Author: Rudy Panucci (Page 100 of 581)

We offer up two new episodes of our speciality music shows Tuesday on The AIR with fresh editions of Radio Free Charleston and Psychedelic Shack. You can hop over and tune in at the website, or you could just stay on this page, and listen to this swell little embedded radio player…

Tune into this week’s Radio Free Charleston at 10 AM and 10 PM Tuesday for a special show loaded with the music of Bill Withers, interspersed with new local music from Jay Parade, Boldly Go and Bottle & Burst, plus new tunes from The Boomtown Rats, Green Day, and more, mixed in with classic songs from local and international artists. We even include a couple of artists covering the music of Bill Withers.

We lost West Virginia Music Hall of Famer, Bill Withers last week, 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 had to salute the man in this week’s show, and mixing his music with music made by others is what I think he would have wanted.

Check out the playlist…

RFC V5 013

hour one
Bill Withers “Lean On Me”
Christopher Harris “Just The Two of Us”
Hightail Home “Lamplight”
David Bowie “Space Oddity”
Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds “Wandering Star”
The Boomtown Rats “Rock n’ Roll Ye Ye”
Bill Withers “Railroad Man”
Jay Parade “Destroyer”
Boldly Go “First Contact”
Misery I Melody “Stormy Weather”
Bottle & Burst “Waste Me”
Profane Existence “Crust Is Back In Town”
Me First and the Gimme Gimmes “Ain’t No Sunshine”
Bill Withers “Better Days”
Captain Catfeesh “Christmas In Prison”

hour two
Bill Withers “Lonely Town, Lonely Street”
Bon Air “Like You’re Still Here”
The BrotherSisters “Damn The Torpedoes”
Alan Parsons Project “Damned If I Do”
The B 52s “Eyes Wide Open”
Mika “I Went To Hell Last Night”
Bill Withers “I Wish You Well”
M Opus “Find My Way Back Home”
Tarja “Serene”
Ovada “Serene”
Karen O “Turn On The Light”
Marcie Bullock “Maybe Just Crazy”
Bill Withers “Use Me”

hour three
Bill Withers “Lovely Day”
Stevie Wonder “Earth’s Creation”
Liquid Canvas “Spirit Molecule”
Flare Baroshi “The Vampire Mafia”
dog soldier “Blanket”
Green Day “I Was A Teenage Teenager”
The Overlooked “December”
Bill Withers “The Best You Can”
Hybrid Soul Project “Ain’t Nobody”
Howard Jones “The One To Love You”
Lady D “You’ll Live In Bliss”
Roger Waters “The Tide Is Turning”
PP Arnold “I’ll Always Remember You”
Bill Withers “Ain’t No Sunshine”

Radio Free Charleston can be heard Tuesday at 10 AM and 10 PM, with replays Thursday at 2 PM, Friday at 9 AM and 7 PM, Saturday at 11 AM and Midnight, Sunday at 1 PM and the next Monday at 8 PM, exclusively on The AIR.

At 2 PM we bring you a brand-new episode of Psychedelic Shack. Nigel Pye returns to The AIR with a show that is jam-packed with the type of trippy music that keeps you delightfully disoriented as you look askew at that troublesome thing we call reality. Nigel has thoughtfully provided us with a playlist for this week’s show…

Psychedelic Shack 029

Andy Partridge and Robyn Hitchcock “Got My…”
David Cross and Peter Banks “Upshift”
David Bowie “Cygnet Committee”
Jimi Hendrix “Foxey Lady”
Mannfred Mann “L.S.D.”
Pink Floyd “Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun”
13th Floor Elevators “Roller Coaster”
Jefferson Airplane “Wooden Ships”
Golden Earring “Sound of the Screaming Day”
Janis Joplin “Piece Of My Heart”
Yard Birds “For Your Love”

Psychedelic Shack alternates weeks with NOISE BRIGADE Tuesdays at 2 PM, with replays Wednesday at 11 AM and 10 PM, Thursday at 8 AM, Friday at Noon, Saturday at 8 AM, Sunday at 4 PM and Monday at 7 PM.

At 3 PM your PopCulteer begs off from producing a new episode of The Swing Shift this week, and instead brings you encores of episode 50, where we play all our favorites, and episode 60, which was a birthday salute to Brian Setzer. We’ll be back with a new episode next week.

You can hear The Swing Shift Tuesday at 3 PM, with replays Wednesday at 7 AM and 6 PM, Thursday at 7 PM and Saturday at 5 PM, only on The AIR. You can also hear all-night marathons, seven hours each, starting at Midnight Thursday and Sunday evenings.

This week’s artsiness is a fresh paint-marker on textured paper creation based on an old digital photo, circa 2007, taken from the fire escape at the much-missed LiveMix Studio.  It’s a nicely-composed view of Kanawha United Presby and The South Side Bridge, with the old Sunrise Museum peeking through the trees on the other side of the river and Old Glory flying right near the center of the scene.

After last week’s abstract impressionism, I figured it’d be good to get back to realism this week. The paint markers were cheap and a bit stubborn, and I have to confess to cropping out the sloppy edges after I scanned this small piece.

You can click the image if you want to see a bigger version.

Meanwhile, over in radio-land, Monday on The AIR, our Monday Marathon runs from 7 AM to 3 PM , and brings you eight hours of live New Wave Music, from four episodes of Sydney’s Big Electric Cat. Speaking of live music, 3 PM sees a new episode of Prognosis where Herman Linte brings you two hours of live Pink Floyd from 1994.

You can listen to The AIR at the website, or on this embedded radio player…

This week our video is not safe for work or sheltered young ‘uns.  There are some topless womenfolk wearing masks in a few of the early scenes, so if the human body unadorned offends you, you might want to skip this one.

Tonight we have an art film made in 1991 and released five years later. Shakespeare’s Plan 12 From Outer Space is described the the director, Charles Montgomery “Spike” Stewart thusly: “William Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night”, re-imagined in a child’s vision of Hell.  Shakespeare’s Plan 12 from Outer Space is a festive yarn, comprised of the most homely and vulgar materials, while shamelessly thwarted buy the Bard’s coarsest of jokes and grossest buffoonery.”

This film is a delight for fans of Eraserhead, The Residents, twisted Shakespeare, New Wave Theater or just cool weird stuff in general. Frank Doubleday (Assault on Precinct 13, Escape from New York, Network) stars as Malvolio. Among its mish-mash of disturbing imagery and low-fi video, you’ll find brief appearances by Kay Lenz, Buck Henry, Grant Loud and Mark Mothersbaugh, along with many stalwarts of the Los Angeles underground performance art scene.

According to the info at YouTube, this film “was photographed utilizing the ‘Fischer-Price PXL 2000’ toy camera as the ‘anchor medium’. The film also collages additional film and video formats available at the time, including 35mm,16mm, Beta Cam, U-Matic, Hi-8 and VHS. There’s nothing quite like it. The adaption was inspired and owes it’s somewhat obtuse perspective to Isaac Asimov’s political dissertation on the original First Folio manuscript. This, the last of the Shakespeare Comedy’s, is a Real Tragedy! -and a lot of FUN!”

This week we go back to May, 2007, for an episode of Radio Free Charleston that has been rarely seen for the better part of the last decade. “Carmen Shirt” featured music by Whistlepunk 2.0 and Josh Buskirk, as well as animation and other cool stuff.  After it debuted on the Charleston Gazette servers nearly 13 years ago, it went offline for years until it briefly resurfaced at MySpace, before that now-obsolete social media site went into a serious decline and deleted everything that had been uploaded there.

The main event of this show was a performance of “Satellite” by Whistlepunk 2.0, a band that included Spencer Elliott, Karen Allen from Crazy Jane, as well as current members of Superfetch and Speedsuit. Karen later recorded the song for a solo album.  We also had a great performance by 12-string virtuoso, Josh Buskirk, and some vintage bizarro animation. The secret weapon of this show comes after the end credits, with a sneak preview of Episode 23 starring Feast of Stephen.

Host segments were shot by your host using a tripod in his “White Room.” Original production notes can be found HERE.

The PopCulteer
April 3, 2020

Friday afternoon The AIR debuts a special new talk show/podcast, plus a new and very optimistic episode of Sydney’s Big Electric Cat. It all starts at 2 PM, and you can listen at The AIR website, or just hit the “play” button on this nifty virtual player…

At 2 PM you can hear what might be the only episode of The Rudy And Mel Shut-In Show. This is one hour of your PopCulteer and his wife talking–often in a not safe for work manner–about whatever pops into our heads.

This rambling conversation touches on politics and how we got in the quarantine situation we find ourselves in, but veers off into topics like how to cope with the quarantine, why they never discuss toilet paper on The Walking Dead, what’s hanging on the walls in our living room, what the future holds for movies and comics and much, much more.

We even talk about the movie Cats and other methods of self-harm.

Mel and I have been talking (some would say threatening) about  doing a show like this for some time, and we decided, just last night, to do a pilot episode to see if anybody cared. If you like the show, go to The AIR’s Facebook page and ask us to make more. Or ask us not make any more. It’s your call.

At 3 PM Friday, this show, and all of this week’s new programming on The AIR will be available at the Podcast tab on the left side of the screen at The AIR website.

Also at 3 PM on The AIR, we debut a special new episode of our weekly salute to New Wave Music, Sydney’s Big Electric Cat. It seeems that after Sydney Fileen put together a rather subversive episode of her show last time, where every song had something to do with virus, sickness, plagues or quarantines, this week she decided to be more optimistic.

In the latest episode of the Big Electric Cat, Sydney introduces a two-hour collage of New Wave performances from Live Aid, the massive benefit concert which took place in various locations across the globe thirty-five years ago this summer.

Listeners will hear The Thompson Twins, Duran Duran, Pretenders, Elvis Costello, Ultravox, Nik Kershaw, Sting, The Boomtown Rats, Paul Young, The Cars, Adam Ant, Simple Minds and more, all performing in either London or Philadelphia.

It’s a brief snapshot of humanity at its best, coming together to raise money and awareness for those in need.

For some reason, it’s comforting to remember Live Aid and its message of hope and decency these days.

That’s this week’s PopCulteer. Check back every day for all our regular features.

The PopCult Comix Bookshelf

DCs Wanted: The Worlds Most Dangerous Super-Villains
by various writers and artists
DC Comics
ISBN-13: 978-1779501738
$39.99 (discounted at Amazon)

Right off the bat, I love this book, but I can’t see any logical reason that it was released. I suppose the idea was that this would somehow tie in with DC’s “Year of the Villain” company-wide story arc, but it’s a real stretch to think that fans of DC’s current form of story-telling would have any interest in an archival volume in which 20 of the 25 stories date back to before 1960.

DC doesn’t have many comics in their library with the word “Villain” in the title, and one of those (Secret Society of Super-Villains) was collected into a trade paperback recently, so I guess they felt they were stuck with creating a nice hardback collection of an obscure reprint title from the early 1970s.

Wanted: The Worlds Most Dangerous Super-Villains collects all nine issues of the comic of the same name, which was one of the many reprint titles cooked up around that time when DC and Marvel were cranking out as many comics as possible in an effort to grab market share and crowd each other (and any smaller publishers) off the newsstands. Right before a paper shortage caused prices to rise and smaller publishers to fail, DC and Marvel were attempting to glut each other out of business.

Marvel had several titles, some dating back to the mid 1960s, that reprinted the earliest adventures of Spider-Man and The Fantastic Four, and DC had been reprinting stories from their vast libraries as “bonus” material when they expanded all the books to 48 pages and raised the price to 25 cents. Both publishers discovered that a decent amount of fans still bought reprint titles, and they had the added appeal to the publisher of already being paid for, so they cost almost nothing to produce back in those days before comics creators were given reprint fees.

DC created several themed all-reprint comics when they reverted to 32 page comics that sold for 20 cents (that is a long story that I don’t have room to tell you here), and Wanted was their all-villain book, published alongside other reprint titles like Secret Origins and Strange Sports Stories. These books were edited and curated by E. Nelson Bridwell, DC’s secret weapon when it came to his vast knowledge of comic book history and his impeccable taste in choosing which stories to reprint. Bridwell does not get enough credit for stoking the flames of comics fandom and instilling a love for Golden Age comics in a generation of comics creators and historians.

With Wanted, Bridwell didn’t take the easy route and just put Batman or Superman in every issue. He plumbed the depths of DC, reintroducing members of DC’s rogue’s gallery that hadn’t been seen in decades, and exposing a new generation to the formative works of such comics greats as Joe Kubert, Mort Meskin, Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, Carmine Infantion and more.

The thing is, Wanted was never really a best-seller. It existed to take up space on the spinner rack, with the intention of keeping that spot away from a rival company. That it turned out to be such a wonderful, if random, collection of terrific comic stories was a bonus.

While the book did cover-feature a few heavy-hitters in its original run–Superman, Batman, Green Lantern and The Flash are on some of the covers–more than equal time was given to more obscure DC heroes like Starman, Doctor Fate, The Vigilante, Wildcat and Hourman. They even cover-featured two really obscure characters that DC had purchased from Quality Comics, Doll Man and Kid Eternity.

Some of the Villains are pretty obscure, too. We do see Batman fight The Joker and The Penguin, but those two are teamed up in one story. We also see the Caped Crusader take on The Signalman, who at that point had only appeared twice since the one story reprinted here. Other Villains showcased in this book include The Prankster, Soloman Grundy, Clock King, The Mist, The Dummy and Mister Who (not to be confused any doctors who came later). This book will educate newer readers of the scope of colorful evil-doers in the DC Universe.

As I pointed out, the stories are drawn by a murderer’s row of iconic comic book artists. In addition to the artists listed above, we also get to see work by Gil Kane, H.G. Peter, Jack Burnley and Lee Elias and stories written by Robert Kanigher, Gardner Fox, Alfred Bester, William Woolfolk, Jerry Siegel, John Broome, Bill Finger, Ed Herron and more. Plus they included the beautiful split-scene covers for the original series by Nick Cardy and Murphy Anderson.

Like I said, I love this book. They even give us a hypothetical tenth issue with an all-female villain line-up. I don’t have this entire series in my collection, and it’s fantastic to finally have them all in one volume. I should mention that it’s also a collection of short-form stories. Most in this book run between seven and 13 pages, and they manage to cram in more plot than a year’s worth of today’s comics. In terms of pure comics glee, this book is a home run.

A curious omission is that they left out issues #8 and #14 of DC Special, which were the first comics that used the logo and the theme. Those must have sold well enough to inspire this series, but they aren’t included here and with no text features, aren’t even mentioned. It’s like this book was thrown together so quickly that nobody even thought to Google the title to see if there were any more issues to include.

One other thing that DC didn’t include is any context. There are no text features explaining why this book exists or why it’s historically relevant. There’s not even a fond remberance from a comics professional who was inspired by this series. They don’t even reprint the informative text features and letters pages, written and edited by Bridwell, that explain the background of each story and why it was chosen. As it is, the only mention of Bridwell is where he’s listed among the editors of the original stories, on the Indicia page.

That is a major disappointment. It’s like getting a deluxe Blu Ray disc of a classic movie and discovering that there no extras–not even a trailer. They could’ve just scanned the original text pages (and I’m not even sure they had them in every issue) and ran them in the appropriate place. That “tenth issue” they included is about five pages longer than it should have been, so they could have sacrificed one of those stories if the page-count was a problem.

Aside from that gripe, I can whole-heartedly recommend Wanted: The Worlds Most Dangerous Super-Villains for anybody who loves classic superhero comics with colorful villains, crisp storytelling and great art.  It’s not a perfect collection, but it’s a lot of fun.

Also of note is that, while you can order this from any bookseller using the ISBN code, Amazon has it for almost half the suggested price.

Wednesday afternoon The AIR brings you a new episode of Curtain Call that celebrates the joys of staying at home. You can tune in at the website, or on this embedded radio player…

This week Curtain Call‘s host, Mel Larch brings you a gimmick program. We were discussing what to do this week for all the people who are stuck at home, and we came up with the idea of doing a show made up entirely of songs from musicals that have the word “home” in their titles. We debut this show Wednesday at 3 PM on The AIR.

The idea being that, while essentially being quarantined may be boring, or suck outright in some cases, there are worse places you can be stuck than at home. Now, we didn’t use any songs from the musical Fun Home, because the “home” in that show is a funeral parlor, and the only song with “home” in the title is a Brady Bunch-style commercial jingle about the funeral home.

Now, I did swipe the graphics for this episode from Fun Home anyway. Just to be on the safe side, we’ll run a couple of shows with music from Fun Home starting at 4 PM.

Here’s the playlist.

CC 081 “Home”

“We Are Home” from In Transit
“When You’re Home” from In The Heights
“A Quiet Night At Home” from Bare
“Home” from Beetlejuice
“Home At Last” from A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum
“Welcome Home” from Bandstand
“Come Home With Me” from Hadestown
“Making A Home” from Falsettos
“Home Before You Know It” from The Bridges of Madison County
“Going Home Alone” from Amour
“The Swamps of Home” from Once Upon A Mattress
“Home” The Wiz
“I Will Be Your Home” from Mythic
“Welcome Home (Finale) from Bandstand
“Bring My Baby (Brother) Home:” from Freaky Friday
“Bring Him Home” from Les Miserable
“I’m Coming Home” from The Rocky Horror Show

Curtain Call can be heard on The AIR Wednesday at 3 PM, with replays Thursday at 8 AM and 9 PM, Friday at 10 AM and Saturday at 6 PM. An all-night marathon of Curtain Call episodes can be heard Wednesday nights, beginning at Midnight, and an additional marathon can be heard Sunday evenings from 6 PM to midnight..

We offer up two new episodes of our speciality music shows Tuesday on The AIR with fresh editions of Radio Free Charleston and The Swing Shift. You may point your cursor over and tune in at the website, or you could just stay on this page, and  listen to this happy little embedded radio player…

Tune into this week’s Radio Free Charleston at 10 AM and 10 PM Tuesday for a special show made up entirely of cover songs. Local and international artists turn their talents to songs by other songwriters in a show that revisits a theme we used to do occasionally on RFC International.

You’ll hear Christopher Harris of Qiet performing a Soundgarden classic; Kate Bush sings Marvin Gaye; DEVO does Hendrix; The Amazing Delores covers Ben E. King; several bands do Beatles tunes; The Carpenter Ants bring us their take on a Shania Twain song and a few dozen other artists sing songs that they did not write themselves.

It’s a fun show, with a few rare tracks and bizarre match-ups that ought to intrigue and delight you.

Check out the playlist…

RFCv5012

hour one
The Tom McGees “Country Roads”
Christopher Harris “Black Hole Sun”
Kate Bush “Sexual Healing”
Flaming Lips “Bohemian Rhapsody”
Dave Stewart and Colin Blunstone “What Becomes of the Broken Hearted”
Men Without Hats “S.O.S.”
DEVO “Are You Experienced”
Groove Heavy “Do You Remember”
Reel Big Fish “Brown Eyed Girl”
Save Ferris “Come On Eileen”
Buck-O-Nine “Pass The Dutchie”
Goldfinger “99 Red Balloons”
Ben Folds “Video Killed The Radio Star”
The Amazing Delores “Stand By Me”
Sleepy Eyes Nelson “The Ballad of Pop Bottle Pete and Beercan Bud”

hour two
The Irreplaceables “Bad Moon Rising”
Under The Radar “All Along The Watchtower”
Klaus Nomi “Lightning Strikes”
Keith Emerson “I’m A Man”
Joe Lynn Turner, Tony Kaye & Steve Cropper “Riders On The Storm”
Todd Rundgren “Good Vibrations”
Deni Bonet “Frankenstein”
Go Van Gogh “I Am The Walrus”
Tin Machine “Working Class Hero”
Tim Curry “I Will”
Adrian Belew “Free As A Bird”
Dave Edmonds, “Lady Madonna”
Fred James “Why Don’t We Do It In The Road”
Vintage Gramola “Layla”
Frank Zappa “Stairway To Heaven”

hour three
The Carptenter Ants “I Feel Like A Woman”
Unknown Hinson “Train Time/ I Fought The Law”
Me First and the Gimme Gimmes “On The Radio”
The Clash “Police On My Back”
Rabbit “Locomotive Breath”
GWAR “School’s Out”
Rammstein “Pet Semetary”
The Rock Lobsters “Stairway To Heaven”
Pseudo Echo “Funkytown”
Robert Palmer “Bad Case of Lovin’ You”
Keith Moon “The Kids Are All Right”
Hybrid Soul Project “Chain of Fools”

Radio Free Charleston can be heard Tuesday at 10 AM and 10 PM, with replays Thursday at 2 PM, Friday at 9 AM and 7 PM, Saturday at 11 AM and Midnight, Sunday at 1 PM and the next Monday at 8 PM, exclusively on The AIR.

At 2 PM we bring you a classic episode of NOISE BRIGADE. Steven Allen Adams will be back with new shows, probably after the governor stops having daily press conferences.

At 3 PM your PopCulteer returns to host a new hour of The Swing Shift as we salute the use of the guitar in Swing Music. It’s not the first instrument you think of when you think of Swing, but the six-string instrument has had a place in Swing since the musical form mutated out of Dixieland Jazz. After opening the show with music from our new friend, Tyler Pedersen, we’ll bring you classic tracks from pioneers like Alvio Rey and Django Reinhardt, plus new guitar-based Swing from Europe and America, and of course, Brian Setzer has to play a part in this episode.
Check the playlist here…

The Swing Shift 089

Tyler Pedersen “The Shake”
Alvino Rey “Cement Mixer”
Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown “One More Mile”
Joe Jackson “Jumpin’ Jive”
Brian Setzer Orchestra “Hollywood Nocturne”
Herb Ellis All-Stars “Herb’s Here”
Steve Howe “The Continental”
Waikiki Beach Boys “Poinciana”
Omar and the Stringpoppers “Eager Beaver Baby”
The Monkey Swingers “Red Red Robin”
Vintage Gramola “Caravan”
Billy Jack Wills “Troubles”
Jim Hall Trio “Things Ain’t What They Used To Be”
Jonathan Stout and his Campus Five “Savoy Blip”
Gagarin Brothers “Black Cat”
Django Reinhardt “Swing Guitars”

You can hear The Swing Shift Tuesday at 3 PM, with replays Wednesday at 7 AM and 6 PM, Thursday at 2 PM and Saturday at 5 PM, only on The AIR. You can also hear all-night marathons, seven hours each, starting at Midnight Thursday and Sunday evenings.

We wrap up our “Chicago-Inspired Art” event here in Monday Morning Art for the month of March with a real physical painting that began life as a digital design, which I liked enough to transfer to a small piece of canvas board. Your PopCulteer and his wife managed to squeeze in a quick trip to Chicago before the scope of the Covid-19 Pandemic became so evident. Today’s art is not based on photographic reference, but instead is just my impression of the view of State Street, looking out the window of our top-floor hotel room.

Things have been a bit stressful for everyone over the last few weeks, and when I get stressed out, my art gets a little more angular. So I did this and scanned it and here it is.

You can click the image if you want to see a bigger version.

Meanwhile, over in radio-land, Monday on The AIR, our Monday Marathon runs from 7 AM to 2 PM, and brings you eight hours of the one-hour version of Radio Free Charleston. These shows will be moving off the server at The AIR after this, so this will be your last chance to hear them for a while. 3 PM sees a new episode of Prognosis. Herman Linte brings you a show loaded with great new and classic prog-rock tunes.

You can listen to The AIR at the website, or on this embedded radio player…

Here’s the playlist for today’s new episode…

Prognosis 055

Marillion “Script For A Jester’s Tears”
Peter Banks “Endless Journey”
Flutatious “Acid Rain”
John Holden “Tears From The Sun”
Pallas “Moonline”
Renaissance “Can You Hear Me”
Robert Fripp “Exposure”
OddsFishce “My Train Of Thought Derailed”
Emerson Lake and Palmer “For You”
Dream Theater “A Better Life”
Kate Bush “Jig Of Life”
The Phantom of Phobos “The Undead”
Genesis “The Musical Box”
Frank Zappa “Times Beach”

Prognosis debuts new episodes Monday at 3 PM on The AIR. That episode is replayed Tuesday at 8 PM, Wednesday at 9 AM, Thursday at Noon, Friday at 7 AM and Saturday at 9 AM. Classic episodes can be heard Monday at 5 PM, and as part of the Haversham Recording Institute overnight show Monday’s beginning at 11 PM.

YouTube’s technical issues with providing embed codes are subsiding this morning, but not for the video that I had intended to bring you today, so instead you will get Rick Wakeman in concert in Cuba from 2005.

It’s pretty dang cool, and I’ve got Wakeman on the mind while waiting for his new album, The Red Planet, which I told you about Friday. It’s due out next week, and since I already posted the latest video up from that project, here’s this to punch your prog-rock buttons.

The CD and DVD are currently out of print, so this is the only way to watch this great performance that includes songs from Wakeman’s acclaimed solo albums as well as some of his soundtrack work and his solo take on a YES classic.

Check out the info…

In April 2005, at the personal invitation of Fidel Castro and the Swiss foundation, Association Friends of Cuba, Rick Wakeman and the New English Rock Ensemble performed a mammoth sell-out concert in the Karl Marx Theatre in Havana, Cuba.

1. Journey To The Centre Of The Earth
2. The Recollection / The Spaceman
3, Catherine Parr
4. The Visit / The Return Of The Phantom
5. Jane Seymour
6. Shed Building
7. King Arthur
8. Cathedral Of The Sky
9. Merlin The Magician
10. Starship Trooper / Würm

“Made in Cuba” presents Rick Wakeman with his band the ‘New English Rock Ensemble’ performing to a capacity crowd live at the Karl Marx Theatre in Havana, Cuba. In April 2005, invited by the Ministry of Culture, the Cuban Music Institute and the Swiss Foundation, “Association Friends of Cuba” – Rock Keyboard legend Rick Wakeman travelled to Havana, to perform a series of concerts that will forever be recognised internationally as an enormous event for the Cuban people, and a historic moment marked by the importance of one of the first and largest official Rock Concerts ever to be performed on the island.