Author: Rudy Panucci (Page 52 of 581)

If you are fullly vaccinated, and observe all proper pandemic protocols, you can go out and enjoy live music this weekend. Your PopCulteer is not yet, but if he were, he’d be at these shows.

Friday it’s my old friends, The Swivel Rockers at Sam’s Uptown Cafe, and Saturday RFC faves, Unmanned, will support Building Rockets at The Empty Glass.

Wednesday afternoon The AIR flis the switch on a brand-new ” covers mixtape” episode of Beatles Blast!  This week, in a listener-suggested reverse of last week’s show, we bring you an hour of The Beatles (together and solo) playing songs written by other people. You can listen at The AIR Website, or on the nifty little player over in the right-hand column of this here blog.

At 2 PM, your humble blogger returns with a one-hour mixtape of songs that The Beatles sang, that other people wrote on Beatles Blast.  You’ll get to hear The Fab Four wearing their influences on their sleeves as they perform songs that shaped their musical evolution.  You get to thear the band, together and solo, performing classic tunes made famous by Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Carl Perkins, Fats Domino, Hoagy Carmichael, Little Richard and more.

Check out the playlist.

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The Beatles “Please Mr. Postman”
John Lennon “Stand By Me”
George Harrison “I Really Love You”
Ringo Starr “Don’t Be Cruel”
Paul McCartney “All Shook Up”
The Beatles “Roll Over Beethoven”
The Beatles “Hippy Hippy Shake”
The Beatles “Long Tall Sally”
John Lennon “Ain’t That A Shame”
The Beatles “Memphis, Tennessee”
Paul McCartney “Brown Eyed Handsome Man”
The Beatles “Matchbox”
Ringo Starr “Drift Away”
The Beatles “Twist and Shout”
The Beatles “Nothin’ Shakin”
George Harrison “Baltimore Oriole”
The Beatles “Sure To Fall”
Plastic Ono Band “Blue Suede Shoes”
The Beatles “Leave My Kitten Alone”
Ringo Starr “You’re Sixteen”
George Harrison “Got My Mind Set On You”
The Beatles “Kansas City”

Beatles Blast can be heard every Wednesday at 2 PM, with replays Thursday at 10 PM and Saturday Afternoon. Monday we’ll be plugging another Beatles Blast marathon into the schedule, so keep reading PopCult for the details.

Tuesday on The AIR  it’s a bittersweet Radio Free Charleston, as we devote much of our first hour to Will Mecum, who passed away after an accident last week.  Will was the lead guitarist, and last original member of Karma To Burn, a West Virginia band that had tremendous success and influence all around the world.

You can hear this edition of Radio Free Charleston at 10 AM and 10 PM Tuesday. You simply have to move your cursor over and tune in at the website, or you could just stay on this page, and  listen to the cool embedded player over at the top of the right column.

I only met Will once, at Mission Coalition, a two-day Metal Show organized by Jason “Roadblock” Robinson almost ten years ago. I got to hang out with Will and the rest of Karma To Burn backstage for a few minutes, and he struck me as an incredibly humble and down-to-Earth guy for someone who had the amount of international success that he’d achieved. In our first hour we bring you five tracks from Karma To Burn, and three from another of his bands, Treasure Cat.

You can see Will in action on our highlight video of Mission Coalition HERE, and in episode 151 of RFC Volume Two HERE. The header image for this post is a quick pencil sketch by me, based on a photo by Gary Cooper Photography.

After that we bring you our usual mix of local and not-local musicians, but for our third hour we revive an episode of RFC Volume Four, from 2017.

Check out the playlist to see all the goodies we bring you this week…

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Karma To Burn “Patty Hearst’s Closet Mantra”
Karma To Burn “49” “50” “36” “33”
Treasure Cat “Battle of Britain”
“Captain Smirk”
“Snake Pliskin (I Thought You Were Dead)”

The Settlement “Enter Mission”
Martin Gore “Vervet”
The Flying Lizards “Steam Away”

hour two
Boldly Go “Phasers On Kill”
Unmanned “Strike One”
Squeeze “Annie Get Your Gun (Live)”
Robin Trower, Maxi Priest, Livingstone Brown “Sunshine Revolution”
Lady D “Karma Is A Bitch”
Gary Moore “Tore Down”
The Swivels “Appalachian Debutante”
All Torches Lit “Occulation”
Sex Pistols “Submission”
Joe Strummer “Minstrel Boy”
Sheldon Vance “Tonight We Sing”
Esmerelda Strange “Love Bug”
The Style Council “It Just Came To Pieces In My Hands”

hour three
Membrane Cell “Insignificant Other”
The Stars Revolt “Goodnight, Goodnight”
Time And Distance “first time caller, long time listener”
A Story Told “Fall Back”
The Carpenter Ants “I Feel Like A Woman”
Pale Nova “How Long”
Kerry Hughes “End’s Never Been So Near”
Jeff Ellis “Is Something The Matter”
The Company Stores “Nightingale”
Scarlet Revolt “Slow Fade”
Flannel Shark “Mary Jane’s Last Dance”
Feast of Stephen “Ward 7”

You can hear this episode of Radio Free Charleston Tuesday at 10 AM and 10 PM on The AIR, with replays Thursday at 3 PM, Friday at 9 AM and 7 PM, Saturday at 11 AM and Midnight, Sunday at 11 AM and the next Monday at 8 PM, exclusively on The AIR.

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.

Our art is all-digital this week. Your humble artist/blogger went on a much-needed long drive with his wife, and didn’t attempt to make any real-world art this weekend. I did get some new cheap canvas board for future projects, but the fingers needed a rest, so I let the mouse do the arting.

This is a geometric semi-abstract, but there’s a bit of a narrative in there, if you stare long enough.

If you want to see it bigger, just click on the image.

Meanwhile, Monday at 2 PM on The AIR, we bring you a new episode of  Psychedelic Shack, followed at 3 PM by a 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 at the top of the right-hand column of this blog.

At 2 PM, Nigel Pye’s new Psychedelic Shack includes the following songs:

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The Who “Armenia, City In The Sky”
Polyphonic Spree “She’s A Rainbow”
The Yardbirds “Happenings Ten Years Time Ago”
Hawkwind “Seeing It As You Really Are”
Cream “Dance The Night Away”
Greta Van Fleet “Age of Machines”
Badfinger “We’re For The Dark”
Eric Burden and War “Tobacco Road”
The Rolling Stones “Tell Her Now It Is”
The Cyrkle “Nicole”
The Hollies “On A Carousel”
Redbone “Condition Your Condition”
Fanny “I Don’t Need Your Love”

Psychedelic Shack can now 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.

At 3 PM, Herman Linte offers up a new Prognosis, withhighlights of recent live releases from Rennaissance and Kansas. Check out this line-up…

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Renaissance
“Carpet of The Sun”
“Ocean Gypsy”
“Symphony of Light”
“Running Hard”
“Mystic and the Muse”
“Ashes Are Burning”

Kansas
“Intro”
“Carry On My Wayward Son”
“Icarus”
“The Wall”
“Keyboard Improv/Drum Solo/Magnum Opus”
“Lamplight Symphnony”
“Song For America”
“Violin Solo”
“What’s On My Mind”
“Belexes”

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 7 PM, stick around for a 12-hour marathon of Six Degrees of Separation, featuring conversations with prominent local musicians, recorded at The Empty Glass.

A few days ago, Will Mecum, the lead guitarist and keeper of the flame of Karma To Burn was killed in an accident. I will have more about Will Tuesday in PopCult as we devote some of this week’s Radio Free Charleston to his music, but for now, here is Karma To Burn, live in concert at Rock In Bourlon 2018,  Recorded in Bourlon (North Of France) – June 30th 2018.

This week we go back to March, 2015, one final time, for another episode of The RFC MINI SHOW shot at JoeLanta, in Atlanta, Georgia. This particular episode starsThe Possum Kingdom Ramblers . This group is possibly the second-most genuine Bluegrass band that we’ve had on Radio Free Charleston.  The group was the brainchild of Buddy Finethy, and includes Ricky and Bambi from Radio Cult, Jas Ingram and for this performance, Timothy Price. The band tackles the old Bluegrass chestnut, “Seven Nation Army” and weaves many other traditional mountain music tunes in and out of it, creating a fairly epic twelve-minute masterpiece.

As an added bonus, my introduction was recorded in Anderson, South Carolina, at a culturally significant place.

The PopCulteer
April 30, 2021

May 1 marks one full year since MIRRORBALL, Mel Larch’s Disco Mixtape program debuted on The AIR as a one-off music special, and became such a runaway hit that we decided to put it on our weekly schedule full-time. 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.

It was during the late summer of 2019 when Mr. and Mrs. PopCulteer were careenig through Eastern Pennsylvania, listening to The Rialto Report podcast about Andrea True, when Mel remarked on how much she loved Disco music, and we began to talk about doing a show of Disco music for The AIR. The show didn’t happen until the pandemic shut everything down and gave us more free time, and the first MIRRORBALL debuted as an AIR Music Special on May 1, 2020.

One year later and Mel still does a fresh episode of the show every other week, but because it’s been a full year since its debut, to celebrate we are going to run 24 hours of MIRRORBALL beginning May 1 at Midnight (that’s Friday night, into Saturday, if you’re keeping track at home). We will play every episode (except for holiday specials) and we will wind up with Mel’s latest Disco opus, which debuts Friday at 2 PM.

To mark one full year of MIRRORBALL, Mel put together an hour of some of her absolute favorites from the Disco era. Tune in at 2 PM Friday, and check out this playlist…

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Jimmy “Bo” Horne “Dance Across The Floor”
Labelle “Lady Marmalade”
Chic “Le Freak”
Dan Hartman “Instant Replay”
Anita Ward “Ring My Bell”
Peter Brown “Dance With Me”
Bee Gees “Stayin’ Alive”
Donna Summer “Dim All The Lights”
The Trammps “Disco Inferno”
Heatwave “The Groove Line”
Andrea True Connection “More, More, More”
Village People “YMCA”

You can hear MIRRORBALL every Friday at 2 PM, with a 24-hour marathon beginning Saturday at  Midnight and with replays at 9 PM, Sunday at 11 PM, Monday at 9 AM, Tuesday at 1 PM and Wednesday at 7 PM, exclusively on The AIR.

At 3 PM, Sydney Fileen graces us with a special mixtape show of her own. In response to request from her fans in New Zealand, Sydney has done a deep-dive into her New Wave record collection to assemble an all-Kiwi edition of Sydney’s Big Electric Cat.  Sydney promises lots of bands that are barely known outside of the Islands of New Zealand, along with a few ringers who went on to have international success.  Best of all, every track is drenched in crunchy New Wave goodness. Check out the playlist…

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Split Enz “What’s The Matter With You”
The Androidss “Auckland Tonight”
Flesh D-Vice “Kill That Girl”
Car Crash Set “Fall From Grace”
The Body Electric “Pulsing”
DD Smash “The Gambler”
Th’ Dudes “Bliss”
Penknife Glides “Taking The Weight Off”
Mi-Sex “Computer Games”
Alms For Children “Danny Boy”
The Verlaines “Death And The Maiden”
The Mockers “Good Old Days”
The Gordons “Sometimes”
Desperate Measures “Generation Gap”
Screaming Meemees “Sunday Boys”
The Tall Dwarfs “Nothing’s Gonna Happen”
Blam Blam Blam “Don’t Fight It Marsha, It’s Bigger Than Both Of Us”
Danse Macabre “Between The Lines”
Dum Dum Boys “Idiot Boy”
The Instigators “Hope She’s Alright”
The Scavengers “Mysterex”
This Sporting Life “Total Loss”
Broken Dolls “Serenade”
Coconut Rough “Sierra Leone”
Coup D’etat “Dr. I Like Your Medicine”
Pedestrians “Saturday Night”
Newmatics “Riot Squad”
The Knobz “Culture”
The Features “City Scenes”
Citizen Band “Feel Good”
Spaces “Just Like Clockwork”

Sydney’s Big Electric Cat is produced at Haversham Recording Institute in London, and can be heard every Friday at 3 PM, with replays 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 for fresh content every single freakin’ day.

Animated Discussions

I’ve had HBO Max for a few months now, and I have mentioned this in passing before, but today, since they’re dropping a batch of new episodes on the service, I want to praise Looney Tunes Cartoons, the latest revival of the classic Warner Brothers cartoon characters, and the first to get it right in decades.

Since they were created under the absent management of Leon Schlesinger, the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons produced at “Termite Terrace” at the Warner Brothers Studio have been the gold standard of animated shorts. Only MGM and Max Fleisher came close to the chaos and hilarity of Looney Tunes. The other studio’s cartoons, expecially Disney’s, pale in comparison.

With animation legends Tex Avery, Bob Clampett, Chuck Jones and Friz Freleng at the helm, Warner Brothers led the pack with a roster of animation superstars like Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Tweety Bird and more. Even with top directors, Avery and Clampett, moving on after WWII, the Warner Brothers cartoons still cranked more hits than misses until around 1960.

After the animation unit was shut down in 1965, there have been attempts to revive the Looney Tunes characters at least once a decade, with mixed results. Some of the revivals have been commercially successful, and some get credit for trying, but none of the revivals have come close to matching the comedic craft and anarchy of the classic Looney Tunes of 1935 to 1945. In fact, a lot of the attempted revivals were downright horrid.

My expectations were low, going in. I did not bother to even read up on the creative teams producing the new shorts for HBO Max. In fact, before I watched the new shorts, billed as “Looney Tunes Cartoons,” I went back and watched a bunch of the classic Looney Tunes and a few of the less-than-stellar revivals.

When I settled in to watch Looney Tunes Cartoons, I was stunned. The animation was lush and easily as good as the golden age. The character designs skipped over the last few decades of ill-advised “updates” and returned to the classic looks. And the cartoons are funny as hell. There was none of that limited animation and angular design crap.

These were like finding freshly-discovered artifacts, unseen since the 1940s. If it weren’t for the occasional contemporary reference (flat screen TVs and smartphones), these would pass for vintage Looney Tunes gold.

Even more shocking to me was the credits. The producer of Looney Tunes Cartoons is Pete Browngardt, the creator of Uncle Grandpa. I loved Uncle Grandpa on Cartoon Network, but I never got any indication from the show that the same producer could make classic-style Looney Tunes cartoons. The show had more of a modern, Cal-Arts style to it.

Yet even way more shocking to me was the discovery that Johnny Ryan was one of the writers and story editors. I’ve been a fan of Ryan’s since Fantagraphics started publishing his underground comic, Angry Youth Comix, back in the 1990s, and with his extreme and obscene take on the world he is probably the last person on the planet that I would have pegged as ever working on a mainstream animated property. (I was unaware of work he had done previously for Nickelodeon Magazine under a pen name).

I cannot stress how pleasant a surprise it is to see new Looney Tunes that are so faithful to the source material. The character designs harken back to the designs of Bob Clampett, Tex Avery and a young Chuck Jones. The Bugs Bunny you see in Looney Tunes Cartoons is primal Bugs. He’s not even the refined Bugs that we saw in the 1950s. This is pure, uncut Bugs Bunny.

There have been minor design changes, but they are miniscule. Bugs Bunny has yellow gloves instead of white.

Daffy Duck is the insane Bob Clampett Daffy, not the lame egotistical Daffy of the post-war era. This is manna from heaven for fans of classic animation.

Much has been made of the fact that, in the new cartoons, Elmer Fudd and Yosemite Sam have had their guns taken away. That actually happened decades ago. What Looney Tunes Cartoons does is to arm Elmer with large axes and scythes and the occasional giant robot or batch of explosives.

Other Looney Tunes characters are revived as well. Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote return in new cartoons which are as funny as the three good ones that Chuck Jones made back in the 1950s. We get to see classic renditions of Marvin the Martian, Gossamer, Foghorn Leghorn, Tweety and Sylvester, Beaky Buzzard, Taz, Porky Pig and others. In the new batch that drops today we get a new cartoon with Gremlins, and the first ever Petunia Pig star vehicle.

The Voice work is great. The direction and tone is perfect, and the animation is amazing. Check out HBO Max for the best Looney Tunes Cartoons in 75 years.

And yes, I decided to revive the old “Animated Discussions” name for this post. Folks with long, long memories may recall that, with Mel Larch,  I wrote the Animated Discussions column for The Charleston Gazette from 1991 until 2005. Mel and I have talked about reviving it as a radio show for The AIR, and I had continued it in the early days of PopCult, so it fit the bill for this.

Wednesday afternoon The AIR brings you a brand-new ” covers mixtape” episode of Beatles Blast! You can listen at The AIR Website, or on the nifty little player over in the right-hand column of this here blog.

At 2 PM, your humble blogger returns with a one-hour mixtape of quirky and wonderful (and largely brand-new) covers of songs by the Beatles, together and solo, on Beatles Blast.  We even snuck in John playing one of Ringo’s hits (which he wrote). We celebrate the joy of singing Beatles songs with a collection of cool interpretations by a diverse collection of amazing artists. Check out the playlist.

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Polyphonic Spree “Let ’em In”
Peter Frampton “Isn’t It A Pity”
Neal Morse “Maybe I’m Amazed”
John Lennon “Goodnight Vienna”
Cheap Trick “Gimme Some Truth”
The Hollies “If I Needed Someone”
Joachim Kuhn “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds”
Vanilla Fudge “Ticket To Ride”
Ben Lee “In My Life”
Neal Morse “If I Fell”
Ben Harper & Innocent Criminals “Michelle”
Paul Weller “Come Together”
Michelle Shocked “Lovely Rita”
Adrian Belew “Blackbird”
Chumbawumba “Her Majesty”
Bill Anschell “Across The Universe”

Beatles Blast can be heard every Wednesday at 2 PM, with replays Thursday at 10 PM and Saturday Afternoon. Soon we’ll be plugging a Beatles Blast marathon into the schedule, somewhere, so keep reading PopCult for the details.

Tuesday on The AIR  Radio Free Charleston sort of hits a milestone.  The newish, three-hour version of RFC hits episode 50. If this weren’t the fifth incarnation of the show, I’d make a bigger deal about it, but between the original broadcast version, the video RFC, The RFC MINI SHOW video program, and the earlier versions of the show that ran on Voices of Appalachia and OntheAIRadio, I’ve produced around 540 Radio Free Charleston shows. It’s hard to get that excited, but I did manage to find a way to make this special…by recycling!

You simply have to move your cursor over and listen at the website, or you could just stay on this page, and groove to the cool embedded player over at the top of the right column.

Tune in to Radio Free Charleston at 10 AM and 10 PM Tuesday and you will hear one of the original broadcast episodes of show, from January 7,1990, when I was but a wee lad of a DJ, and blogs were years away from being invented.  I have mercilessly edited down nearly five hours of on-air chaos to fit into our three-hour timeslot.

This is actually a case where I took two episodes of RFC Volume Three, from 2015 that first re-presented this broadcast, and just edited them further, since this show is historically significant, and hasn’t been heard by anyone for more than six years. Sometimes “historically significant” means, “the least amount of work.”

Check out the playlist to see all the music that made the cut…

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Stark Raven “Into The Fire”
Brian Diller “Mr. Auctioneer”
Brian Diller and the Ride “Waking Up”
Brian Diller and the Ride “Shoe Fits”
Three Bodies “The Drive”
Three Bodies “My Friend”
Three Bodies “Surpise Ending/Unknown Title”
The Bounty “Mary’s Door”
The Bounty “Buffalos”
The Bounty “Pandora’s Box”
The Bounty “325”
Zone 3 “Willy The Wimp”

The Go Van Gogh Family Tree:

True Rumor “River Beyond”
The Meadowblasters “Da Da Da Da Da I Love You”
The Meadowblasters “She Doesn’t Want My Love”
Go Van Gogh “Planet Freedom”
Go Van Gogh “I Don’t Like Trains”
The Tunesmiths “Ballet Dancer”
The Tunesmiths “For Your Love”
Go Van Gogh “Shut Up, I Love You”

Atomic Cafe “The Trax”
Larry Groce “No Woman, No Cry”
Larry Groce “Accidentally Like A Martyr”
Blue Million “Everything Inside Out”
Blue Million “I’ll Keep You Warm”
David Lanham Band “Rock With You”
David Lanham Band “Small Town Blues”
World Without Fear “Nothing”
World Without Fear “Please Don’t Love Me”
Mad Scientist Club “Live Song”
Mad Scientist Club “Thunder and Lightning”
Mad Scientist Club “Doctor Owsley”
Still Portrait/Mark Scarpelli “Music that I don’t remember the titles to”

Stark Raven (side one of the debut album)”

“Riding On A Wave”
“I Know You”
“Be With Me”
“Feel Only Love”
“He Loves To Limbo”

The Swivels “No Vaccination”
The Swivels “Mobile Man”
Tim Truman “Ten Dollar Dog”
The Pudgy Young Upstarts “Uncontrollable Urge”

This is a pretty fun time capsule back to the first incarnation of Radio Free Charleston, and I hope you guys get a kick out of hearing it.

You can hear this episode of Radio Free Charleston Tuesday at 10 AM and 10 PM on The AIR, with replays Thursday at 3 PM, Friday at 9 AM and 7 PM, Saturday at 11 AM and Midnight, Sunday at 11 AM and the next Monday at 8 PM, exclusively on The AIR.

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.

Some notes about what you’ll hear:

Portarit of a young, underpaid radio star

This show originally aired early in January, 1990, right after RFC and yours truly had been the subject of a profile in the Charleston Gazette written by Michael Lipton. I decided to devote all four hours of the first show after the article was published to local artists. Truth be told, the show actually ran almost five hours. Station management wasn’t listening to my show (nobody at the station ever did) so I could run long and have the DJ that followed me make up the time.

You will hear me cracking jokes and making remarks about the piece Michael wrote. A lot of folks thought that I was genuinely angry, when in fact I was thrilled with the press and was just milking it for laughs. So please, do not think that I was really upset with Michael Lipton. He’s always been great to me and I’ve always respected him. I was just only joking, really!

This is pretty much what the people heard between 2 AM and 7 AM on January 7, 1990. I tried to keep the modern-day interruptions to a minimum. I did trim quite a bit of stuff, but it’ll give you the general idea of what the show was like back then.

These recordings are taken from an off-air recording of the original broadcast, so there may be some loss of sound quality.

There may be a new Swing Shift later today on The AIR, but only if I feel like whipping one out first thing Tuesday morning.