Author: Rudy Panucci (Page 5 of 581)

July 10, 1925: In Dayton, Tennessee, the so-called Scopes Monkey Trial begins with John Thomas Scopes, a young high school science teacher, accused of teaching evolution in violation of a Tennessee state law. In honor of this important date, PopCult presents the first episode of Lancelot Link: Secret Chimp.

RFC 111, "Teefury.com Shirt" from Rudy Panucci on Vimeo.

This week we go back to September, 2010 for an episode of Radio Free Charleston that originated from The Empty Glass, the legendary music venue on Charleston East End.

The show this week featured music from Andy Park, Stephen Beckner and Stone Soup, plus some offbeat animation and a public service announcement for Covenant House that starred Ann Magnuson.

Most of this episode was shot at The Empty Glass on Thursday, September 16, during a benefit for Empty Glass Records, a project that allowed Charleston’s most celebrated bar to install recording equipment so that they can preserve the magic moments that still happen there on a regular basis.

The PopCulteer
July 8, 2022

It has been a bit of a strange week here at PopCult. Power outages, weather-related ailments and technical issues threw us off our planned schedule and things aren’t getting posted in the order they were planned.

However, things have settled down and today’s PopCulteer should get us mostly back on track.

The plan was to run a photo essay yesterday, and devote this week’s PopCulteer to a short piece on my thoughts on the return of the Sternwheel Regatta, and notes for a new episode of MIRRORBALL.

MIRRORBALL got delayed a week.  I didn’t have time to do the photo essay so yesterday I ran a “best-of” post. My thoughts on the Regatta are below, and below those you’ll get to see the photos I’d planned to run yesterday. So all is well.

Boat Race

My attitude toward the Regatta, like my attitude toward just about everything is, if it makes you happy and it doesn’t hurt anybody, then it’s great. I don’t think the Regatta hurt anybody, and reports are that it made an awful lot of people happy, so good for it.

It’s not for me, but everything doesn’t have to be for me. I don’t do well in the heat. I don’t drink beer. And my taste is music is generally pretty far from commercial. I also don’t like being around bodies of water. I think the whole idea of Charleston ever having been a classic riverboat town is contrived nonsense, and I’d still like to not die from COVID. There was very little chance I was going to go anywhere near The Regatta this year.

But it was great for the people who enjoyed it, and it was apparently great for Charleston businesses.

I think holding it immediately after FestivALL was a good idea. It prevented the post-FestivAll doldrums and struck while everybody was still in a celebratory mood. While it had to really suck for city workers who had to clean up after back-to-back citywide spectacles, it seemed to work out really well for the attendees. And it looks like it might be easier to book decent headliners during the Fourth of July weekend than it was during Labor Day.

People lamented the demise of the Regatta back in 2009, but to be brutally honest, it had basically degenerated into an overgrown beer bash by then, and the musical acts, with a few notable exceptions, were generally underwhelming. The one year, near the end, when they booked a decent band, Blue Oyster Cult, the director of the Regatta took pains to mention to the press that she had never heard of them.

This year the musical acts were booked with wider appeal, with the first night actually bringing in a band that appealed to people under the age of fifty.  I was never a fan of The Regatta back in the day. I worked in Charleston and it made my commute hell, and I can only think of four or five acts that I would have walked across the street to see. But I’m not the type of person that the Regatta is supposed to attract. I’m old, with weird taste in music. I don’t drink and I really don’t like being around large drunken crowds. Plus I hate being outdoors for long periods.

Having said that, if they book The Aquabats next year, I’ll be there.

One More Trip to FiestaWare Land

Last week I ran a photo essay of a recent trip to the Fiesta Tableware Factory Outlet Store in Newell, West Virginia. Today we’re going back for more photos. This time most of them are by my lovely wife, Mrs. PopCulteer, Mel Larch.  These were taken where they make the brightly-colored dinnerware beloved by millions.  You can see a smokestack on the factory above.  More photos follow. Take a look.

Once more into the promised land.

One of the old dish mold presses, on display on the way to the seconds room.

Colorful shirts, actually made of the same ceramic as their dishes (not really…they’re just regular t-shirts)

An artsy pic of heart-shaped dishes

The “other” seconds room, filled with restaurant dishes

A small part of Mel’s haul from the trip

At the end of the parking lot, you can see one wall of a factory building and several bins filled with FiestaWare discards.

Some of these are left overs from a recent tent sale, while some are…casualties

BTW, if you look away from the factory, you get this incredible view of the Ohio River.

A sad tale of broken pottery. I don’t know what they do with this stuff, but I hope they break it into smaller pieces and sell it by the pound to artists for use in mosaics

That is our PopCulteer this week. Check back for fresh content every day, plus all our regular features. The plan for next week is to tell you about new radio content on our internet radio station, The AIR, plus we have some Kickstarter alerts and reviews to share.

Sometimes, things go wrong.

I had planned to bring you a photo essay today, part two of the trip Mrs. PopCulteer, Mel Larch and I took to the Fiesta Tableware Factory Outlet store a few weeks ago.

Mel got home from work and we’d just finished a nice dinner when a big storm blew through, and knocked out our power at the exact moment I’d sat down at the computer to begin writing and editing photos.  The power was restored after more than two hours, but it turns out that my poor wifi router did not survive the electrical shenanigans, and dealing with that, and attempting to administer device resuscitation via reset buttons and such ate up most of the rest of my Wednesday evening.

So, with little time left to PopCult before what promises to be a very busy day (made busier by the need to get a new wifi router), I have decided to dust off and republish one of the my favorite self-indulgent pieces I’ve written for this blog.  Over nine and a half years ago, I sort of celebrated the demise of an old nemesis. I did it without naming names, and with what I felt was a lovely punchline. It wasn’t a high point of mine in terms of Karma, but it was very, very satisfying.

Originally I had buried this at the end of a long PopCulteer, but here it is in a more prominent spot, slightly re-written to fix typos and polish it up and stuff.  Since I no longer feel the need to protect the identity of the person involved, and to answer a question I’ve been asked more than once since this was originally published in late 2012, yes, this is about John Dickensheets.  Don’t feel bad for him. He can’t read it. He’s deader’n hell.

Being The Better Man

It’s time for a personal story. I try not to carry grudges or make enemies. It requires too much effort for too little gain. Yet, sometimes, when somebody does something really bad to you, it’s hard to forgive.

I had a guy like that, and he recently passed away.

This goes back to when I first did Radio Free Charleston as a broadcast radio show.

If you haven’t heard the story before, here’s the quick version: After working over 100 consecutive days at WVNS-FM, with no days off, I was rewarded with the title “Assistant Program Director” (with no raise) and was given the job of filling the weekend part-time on-air slots. I couldn’t find anyone to take the Saturday Midnight to Sunday 6 AM spot, and my top-rated weekday 7 PM to Midnight shift was pre-empted by syndicated crap programming on Fridays, so I pitched the idea of putting a part-timer on the Friday night shift, and took the “dead zone” timeslot myself. The catch was that, after even more syndicated crap programming ended at 2 AM, I could play whatever I wanted to until 6 AM.

The program director woke up out of his hangover long enough to agree, and thus Radio Free Charleston was born. A mix of local, alternative, New Wave, Progressive and Novelty music, it was unlike anything heard on Charleston radio before. Within a few months it was the hottest radio show in town, and that’s when I became a target.

The sales manager at the station hated me. This may have had something to do with the time my Dad physically threw him into MacCorkle Avenue in South Charleston during rush hour back in the 1970s. Even back then, nobody liked this guy.

Anyway, at the peak of RFC’s success we had 17 dedicated advertisers, including Comic World, Budget Tapes and Records and Executive Air. There was an enthusiastic young guy on the sales staff and he took me with him to meetings to sell the show. It was a golden time. We were on the verge of landing national sponsors like Gibson Guitars, when the sales manager issued an edict: No advertiser was allowed to buy time only during my show. They had to purchase a package for spots on the entire station. Further, he began triple-billing my sponsors and turning the bogus bills over to collection agencies.

This was not only discouraging to me, personally, but it was spiteful behavior that cost the station tens of thousands of ad dollars.

Of course, eventually this jerk was promoted to General Manager of the station by the incompetent absentee owners and I quit, rather than give him the pleasure of firing me.

He was never less than a complete asshole to me, and I never forgot it. I got back at him many times. My resignation letter was dripping with arrogance. When the station was sold, I made sure that the new owners knew every skeleton in his bone-filled closet. When the man that he thought was his only friend passed away, a much-loved man who happened to be a second cousin of mine, I got to answer the door when Mr. Jerk came by, and watched him turn shock white at the sight of me.

When Mr. Jerk himself died, after being sickly and suffering for many, many years years, I had a grin on my face for days. Despite my normal, generous attitude toward people, I couldn’t spare any sympathy for this devil.

In fact, I had decided that, when this person finally kicked the bucket, I was going to do something most people only joke about. I was going to take a piss on his grave.

I know it sounds petty. I’ve only given you the rough outline of what the man did to me and how he didn’t care if his actions also hurt his radio station or the local music scene.  In addition to being vile and hateful to me, he was racist, mysogynistic and two-faced. Taking a whiz across his tombstone would have only scratched the surface when it came to paying him back.

I found out where he was to be buried, got directions. and shortly after he was interred, I made a trip, downing a couple of extra bottles of water along the way, just to be sure I was ready to make a big splash.

As I pulled through the gates of the cemetary, I began to feel a sense of elation. I knew that, if he were aware of my plans, it would cause him no end of grief and pain, and that’s what I was aiming for.

But then I got to the grave and it hit me.

How could I let this cold, dead bastard still play a part in my life?

Why would I waste this much time, make such an effort, just to pee on the grave of a pathetic loser of a dead man?

It had turned out to be a colossal waste of time. Why was I letting him live rent-free in my head when he’d already shuffled off this mortal coil, undoubtedly to points South?

When I got there, I took one look, and being the better man, I simply walked away.

That line was just way the hell too long.

Now, with FestivAll and the Regatta in our rear-view mirror, it’s time for PopCult to provide a cursory guide to Charleston and its surrounding cities and towns and take one more quick look at just a few of the cool things going on in and around town this weekend.

Live Music is back at Taylor Books. There is no cover charge, and shows start at 7:30 PM. Friday it’s Makenna Hope. Saturday sees Blue Twisted Steel at Charleston’s Bookstore/coffeehouse/art gallery institution.

At this point, there are no vaccination or mask mandates for any of the events listed this week. However, we all need to remember that the pandemic is not over yet, and now only the stupidest of people are going without vaccinations. 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. After the super-spreader potential of recent weeks, and rising case numbers locally, let’s all try to be smart and kind about this.

If you wanna hear something funny,  tune in to The AIR Wednesday night at 11 PM where we will offer up a new episode of The Comedy Vault, this time featuring an hour of the comedic musical stylings of Spike Jones.

In the meantime, if you’re up for going out, here are some suggestions from folks who were kind enough to provide graphics and make my job easier…

Thursday

Friday

Saturday

Sunday

Tuesday on The AIR  it’s Radio Free Charleston time, and in honor of holidays and anniversaries, we offer up a new three-hour episode of Radio Free Charleston. You simply have to point your cursor over and tune in at the website, or you could just stay on this page, and  listen to the cool embedded player found elsewhere on this page.

Jully 4 was the official 16th anniversary of the video version of Radio Free Charleston and you can hear our celebration at 10 AM and 10 PM Tuesday.   This week our latest Radio Free Charleston digs into the archives of our video program and brings you songs recorded especially for the video incarnation of RFC between 2006 and 2014, including all three episodes devoted to the 2012 Tribute To The Troops show at the Saint Albans City Park Ampitheater, That makes up most of our second hour, with great music from Johnny Compton, Breedlove, In The Company of Wolves, Under Social, Harrah and more.

Our third hour brings you the audio from our video tribute to LiveMix Studio, with music and interviews with Raymond Wallace, Mel Larch, Brian Young and Whistlepunk, Dave Roberts and The Nanker Phelge and members of Feast of Stephen.

But our first hour kicks off with brand new music from Corduroy Brown, plus new tracks from Curious Grace & Black Rabbit, Brian Diller, The Amos Steele Company, Slate Dump, Reginia Spektor, Adrian Belew and more.

Throughout the show we continue our mix of local, independent and major-label artists, just to keep you on your toes. We actually recorded this show on July 4, so if my announcing seems a little distracted, there’s plenty of reason for that.

Check out the playlist below to see all the goodies we have in store (live links will be updated later Tuesday)…

RFC V5 094

hour one
Corduroy Brown “Medicine”
Curious Grace & Black Rabbit “You and Me”
Andy Park “Theme Park”
St. Vincent “Nowhere Inn”
Brian Diller “Last Goodbyes”
Paul Callicoat “A Couple of Fivers”
Amos Steel Co. “Bring It On Home”
Stone Soup “Wishing Well”
Slate Dump “I Am Cringe, But I Am Free”
Stephen Beckner “Fragile”
Regina Spektor “Up The Mountain”
The Dream Syndicate “Where I’ll Stand”
The Velvet Brothers “All I Know”
Adrian Belew “Taking My Shoes Out For A Walk”

hour two
Tribute To The Troops 2012
Cadence Weaver “The National Anthem”
Harrah “Cadillac Rock box”
In The Company of Wolves “Truth Reveal”
Everpulse “Tune It To The End”
Remains Unnamed “Flat Line”
Under Social “Shake It Down”
Breedlove “Every Dog Has Its Day.”
Johnny Compton “Highway Song.”
Point of Jerus “You Will Never Be Free”
In The Company of Wolves “Fixation”
Deck of Fools “Sky High”
Harrah “Too Late”
Lady D “Just The Two of Us”

hour three
The Lickerish Quartet “You All Alone”
Episode 150-LiveMix Studio:
Raymond Wallace “Champagne Charlie”
The Nanker Phelge “I’m Coming Home”
Whistlepunk “Too Good”
The Ghosts of Now “Deathburn”
Mel Larch “Ava Maria”
The Feast of Stephen “Tired of Sinking” “Bankrobber”
Sasha Colette, Jonathon Wood, John Lilly “Wayfaring Stranger”
David M. Stowall “Moltova Nebula”

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 two episodes of MIRRORBALL at 1 PM.  At 3 PM we have two recent episodes of The Swing Shift.

This week’s art is a small pencil sketch, created by yours truly while struggling through a nasty summer of Myasthenia Gravis, but armed with my trusty Blackwing Palamino pencil and some textured paper. It’s a drawing, done using photo reference of the Stegadon skeleton at the The Grave Creek Mound Archaeological Complex, which I told you about last week.

I’d planned to do this as a 20-minute timed drawing, but it was working out better than expected, so I kept going until my hands cramped up sometime after the one-hour mark. I cleaned up some smudges after scanning.

To see it bigger try clicking HERE.

Meanwhile, Monday at 2 PM on The AIR, we re-present the first two episodes of  Psychedelic Shack, followed at 3 PM by the first 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.

Last Friday was the sixth anniversary of The AIR, and Herman Linte and Nigel Pye both offered to do special episodes to commemorate that, but when I realized we’d be dropping those episodes on a holiday when hardly anybody reads PopCult or listens to The AIR, I told them to just give me normal shows for next week, and we’d revisit their origins this week.  From 7 AM to 11 AM Monday we’ll bring the first episode of Sydney’s Big Electric Cat, followed the latest episode, where Sydney Fileen revisits the artist line-up from her first show.

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. Classic episodes can be heard Sunday at 9 AM as part of our Sunday Haversham Recording Institute collection.

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.

Tonight at 8 PM you can hear an hour of hilarious novelty tunes from the archives of Dr. Demento on The Comedy Vault. Wednesday evening at 10 PM, we’ll have another new episode of The Comedy Vault.

Then, at 9 PM we bring you an overnight marathon of the reamaing episodes of our series-within-a-series, as Beatles Blast brings you The Lost Beatles Project episodes of Beatles Blast.

Tonight we bring you an animated short from 1961, known in America as Ersatz.  I first saw this nearly 60 years ago on a network television special that compiled recent OSCAR-winning shorts like this film and Moonbird by John and Faith Hubley and some work by The National Film Board of Canada.

It might be reasonable to assume that seeing this cartoon at an extremely young age shaped my view of the world and my healthy sense of absurdity.  Even today I can be heard muttering “De da DEE da dah dah” while shuffling around the house.

Ersatz (known in its original language as “Surogat”) was the first film produced outside the USA to win an Oscar for animated short subject. It was producedby Zagreb Film, then in Yoguslavia, by Croatian director Dušan Vukotić.  Tonight we take you to the inflatable world of Ersatz, one of the most influential animated shorts of all time.

RFC 110 "FestivAll 2010 part seven" from Rudy Panucci on Vimeo.

This week we go back to a September, 2010 episode of our video incarnation of Radio Free Charleston that was a bit of a minor flashback itself.  The previous June, I had worked myself nearly to death cranking out six episodes of the show devoted to 2010’s FestivAll. After that I got overwhelmed by caregiver duties for my uncle, and only produced two editions of the show over the next 9 weeks. I was so tied up with other things that I wasn’t able to go out and record any fresh material.

However, I discovered that I had a wealth of leftover material from FestivAll that I wasn’t able to shoehorn into that summer’s six-episode run. In addition, I had outtakes and alternate takes of my host segments, so I was able to construct an entire episode simply by using video and audio that I already had in the archives. This is of note because I’m planning for this year’s video episode of our show to primarily feature previously-unseen performances from the vast RFC archives. So consider this a head’s up that it’s been done before.

This show brings you more music from Brian Diller and The Velvet Gypsies, plus extra music from Craig D’Andrea and Ron Sowell, and footage of the balloon sculptures at The Charleston Town Center. It’s sort of a case of re-cooking leftovers so that they taste as good or better than the original meal.

The PopCulteer
July 1, 2022

This week we have a momentous episode of Sydney’s Big Electric Cat, which celebrates its sixth anniversary as part of The AIR on July 1. You’ll get a unique birthday celebration Friday afternoon on The AIR.  The AIR is PopCult’s sister radio station and also officially turns six years old today, even though its roots reach back more than a couple of years before that.  You can hear this anniversary show on The AIR website, or just click on the embedded player found elsewhere on this page.

At 2 PM, we have an encore episode of Mel Larch’s DISCO showcase, MIRRORBALL! Mel will return with a new episode next week. You can hear MIRRORBALL every Friday at 2 PM, with replays Saturday at  9 PM (kicking off a mini-marathon), Sunday at 11 PM, Monday at 9 AM, and Tuesday at 1 PM  exclusively on The AIR.

At 3 PM, on Sydney’s Big Electric Cat, Sydney Fileen reaches back to her very first episode, and replicates the line-up of New Wave artists from her debut program, but she replaces every song with another by the same artist.

It’s a very clever way for Sydney to revisit her first episode without just repeating it. As for repeating it, Friday night at 8 PM you can tune in for a special airing of the very first episode of Sydney’s Big Electric Cat, followed immediately by an encore of Friday’s new episode, so you can compare them, back to back.

I was really impressed with the concept, and thought it was a great way to mark six years of Sydney’s Big Electric Cat. Check out this new playlist, based on the artists from the first episode…

Big Electric Cat 093

M “Neutron”
Bow Wow Wow “Mile High Club”
The Humans “Pipeline”
The Fixx “Stand Or Fall”
Adam Ant “Dog Eat Dog”
Kim Wilde “2-6-5-8-0”
The Buggles “I Love You Miss Robot”
The Human League “The Lebanon”
Romeo Void “A Girl In Trouble”
Split Enz “Shark Attack”
Yazoo “Situation”
Pete Shelley “Telephone Operator”
The Waitresses “Wasn’t Tomorrow Wonderful”
Elvis Costello “Secondary Modern”
Ultravox “The Ascent”
Depeche Mode “Wrong”
XTC “Meccanic Dancing”
Martha and the Muffins “This Is The Ice Age”
Missing Persons “Hello I Love You”
Trio “Hearts Are Trump”
Wall of Voodoo “Two Minutes To Lunch”
The Go Gos “We Got The Beat”
Animotion “Let Him Go”
Gary Numan “I Nearly Married A Human”
Orchestral Manuevers In The Dark “The Punishment of Luxury”
The Beat “Rough Rider”
ABC “4 Ever 2 Gether”
Heaven 17 “Who’ll Stop The Rain”
Thompson Twins “No Peace For The Wicked”

At 8PM Friday, tune in for a rebroadcast of the first edition of Sydney’s Big Electric Cat, from six years ago, and for the sake of comparison, here is the playlist for that program…

Big Electric Cat 001

M “Pop Musik”
Bow Wow Wow “I Want Candy”
The Humans “I Live In The City”
The Fixx “Red Skies”
Adam Ant “Desperate But Not Serious”
Kim Wilde “Kids In America”
The Buggles “Clean Clean”
The Human League “Don’t You Want Me”
Romeo Void “Never Say Never”
Split Enz “How Can I Resist Her”
Yazoo “Don’t Go”
Pete Shelley “Homosapien”
The Waitresses “I Know What Boys Like”
Elvis Costello “Green Shirt”
Ultravox “The Thin Wall”
Depeche Mode “Just Can’t Get Enough”
XTC “Generals and Majors”
Martha and the Muffins “Echo Beach”
Missing Persons “Destination Unknown”
Trio “Da Da Da”
Wall of Voodoo “Mexican Radio”
The Go Gos “Vacation”
Animotion “Obsession”
Gary Numan “Are Friends Electric”
Orchestral Manuevers In The Dark “Enola Gay”
The Beat “Save It For Later”
ABC “Poison Arrow”
Heaven 17 “We Don’t Need This Fascist Groove Thing”
Thompson Twins “Doctor Doctor”

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 what’s on The AIR Friday, and that is this week’s PopCulteer. Check back every day for fresh content and loads of or regular features.