Author: Rudy Panucci (Page 169 of 581)

Welcome to PopCult’s guide to Bonus Round Week on The AIR. This week, Tuesday through Saturday, each programming day on The AIR will be split between two mini-marathons of some of our most popular specialty music programs.

You can listen at The AIR Website, or on this embedded radio player…

Friday sees Sydney’s Big Electric Cat, our showcase for the best music of the New Wave era, take the daytime spot, from 7 AM to 7 PM.

Sydney’s Big Electric Cat is a two-hour blast of spectacular New Wave music presented by legendary DJ Sydney Fileen and produced at the Haversham Recording Institute in London, England.Each week Sydney treats us to 120 minutes of rock music from one of its most creative and inspired eras, when punk and prog and electronica collided with rockabilly and fashion and video to make some of the most exciting music in history.

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, Tuesday at 7 AM, Wednesday at 8 PM and Thursday at Noon, exclusively on The AIR.

From 7 PM to Midnight, you can hear five episodes of Harrah’s Hard & Heavy, hosted by Lee Harrah. Lee provides a non-stop onslaught of Metal and Hard Rock, with a lot of surprises tossed in along the way, all presented in Lee’s imitable style and grace.

Harrah’s Hard & Heavy can be heard Friday at 8 PM and Saturday at 11 PM, and if all goes according to plan, we’ll be featuring new episodes this fall.

Welcome to PopCult’s guide to Bonus Round Week on The AIR. This week, Tuesday through Saturday, each programming day on The AIR will be split between two mini-marathons of some of our most popular specialty music programs.

You can listen at The AIR Website, or on this embedded radio player…

Thursday sees Prognosis, our showcase for Progressive Rock, take the daytime spot, from 7 AM to 7 PM.

Originally hosted by Haversham Recording Institute Chairman, Herman Linte, for much of this year yours truly has been filling in behind the microphone. Herman plans to return to the show this fall, and this mini-marathon offers shows hosted by both of us.

Prognosis brings you the cool stuff, the intricate, complex rock music that arose in the late 1960s, and continues today with a healthy dose of bombast, virtuosity and an intelligence that is often mistaken for pretension. You will hear classic Prog-rock artists like ELP, YES, Pink Floyd, Genesis and King Crimson mixed in with today’s rising stars like Tomorrow’s Eve, Sonar with David Tom, The Frankly Valentyn Project and The Blank Page .

Prognosis can be heard every Thursday at 3 PM, with replays Friday at 7 AM, Saturday at 8 AM, Tuesday at 8 PM and Wednesday at 10 PM, exclusively on The AIR.

From 7 PM to Midnight, you can hear five episodes of Radio Coolsville, which came to us from WMUL Radio in Huntington. DJ Betty Rock brought us a weekly hour of the best of Alternative Rock and whatever else happened to catch her fancy.

Radio Coolsville is out of production now, but we still have around ten episodes that haven’t been heard on The AIR yet, and we will be releasing those later this fall. You can hear the best of Radio Coolsville every Tuesday at 5 PM.

Welcome to PopCult’s guide to Bonus Round Week on The AIR. This week, Tuesday through Saturday, each programming day on The AIR will be split between two mini-marathons of some of our most popular specialty music programs.

You can listen at The AIR Website, or on this embedded radio player…

Wednesday sees Curtain Call, our showcase for the best of musical theatre, take the daytime spot, from 7 AM to 7 PM.

Curtain Call is hosted by Mel Larch (AKA Mrs. PopCulteer) and presents a wide range of the best show tunes in recorded history. From classics numbers from shows like 42nd Street, West Side Story and Hello Dolly to modern classics from Book of Mormon,  Hamilton and SpongeBob Squarepants, Mel keeps her listeners entertained with a thoughtful mix of the best the stage has to offer.

Curtain Call can be heard Wednesday at 3 PM, with replays Thursday at 7 AM and 8 PM and Saturday at 6 PM. An all-night marathon of Curtain Call episodes can be heard Wednesday nights, beginning at Midnight.

From 7 PM to Midnight, you can hear five episodes of Beatles Blast, presenting music by, about, and inspired by The Beatles. Hosted by yours truly, this hourly intraveneous dose of the Fab Four brings you the classic songs, solo material, rare collaborations, covers by other artists and on occasion, interviews and documentary presentations about The Beatles.

Beatles Blast can be heard Wednesday at 2 PM, Thursday at 11 AM and 9 PM, Friday at 5 PM, and Tuesday at 9 AM.

Welcome to PopCult’s guide to Bonus Round Week on The AIR. This week, Tuesday through Saturday, each programming day on The AIR will be split between two mini-marathons of some of our most popular specialty music programs.

You can listen at The AIR Website, or on this embedded radio player…

Tuesday sees Radio Free Charleston, our showcase for local music from West Virginia, take the daytime spot, from 7 AM to 7 PM.

Radio Free Charleston is the long-running program hosted by yours truly, Rudy Panucci, that presents music from Charleston and other cities in the state that may just surprise you in terms of style, variety and the sheer depth of musical talent on display.

This show began in 1989 on broadcast radio, and after a few years in limbo, RFC returned in 2006 as a video program, before making the transition back to radio, via the internet, in 2014.

Now, with the video show on hiatus, and a new role as the flagship show of The AIR, Radio Free Charleston continues its mission to show the world that there’s more to West Virginia music than Country and Bluegrass and “Country Roads.” You’ll hear punk, metal, progressive, jazz, standards, experimental and many other kinds of music.

Radio Free Charleston can be heard Tuesday at 10 AM and 10 PM, with replays Thursday at 2 PM, Friday at 8 PM and Saturday at 11 AM and Midnight, exclusively on The AIR.

From 7 PM to Midnight, you can hear five episodes of Psychedelic Shack, produced by our friends at Haversham Recording Institute in London, England, and presented by Nigel Pye.

Each week Nigel creates a mind-expanding mixtape with this showcase for Psychedelic Rock, Every Tuesday you can tune in, and turn on with an all-new hour of mind-altering and mood-expanding music from his home base at Haversham Recording Institute.

Psychedelic Shack can be heard Tuesday’s at 2 PM, with replays Wednesday at 11 AM, Thursday at 5 PM and Saturday at 7 AM.

Wrapping up September’s art, which was all inspired by your PopCulteer’s early-in-the-month surgical strike visit to New York City, we have a digital painting of the glorious sight that befell my eyes once I wandered out of the 161st Street Station, The House that Ruth Built (sort of), Yankee Stadium.

I wrote about my visit to this holy ground HERE. For this painting, I used some photographic reference, but the photos didn’t make it seem big enough, so I improvised a bit. I went hyper-realistic again with this one, after starting the month with two works of abstract Impressionism. I try not to overthink these artistic decisions, and just go with what I think works best for the subject.

You can see this in a bigger version by clicking on it.

Meanwhile, today on The AIR, you can catch the first day of BONUS ROUND WEEK, where we bring you different marathons, spotlighting our musical programming, which normally occupies the afternoon timeslots.

Monday we find ourselves in the midst of a 36-hour marathon of The Swing Shift, bringing you the best Swing Music from the last century. Tune in at The AIR Website, or on this neat little embedded player…

Check back each day this week for notes on what you can hear that day.

Fred “Tex” Avery was one of the greatest gag cartoon animators in history. He either created, co-created, or developed Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Elmer Fudd, Droopy, Screwy Squirrel, and Chilly Willy. Whether it was his early work at Warner Brothers, his creative peak at MGM, or his later years with Walter Lantz and advertising work, Avery’s sense of humor helped shape several generations of cartoon fans into the twisted mass of insanity that we are today.

His cartoons may well be the funniest ever made, and his influence continues to be seen in animation today.

Check out these two documentaries and one collection of cartoons to find out why. Be warned that the first one ends abruptly, but it’s still filled with great interviews and clips from his work.

Episode 153 of Radio Free Charleston, “Dr. Pepper Shirt,” was a special episode, comprised entirely of rehearsal footage from two of this musical events happening in town back in March, 2012: The 2nd Annual Alumni All-Star Jam at WVSU, and the CYAC production of “Jesus Christ Superstar.”

I always felt honored to be invited to bring the RFC cameras into a rehearsal because it means that the performers trust me to document their work-in-progress, warts and all. It’s a gutsy move, and a sign of confidence on the part of the artists involved.

Of course, I had a bit of an “in” with one performer. Radio Free Charleston‘s Resident Diva and now Mrs. PopCulteer, Melanie Larch, appears in this special edition of RFC, as does Lady D, the WVSU Alumni All-Star Band and the cast of “Jesus Christ Superstar.”

Our first two songs are from The 2nd Annual WVSU Alumni All-Star Jam Band. These were early run-throughs, just the first or second time that the musicians have tackled these songs together. The incredible band is comprised of Jonathan Wesley (Inspiration) on drums, Tim Courts (Bob Thompson Unit) on piano, Mike “Nemo” Pleasant on bass guitar, Dick Stockton on trumpet and Bill Hambleton on Trombone. The show was a smash success, and more than six years later, people are still talking about it.

As a bonus in this episode we had a sneak peek of The Contemporary Youth Arts Company production of “Jesus Christ Superstar.” This was another case where our production deadline would not allow us to record a dress rehearsal, and we had to go in before they had their microphones working. You’ll hear the cast performing “Hosanna.”

You can find the original production notes HERE.

The PopCulteer
September 21, 2018

Next week our companion internet radio station, The AIR, will pre-empt all its regular programming so that we can present marathons and mini-marathons all week long to allow new listeners to sample all of our specialty music programming. We are calling these “Bonus Rounds” and it will give our new listeners a way to get up to speed on our regular weekday afternoon music shows.

Listenership at The AIR has been growing rapidly, and next week we will be gaining some additional exposure in Europe, so the time was right to showcase our wares in a more binge-worthy manner.

This will also allow your PopCulteer to take some time off to finish his anniversary trip that he and his wife began a few weeks ago. If you can stretch our your anniversary celebration for a full month, why not do it? Last year we had a “Fall Preview Week” and this year we found a new programming stunt to welcome the new season.

Each morning next week PopCult will tell you what you can tune in to hear on The AIR that day. Right now we are going to give you a head start and announce that Monday will present a marathon of The Swing Shift, and for that show, which has our largest world-wide audience, we will bring you 36 episodes, beginning Sunday at Midnight, and finishing up Tuesday morning at 7 AM.

The Swing Shift presents the best Swing Music from the last hundred years, all cobbled together in a weekly one-hour package.

The rest of the week will filled with shorter marathons of our other shows, some will be twelve-hours, some will be five. You can listen to the whole thing at The AIR Website, or on this embedded player of no small esteem…

On The Swing Shift listeners might hear classics from the Big Band era mixed in with music from the 1970s revivalism, 1990s Retro Swing, Electro Swing from Europe and brand-new music by today’s Swing Standard-bearers.

The show has proven so popular that we also run overnight marathons of The Swing Shift on Sundays and Thursdays at Midnight. So combining the regular Sunday night run with the Monday Marathon gives us a big start to the week.

With that, we will wrap up this week’s PopCulteer, and remind you that you can check back every day for fresh content and all our regular features, and if the opportunity arises, some posts from the road next week. And don’t forget that ShockaCon kicks off Friday!

I’ve already told you about the Movie and TV stars who will be at ShockaCon this year, and you probably know about all the vendors selling cool scary and spooky stuff, but today we’re going to let you know about the other cool things happening at Charleston’s only horror and sci-fi convention.

First, you ought to know that ShockaCon 7 happens this Friday, Saturday and Sunday at the Beni Kedem Shrine Center on Quarrier Street in Charleston.  It’s right between the Charleston Civic Center and the Charleston Town Center Mall. You can’t miss it. September 21, through 23 the Shrine Center becomes ground zero for all the macabre fun you can imagine…and some that you might not be able to.

Asdie from the Cemetary Knights Hearses and the Terminus Grill, you’ll find Ghostbusters, Renfields, Belly Dancers, cosplayers, gamers, and stars like Linnea Quigley and Sean Patrick Flanery, you can find all sorts of cool panels, and workshops.

Today we’re going to bring you the schedule for ShockaCon again, along with descriptions of the panels they’re having this year.

If the print is too tiny, just click on the graphic below to see a bigger version…

In honor of Talk Like A Pirate Day (which is today, in case you didn’t know) we go backinto the Radio Free Charleston Archives for a couple of video clips featuring our friends from California who happen to be real, true pirates, The Dread Crew of Oddwood.

Five years be past since the ARRRRR-F-C cameras caught up with the plundering pundits of “Heavy Mahogany,” and the scurvy dogs are still kickin’ and playing all up and down the ports of the Western Territories.  Our crew encountered their crew at the World Famous Empty Glass, and we ventured forth to bring ye a heap of video treasure from that fateful night.

Above ye see an ARRRRR-F-C MINI SHOW starring the Dread Crew, in fine form.

Down below ye see a bonus clip featuring the charming scoundrels, produced to mark this very holiday some five year ago.

So, avast ye swabs, set sail for the music of The Dread Crew on this special day!