental music, we bring you a couple of tracks courtesy of the newly-minted House of Tabu record label: The Tentakills and The Madeira offer up new generation surf music with a lounge/tiki edge to it.

Hour three sees some classic free-formatting, along with almost a half-hour chunk of a March 1990 Radio Free Charleston Broadcast that folks keep asking me to share again.

Check out the playlist below to see all the goodies we have in store. Live links will take you to the artist’s pages so you can find out more about them, and maybe even buy their music and find out where to see them perform live…

RFC V5 138

Brian Diller “Joe Franklin”
Buni Muni “SVG NASCAR SUPERSTAR”
DEVO “C’mon”
Wobbly “You Belong Here”
Sean Richardson “Let Me Sleep”
Massing “Life Rocks”
Ultravox “Cut and Run”
Tom Batchelor Band “Rubber Meets The Road”
Jesse Blankenship Band  “Shutting Down The Warehouse”
The Cleverlys “Party Rock Anthem”
Annie Neely“Sweet Love”
Paul Callicoat “Guns”
Travis Yee “WAP”
Novelty Island “Scuba Diver”
Jeff Ellis “Marla Darling”
Emmalea Deal “Rosie”

hour two
Matt Mullins and The Bringdowns “Lucky Man”
Jim Lange w/Tim Courts “Ocracoke Island”
Brian Diller “Indian Summer”
Logical Fleadh “General Bonhomie’s Last Waltz (acoustic Character Fleadh Mix)”
Shawn Maxwell “Appointment With”
The Tentakills “Grit”
The Madeira “Tribal Fury”
Yoko Ono “No No No”
The Monochrome Set “Cosmonaut”
Payback’s a Bitch “The Devil’s Advocate”
Sheldon Vance “Turn It Back Around”
The Science Fair Explosion “Final Embrace (Not A Cover)”

hour three
Underdog Blues Revue “Trouble Man”
The Humans “Pipeline”
The Rose Garden “I’m Only Second”
Speedsuit “If Love Gets In The Way”
The Anchoress “Elderly Woman Behind The Counter In A Small Town”
Galen and Paul “The Lighthouse Waltz”
The Wearing Hands“Cluster”

RFC Flashback:
RFC Theme
John Lennon “Cold Turkey”
Three Bodies “Broken Vase”
Beckner, Price and Panucci “Got Drunk, Got Married, Got Screwed”
The Wedding Present “Getting Better”
Electronic Moog Orchestra “Cantina Band (from Star Wars)”
David Bowie“Jean Genie”

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 3 PM, Friday at 9 AM, Saturday at Noon and Midnight,  and  Monday at 11 AM, exclusively on The AIR. Now you can also hear a different 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’re going to bring you a couple of classic episodes of The Swing Shift.

We plan to return with new episodes of The Swing Shift next week, but after spending last week dodging tornadoes in Chicago, your humble blogger/radio guy was just a little too worn out.

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.

Are you sick of New York City yet? I’m not, but this is probably our last NYC-inspired piece for a while.

This week’s art is a quicker and tinier study inspired by what I saw on 44th Street in New York when I went there back in May.  Like last week, it was done on cheap sketchbook paper using oil pastel crayons.

I may revisit this later with a larger piece. This one is actually probably half the size of a comic book page.

To see it bigger try clicking HERE.

Over in radioland, Monday at 2 PM on The AIR, we bring you a classic episode of Psychedelic Shack, and then at 3 PM a classic 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. You can hear two classic episodes of the show Sunday at 2 PM.

At 8 PM you can hear Steve Harvey on last week’s episode of The Comedy Vault.

Tonight at 9 PM the Monday Marathon presents ten hours of Nigel Pye’s Psychedelic Shack.

Inspired by Sydney Fileen’s latest episode of her Big Electric Cat, this week we bring you The Teardrop Explodes, doing a mini-concert live on The Old Grey Whistle Test on April 1, 1982. This is one of the band’s last performances with their classic line-up.

This one’s for all the die-hard New Wave fans out there.

Enjoy!

From January 2008 comes the thirty-fourth episode of Radio Free Charleston, “Lucha Mask Shirt (Show Without Words #1) which featured music from Charleston’s Blues legend Raymond Wallace, WV’s Latin Stars Duo Divertido, and Parkersburg’s master of the 12-string Josh Buskirk. This episode was online briefly as part of the RFC Archives MySpace page, but went down with that ship, and is now available again for the first time in well over five years.

In addition to the music, we also had fresh animation from RFC Big Shot Frank Panucci and a special visit from the then Commander in Chief. Best of all, this episode of RFC featureed NO VOCALS! The music is all instrumental, as is the animation, and even the President doesn’t have much to say.

Of course there were the host segments to contend with. I hosted the show with duct tape over my mouth. There are subtitles for my mumbling. We even recorded a special version of the theme song, and non-verbal jingles for this show. A lot of effort went into this as an afterthought.

We remembered to record them while we were shooting the host bits on the fifth floor of the Quarrier street parking building at the Charleston Town Center, and the new jingles and theme were recorded in the car while RFC Big Shot Melanie Larch and I were warming up between segments. It was very, very cold  when we shot these.

The “Show Without Words” became an irregular feature of Radio Free Charleston, with three more wordless episodes in the ensuing years. This one was the first. We sort of got the hang of it later. You can read the original production notes HERE.

The PopCulteer
July 14, 2023

It’s a bit hectic behind the scenes here at the moment, in fact, it’s after midnight, Friday morning, and your humble blogger is sitting in a fancy hotel in Chicago, updating this week’s column, which I wrote last week, to include a photo essay of my trip to the Windy City, so far.

Mrs. PopCulteer and I have been here since Monday. We’ve taken in a great new play at Steppenwolf and a killer take on The SpongeBob Musical at the Chopin (by Kokandy), and I’ll tell you about those shows when I get back home.  Later Friday the plan is to maybe go to a comic book signing by Svengoolie, and, weather permitting, maybe take in a Chicago Dogs game.

The weather permitting is a bit of a big deal, since Wednesday, right after we got back to the hotel from seeing a matinee performance of Another Marrriage at Steppenwolf, Chicago decided to treat us to a meteorological air show, with possibly as many as  eight tornadoes (Update: There were eleven)  hitting the Chicagoland area. We watched from the 23rd floor as Chicago became The Windy AF City.

Luckily it missed us, and while there was damage, no injuries were reported, but it made for an interesting early evening.

Here are just a few photos from the trip, so I can test out the concept of posting from the road…

A Batman angle of River North

Someday we will…eat at Joe’s.

That box thing being lowered rapidly by a crane from atop a tall building was about the size of a U Haul truck. It came down forty floors in about thirty seconds.

Tribune Towers, from back when we had newspapers.

Flags, all blowing in the same direction.

We finally found this place. Didn’t eat there yet, though.

Mrs. PopCulteer takes wing.

Yours truly tries the same thing. BTW, you’d be surprised how many people in Chicago recognize the Buc ees hat.

The building formerly known as Hancock Tower.

From inside the Tornado Warning that affected 3.7 million people Wednesday night.

Caution: Exploding Teardrops

Also this week all we have to tell you about a new episode of Sydney’s Big Electric Cat. The AIR is PopCult’s sister radio station. You can hear these shows on The AIR website, or just click on the embedded player at the top right column of this blog.

At 2 PM, we bring you a encore of one of two Valentines Weekend episodes of MIRRORBALL from 2022.  If all goes according to plan, you’ll hear the second episode that debuted that day in two weeks. You can read all about both shows HERE.  

You can hear MIRRORBALL every Friday at 2 PM, with replays throughout the following week, Saturday at 9 PM, Sunday at 11 PM, Monday at 9 AM and Tuesday at 1 PM.

At 3 PM, Sydney Fileen graces us with special mixtape-style new episode of Sydney’s Big Electric Cat. This week Sydney delves deep into the history of the enigmatic New Wave/Psychedelic band, The Teardrop Explodes.

The Teardrop Explodes formed in Liverpool in 1978, taking their name from a caption in issue #77 of Daredevil, a Marvel comic book published earlier in the decade.

With vocals and lyrics by Julian Cope, who would go on to reach underground deity status following the break up of this band, The Teardrop Explodes also included David Balfe and Troy Tate, who would go on to become notable record producers.

In these two hours Sydney will play the hits, some deep album cuts and quite a few rarities and live tracks from the recently released The Teardrop Explodes boxed set, Culture Bunker.

Check out the playlist…

BEC 106
The Teardrop Explodes

“Reward”
“East of the Equater”
“Kilimanjaro”
“Sleeping Gas”
“Rachael Built A Steamboat”
“Brave Boys Keep Promises”
“The Culture Bunker”
“Tiny Children”
“Read It In The Books”
“Camera Camera”
“Bouncing Babies”
“Christ Vs. Warhol”
“Screaming secrets”
“Vox Clements In Deserto”
“You Disappear From View”
“Treason”
“Passionate Friend”
“Colours Fly Away”
“The Tunnel”
“Soft Enough For You”
“All I Am Is Loving You”
“Traison (C’est juste une histoire)”
“Suffocate”
“Count To Ten and Run For Cover”
“Terrorist”
“Pussyface”
“When I Dream”
“Strange House In The Snow”
“In-Psychlopaedia”
“World Shut Your Mouth (instrumental demo)”
“Ha Ha, I’m Drowning”

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. Classic episodes can be heard Sunday morning at 10 AM.

That’s what’s new on The AIR Friday, and that is this week’s PopCulteer. Check back for our regular features every day. I’m taking in a minor-league ballgame in Chicago tonight, weather permitting.

We may still be in the hot and muggy part of the year, or we might have entered the nasty storm phase, either way you can be sure that many people are looking for STUFF TO DO so that they don’t lose all their social graces.  Here are a few suggestions (which are a little sparse this week because we’re preparing this post way in advance)…

CharCon is happening again this weekend at The Clay Center. You can find out more about Charleston’s long-running gaming convention HERE.

Thursday night at The Alban Arts Center, Black Empire Productions presents, for one night only, Abortion Weekend.  Written by multifaceted creatives Jairis Carter and Mareshah Dupree, Abortion Weekend is a hilarious, honest, and heartfelt representation of the young, gifted, and black femme experience in America today. Adulthood hits preacher’s daughter Dazia (Jairis Carter) full force as she unexpectedly gets pregnant the summer before her senior year of college. Her best friend and ride or die Ayanna (Mareshah Dupree) takes it upon herself to plan a wild and crazy “Abortion Weekend” in order to terminate the pregnancy.

This two-person show is conducted as a tag team comedy show, as the audience is thrust into a world of vibrant larger than life personalities, magical happenings, and a friendship of the ages. The play is masterfully crafted with true to life vernacular, spoken word poetry, and an immersive sound and lighting design. For more information, check out the graphic below.

Live Music is back at Taylor Books. There is no cover charge, and shows start at 7:30 PM.  Friday it’s Andrew Adkins. Saturday Brandon Costello entertains the crowd at Charleston’s beloved Bookstore/Coffee Shop/Art Gallery.

The World Famous Empty Glass Cafe has some great stuff this weekend, and you can find a complete schedule by visiting their website.

There’s also a celebration of fifty years of Hip Hop happening that I just found out about…

Please remember that the pandemic is not over yet. It’s still a going concern. And now there are seasonal allergies, the flu, invaders from the planet Gor, wayward county officials, unfrozen cavemen, crooked land developers 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.

If you’re up for going out, here are a few suggestions for coming weekend, roughly in order…

Continue reading

For yet another Wednesday afternoon, The AIR brings you new episodes of Curtain Call and Beatles Blast.  You can tune in at the website, or just stay right here and  listen to the convenient embedded radio player lurking elsewhere on this page.

At 2 PM (EDT) Beatles Blast brings you another mixtape show with a flimsy premise.  The show begins with the Beatles classic, “In My Life” and then, inspired by one of that song’s lyrics, brings you “places I remember.”  In other words, it’s the Fab Four, together and solo, singing songs about places they’ve been.

Luckily, with The Beatles, even if the premise is flimsy, the music will always be great.

Beatles Blast can be heard every Wednesday at 2 PM, with replays Thursday at 11 PM, Friday at 1 PM,  and Saturday afternoon.

At 3 PM (EDT) on Curtain Call, Mel Larch salutes the musical, Oliver!, 60 years after it made its Broadway debut.

Oliver! is a coming-of-age stage musical, with book, music and lyrics by Lionel Bart. The musical is based upon the 1838 novel Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens.

The msuical premiered at the Wimbledon Theatre, southwest London in 1960 before opening in the West End, where it enjoyed a record-breaking long run. Oliver! opened on Broadway, after being brought to the U.S. by producer David Merrick in 1963. .

In 1963 Lionel Bart received the Tony Award for Best Original Score. Many songs are well known to the public, such as “Food, Glorious Food”, “Consider Yourself” and “I’d Do Anything”.

Mel brings you the 1963 Broadway cast recording, which featured child actor Bruce Prochnik in the title role alongside Georgia Brown, Danny Sewell and Barry Humphries, reprising their West End roles as Nancy, Bill Sikes and Mr. Sowerberry, respectively, and Clive Revill as Fagin and Michael Goodman as The Arftul Dodger.

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 and Monday at 9 AM. A six-hour marathon of classic episodes can be heard Sunday evening starting at 6 PM, and an all-night marathon of Curtain Call episodes can be heard Wednesday nights, beginning at Midnight.

Also on The AIR, Wednesday at 11 PM,  The Comedy Vault brings you an hour of Beckley native Steve Harvey’s stand-up comedy.

We’re nearly at the mid-point of July, and once again we’re bringing you our regular programming on The AIR that means it’s time for a new  Radio Free Charleston and a new edition of The Swing Shift. 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.

We have another hybrid show this week, where I do a full-hour of new stuff, and then fill up the remaining two hours with a revival of the free-format Radio Free Charleston International. In this case, it’s a show from 2017 that hasn’t been heard in more than five years.

But our first hour is loaded with tons of cool new local and indie acts, along with a couple of ringers.

Our opening band, Wrong War, formed in Chicago in 2019 and features Matt Weeks on lead vocals. In addition to being at the helm of Council Records, Weeks played and toured extensively with the widely influential bands Current, Calvary, and Ottawa. On guitar and bass, respectively, are Patrick Keenan and Dave Pawlowski, who played together in The Phenoms. Salvo Beta drummer Dan Smith, along with Weeks, is responsible for much of the band’s relentless, aggressive sound. Smith also handles all noise and sampling. KirkbyKiss also comes to us from Council Records.

Our first hour also brings you new tunes from The Wearing Hands, Golden, Dave Strong, The Dollyrots, Buni Muni, Telehealth, Nixon Black, Jeff Ellis, Galen & Paul and more.

Our second and third hours revive episode 22 of Radio Free Charleston International, and it’s pretty much as free-format as you can get. I mean, I played The Pixies, The Monkees, Kansas and Macy Gray…in a row, in that order. The rest of these two hours is equally brilliantly headscratching.

Check out the playlist below to see all the goodies we have in store. In the first hour, live links will take you to the artist’s pages so you can find out more about them, buy their music and find out where to see them perform live…

RFC V5 137

hour one
Wrong War “The Call”
The Wearing Hands “Mr. Boston”
Golden “Smokers”
Dave Strong “Still Thinking About You”
The Dollyrots “I Touch Myself”
Science of the Mind  “Kaoss”
KirkbyKiss “Standards and Practices”
Buni Muni “Chunky”
Telehealth “Taliesin Grid”
Stewart Copeland “Demolition Man”
Slik “The Kid’s A Punk”
Nixon Black ” “Treading On Darkened Waters”
Payback’s a Bitch“Johnny and Jenny”
Marcie Bullock“Little Did You Know”
Jeff Ellis “Doors He Could Open”
Logical Fleadh “MacArthur Road”
Galen and Paul “No Es Necesario”

hour two
Green Day “Revolution Radio”
The Pixies “Um Chagga Lagga”
The Monkees “The Porpoise Song”
Kansas “Summer”
Macy Gray “Redemption Song”
The Sword “High Country (acoustic)”
Vangelis “Mission Accomplished”
Regina Spektor “Older and Taller”
Manfred Mann “I Put A Spell On You”
The Isley Brothers “Shout”
Freddie Mercury “The Great Pretender”
John Lennon “Stand By Me”
The Who “Batman”
Marillion “Living In Fear”
Frank Zappa “Cosmic Debris”
Elvis Costello “…and in every home”
No Doubt “Open The Gate”
Sting “I Can’t Stop Thinking About You”
The Screaming Jets “Cash In Your Ticket”
Miss Behaviour “Savage Heart”
Neil Young “We R In Control”
Starpilot “Blazor”
Mi Sex “Computer Games”
New Order “Bizarre Love Triangle”
M “Doubletalk”
Kate Bush “Pull Out The Pin”
Peter Gabriel “Intruder”
Adrian Belew “Standing In The Shadows”

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,  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, a new episode of The Swing Shift give you a one-hour mixtape of piano-driving Swing Music. You’ll hear everything from Amos Milburn to Stan Kenton, Lionel Hampton, Nat King Cole and many others, but due to deadline pressures, you don’t get a playlist. Thems the breaks. Just tune in and let the 88 keys take you to swingin’ new places.

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.

You guessed it, our art is still infused with my recent visit to New York City.

This week, it’s a street scene, based on blurry photos I took while there, of the display canopy for the current Broadway Show, Some Like It Hot. I did this on cheap sketchbook paper using oil pastel crayons. I had to lay a sheet of acetate over it so I could scan it, and it was color-corrected once it was in the computer.  I’m still trying to follow Hopper’s quest to capture light with my art. This might get blown-up into a more detailed painting later.

To see it bigger try clicking HERE.

Over in radioland, Monday at 2 PM on The AIR, we bring you a brand-new episode of Psychedelic Shack, and then at 3 PM a brand-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.

The problem is, like last week, I don’t have full playlists for either show. I’m working on an early deadline, while our friends at Haversham will be getting the shows to me well after I write this. I do know that Herman Linte will present two full hours of the music of progressive classical-crossover band, Sky. Nigel Pye says to expect his usual assortment of trippy, mind-expanding music.

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. You can hear two classic episodes of the show Sunday at 2 PM.

At 8 PM you can hear an encore of last Wednesday’s new episode of The Comedy Vault.

Tonight at 9 PM the Monday Marathon presents ten hours of classic episodes of Prognosis.