Author: Rudy Panucci (Page 97 of 581)

The PopCult Comix Bookshelf

THE SPIRIT: AN 80TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION
by Will Eisner
Clover Press, LLC
ISBN-13: 978-1951038052
$12.99

Will Eisner’s The Spirit is one of the most important comic book features ever, due to the influence it’s had on comics since it debuted in 1940. Eisner’s mastery of short-form storytelling, combined with his innovation in building much of the language of graphic storytelling and the comic book continues to influence comic book artists many decades after the publication of new stories of The Spirit ended. Eisner was not only a master of laying out a story and panel composition, but his finished art (some of it completed by assistants under his direction) still stands out as some of the best comics has ever seen.

It is a testament to Eisner’s talents that The Spirit has remained relevant and has been kept in print for such a long time. I first discovered The Spirit in the 1970s, when Jim Warren brought the character back to newsstands in a magazine-sized reprint series.

My first impression of the character was in black-and-white, with tones added, so even forty-five years later, it’s still a little jarring for me to see the character in color.

But The Spirit was originally published in color, as a comic book/comic strip hybrid. The Spirit Section was a weekly tabloid-sized comic book, distributed as a Sunday Newspaper insert, and at its peak in the 1940s, was delivered to over five million households.

The Spirit was the masked vigilante identity of Denny Colt, a Central City police detective gunned down in the line of duty who fakes his death so that he can continue to fight crime outside of the boundaries of the law, with the approval of the city’s police commissioner.

While that might lead you to think that The Spirit is a gritty, noiresque crime drama, you’d only be partly correct. In addition to being the finest comics noir ever created, The Spirit also offered up light-hearted character studies, poignant urban fables and regularly mixed in elements of romance, comedy, horror and adventure with the not-so-standard detective stories.

THE SPIRIT: AN 80TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION is a delightful sampler, with nine vintage stories (five of them with new color by award winning colorists Laura Martin and Jeromy Cox), each with a brief introduction by a selection of comics professionals and historians, including Denis Kitchen, Paul Levitz, Craig Yoe and Kenova’s own, Beau Smith.

My only nit-picky criticism of the introductions is that they don’t all give the original date of publication of the story. Chalk that up to me being a comics nerd who was spoiled by reading reprint comics curated by E. Nelson Bridwell while I was growing up.

The intros are short and filled with great information, and the selection of stories is top-notch, avoiding the “Classics” that have already been reprinted a million times before in favor of lesser-seen, but still amazing works that show off Eisner’s range as a storyteller. We get to see The Spirit in different settings, a Western, a monster movie, a broad parody, a radio drama, a nuclear spy story and more. This volume also includes his “origin” tale, as re-told in 1946.

All of this demonstrates Eisner’s timeless quality as a writer and artist. These stories still stand head and shoulders above most of the comics produced before or since. Eisner’s work does not seem like “Golden Age” comics work, but it is. However, it fit right in with the Warren Magazines when I discovered it in the 70s, and it still stands out compared to the best of today’s comics.

If you were to compare Eisner to a filmmaker (which is easy to do because he was a pioneer when it came to bringing a cinematic style to comics). you couldn’t just compare him to one director. Eisner’s work is like the best of Orson Welles, Frank Capra, Sam Fuller and Stanley Kubrick, all rolled into one.

THE SPIRIT: AN 80TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION is a great introduction to Eisner’s work. The Spirit has been collected many times before (notably with the entire run collected as part of DC Comics’ Archives Series), but in this nicely-bound, slim but ample collection, at a low price, it’s affordable and easy to hold and read. This is in the “Graphic Novella” format, which is a softcover book with hardcover binding and trim, and only around a hundred pages or so.

THE SPIRIT: AN 80TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION is highly-recommended for any fan of comics, and can be ordered from any bookseller using the ISBN code. I’m hoping Clover Press publishes more collections of The Spirit in this format. It really presents the work well.

Mel Larch’s MIRRORBALL, a Disco Music special which debuted last Friday on The AIR turned out to be so popular that it will return as a series of AIR Music Specials over the next few months. To celebrate, we are scheduling an encore today at 3 PM on The AIR, which you can listen to at The AIR website, or on this shiny and sexy embedded radio player…

Because of the MIRRORBALL encore, Mel’s other show, Curtain Call, is skipping a week in it’s series of tribute episodes to Stephen Sondheim. That will be back next week.

Also new on The AIR this week, you can expect another edition of Rudy & Mel’s Shut-in Show, plus classic episodes of our other programming. I would tell you what’s on the Shut-in Show, but we don’t record those until hours before they air, so there’s no telling what we’ll be talking about.

Thursday afternoon we will be running the latest Radio Free Charleston, which is a nostalgic throwback to an original broadcast episode of the show from just over thirty years ago. You can read about that HERE.

You can also listen to that show, along with many of our recent programs on-demand at the “Podcast” section of The AIR website.

Next week we are planning to bring you new episodes of all of our music specialty programs. This week The Haversham Recording Institute in London is being deep-cleaned, and Herman Linte, Sydney Fileen, Nigel Pye and the Haversham crew will all be returning to their studio in a day or so, rather than working from their homes. We’re hoping Steven Allen Adams will be able to give us a new NOISE BRIGADE, and we’ll also bring you fresh editions of our other shows.

We are trying to be here for you, helping to fill the time while you’re staying safe at home during the pandemic.

We offer up a special not-quite brand new episode of Radio Free Charleston Tueday on The AIR. There’s also a new episode of The Swing Shift. You can leap over and tune in at the website, or you could just stay on this page, and listen to this swell little embedded radio player…

At 10 AM and 10 PM you can hear a rebroadcast of most of an original episode of Radio Free Charleston, as broadcast on WVNS Radio on April 13, 1990. We bring you the first three hours of the program, bailing out before the final hour, which this week was actually a bootleg Beatle album that I was sneaking onto the station. You might notice that, even back then, we were flying our freeform radio flag high, with a playlist that’s all over the damn map.

Before we get into the rebroadcast, I play a song by The Stranglers and give a quick tribute to David Greenfield, the keyboard player for the punk/prog band, who passed away Sunday night of complications from Covid-19. Greenfield appears in the original broadcast as well, as a member of The Stranglers and The Purple Helmets.

RFC debuted on Labor Day Weekend, 1989, and by the following spring had become so successful that station management had to kill it. We didn’t last a month beyond this episode, but this was pretty epic. Remember that the show began at 2 AM Saturday night/Sunday morning, yet we had live, in-studio performances from Strawfyssh, (who were then a trio consisting of Todd Jackson, Keith Walters and I think Jon Raider), and they were joined by Brian Young of Three Bodies, and after they left the studio, Johnny Rock, Tom Hilliard and Sam Spade turned up after 4 AM.

It was pretty epic, and we spend a lot of the show talking about the then-upcoming Earth Day 20 celebration that Radio Free Charleston put on at West Virginia State College. This episode has a ton of surreal audio comedy bits that had been improvised by yours truly, in cahoots with Brian Young and America’s Test Kitchen‘s own Bridget Lancaster. You’ll even get to hear some interesting commercials presented for historical and hysterical value. That’s all heard between me spinning an insanely eclectic playlist that runs from YES to John Prine to Frank Zappa to Shawn Colvin, with a bunch of local tunes mixed in as well.

Check out this playlist…

RFCV5 016

The Stranglers “Nice ‘N’ Sleazy”
Disclaimer
RFC Theme
Clownhole “Heads On Fire”
Crack The Sky “Love Me Like A Terrorist”
Strawfyssh “If Only If”
Strawfyssh “Sacred Pommegranite”
They Might Be Giants “She Was A Hotel Detective”
Earth Day promo
Stark Raven “Irrational People”
The Purple Helmets “I Can’t Explain”
Fishbone “Slow Bus Movin'”
Strawfyssh “Choppin’ Broccoli”
Marc Jordan “Can We Still Be Friends”
Figures On A Beach “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet”
Brian Young with Keith Walters “Swinging Man”
Skinny Puppy “The Omen 1”
Government Cheese “Camping On Acid”
Psychedelic Furs “Pulse”

hour two
Brian & Rudy “Elvis ID”
Frank Zappa “Ride My Face To Chicago”
The Nude Kids On The Block “The Right Muff (live)”
Peter Frampton “Show Me The Way”
Gentlemen Without Weapons “Unconditional Love”
Suicide Hotline
The Dead Milkmen “My Many Smells”
The Clash “Rudie Can’t Fail”
Nude Kids On The Block “Happy Birthday Mo-chelle”
Shocking Interview
Smoking commercial
Pere Ubu “Waiting For Mary”
Joaquin Liévano “The Art of Bowing”
Bauhaus “Bela Lugosi’s Dead”
The Strangeloves “I Want Candy”
Messages from Strawfyssh
Don McClean “American Pie”
Full Body Slam
The Dickies “Monster Island”
Hyper Station ID
The Stranglers “Mean To Me”
John Wesley Harding “Here Comes The Groom”

hour three
The Beloved “Don’t You Worry”
Three Bodies “Treehouse”
Meandering rant
YES “Tempus Fugit”
Sexy Coughing
Syd Barrett “Dollyrocker”
David Friesen “Festival Dance”
Some Forgotten Color “Restrain”
Johnny Rock, and Tom Hilliard and Sam Spade in the studio
West Virginia Tourism Jingle
Cranky Old Men
John Prine “Illegal Smiles”
Daivd Bowie “Fashion”
Shawn Colvin “Cry Like An Angel”
Studio chatter
Dirty waiter talk
John Prine “Sam Stone”
Stephen Beckner “Blind Tomorrow”
The Sugarcubes “Regina”
Studio chatter to the end of the show

Radio Free Charleston can be heard Tuesday at 10 AM and 10 PM, with replays Thursday at 3 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 1 PM today, we’ll replay last week’s Air Music Special, MIRRORBALL, hosted by Mel Larch. 2 PM sees an encore of a recent episode of Psychedelic Shack, as the entire Haversham Recording Institute crew has taken this week off.

Don’t despair, though, because we do have a new episode of The Swing Shift at 3 PM Tuesday. This week we spend the whole our jiving to the 90s Swing Revival, with bands like Cherry Poppin’ Daddies, Brian Setzer Orchestra, Big Bad Voodoo Daddy and Royal Crown Revue. Look at this setlist…

The Swing Shift 091

Cherry Poppin’ Daddies “Mr. White Keys”
Brian Setzer Orchestra “That Mellow Saxaphone”
Indigo Swing “Swing Lover”
Lily Wilde “Work Baby”
Big Bad Voodoo Daddy “Jump With Me Baby”
The Jive Aces “Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate The Positive”
Lavy Smith and her Red Hot Skillet Lickers
-“Everybody’s Talking About Miss Thing”
Royal Crown Revue “Watts Local”
Big Time Operator “The Game”
Atomic Fireballs “Spanish Fly”
Louis Prima Jr. “A Sunday Kind Of Love”
Johnny Favourite “Black Dog”
Dem Brooklyn Bums “Wifebeata Boogie”
Joe Jackson’s Jumpin’ Jive “San Francisco Fran”

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.

One of the things I do when I’m in the mood is to take a photo and so thoroughly mangle it by repeatedly feeding it through digital filters and manipulating the colors so much that the end result is completely unrecognizable.

While the image you see above looks like a semi-abstract floral painting of some sort, it is actually a super-manipulated take on a publicity photo of some actors from the 1970s. Because I do not know how litigious the original photographer might be, I will refrain from identifying the actors or posting the original image here. If you would like to try to figure it out for yourself, here’s a clue: It doesn’t look anything like the image above.

You can click the image if you want to inspect a bigger version and figure it all out.

Meanwhile, over in radio-land, Monday on The AIR, our Monday Marathon runs from 7 AM to 3 PM , and brings you eight episodes of Beatles Blast.  These are NOT the Lost Beatles Tapes episodes, and instead follow the show’s original format.Then 3 PM should see an encore of a recent episode of Prognosis with Herman Linte. Our friends at Haversham are busy on another project this week, but should be back with fresh programming next week.

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

Since tomorow is a day I dread, a day people have proclaimed “Star Wars Day” for no other reason than the tired and barely clever pun, “May The Fourth Be With You.”  Because of that, quite possibly the lamest joke ever created by nerds, one that should bring the harshest scorn and shame upon anyone who utters it, I decided to pick a short film that demonstrates that stupid humor based on Star Wars can exist without being completely insipid.

Hardware Wars is a 1978 short film parody of a teaser trailer for the science fiction film Star Wars. The thirteen-minute film, which was released almost 18 months after Star Wars, mainly consisted of inside jokes and visual puns that heavily depended upon audience familiarity with the original. The theme song is Richard Wagner’s famous “Ride of the Valkyries.”

This is the work of Ernie Fosselius, who has had an amazing career that includes being a founding member of The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo, directing several short films for Sesame Street, sound design for several acclaimed motion pictures and providing the voices for The Rancor Keeper in Return of the Jedi, and the Martians in Mars Attacks.

Near misses in the career of Fosselius include turning down the chance to direct Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, and the authorship of several unproduced screenplays including one for Zippy The Pinhead.

He’s currently working with animatronic puppets in a gallery show, and has a few dozen other ideas floating around. Enjoy Hardware Wars, and please stop making that awful joke.

And yes, that is Paul Frees, doing the narration.

This week we go back to June, 2007 for another early episode of Radio Free Charleston that hasn’t been online for over six years. This is another show that had unfortunately been archived at MySpace, before that service self-destructed and deleted all their videos.

This was an edition of the show that was produced while I was under a great deal of stress. I had recorded the famed reunion of Feast of Stephen the previous month, and mixing the audio and editing video from five cameras was taking longer than anticipated. Much of this was due to the fact that I had begun overseeing the care of my elderly aunt and uncle, and my aunt, Stella Warden, had been diagnosed with quickly-progressing lung cancer right in the middle of production of the FOS reunion special

So I decided that the best way to deal with things was to rush out a stopgap episode of RFC, just in case something forced me to delay the Feast of Stephen special, which was already way behind schedule at this point.

Which was a good move, since what happened was that my aunt’s cancer progressed quickly and took her life about a month after this show premiered. The FOS reunion eventually became episode 23 of RFC, after a gap of over a month between shows.

Which is not meant to demean this episode of the show. It’s a pretty great show. I had discovered Captain Crash and the Beauty Queen at a new talent showcase at the Labelle Theater (along with InFormation, Jordan Searls and Joe Slack) and rushed them into LiveMix Studio so fast that they hadn’t quite settled on their name yet. In this show they were called “Aurora.” Voices of Anatole were one of the top metal acts in the region, and I was offered the chance to include a music video for them by Screaming Butterfly Entertainment, which is helmed by Holly Mollohan, who has gone on to produce many great award-winning films and music videos for the likes of Byzantine and other bands.

This episode also features No Running, one of Frank Panucci’s most beloved contributions to RFC. We open the show with The No Pants Players Eat A Watermelon, which is either disgusting or erotic, depending on your point of view.

Host segments were shot on the banks of the Kanawha River in Dunbar, just a few blocks from my house, during a rare break of a couple of hours from providing end-of-life care to my aunt. Considering what all was happening at the time, this turned out to be a pretty incredible episode of the show. I was still learning my craft as a guerilla TV producer and host, but I think it came out pretty well, and it’s nice to have it back online.

The PopCulteer
May 1, 2020

It’s another Friday and another PopCulteer filled with radio notes because your humble blogger doesn’t want to go off on rants about current affairs.

So, with distraction as our goal, this afternoon The AIR becomes DANCE PARTY CENTRAL!

At 2 PM we present an AIR Music Special, the long-gestating MIRRORBALL, hosted by Mel Larch. We follow that with a special 12″ Dance MIx edition of Sydney’s Big Electric Cat at 3 PM. You can hear these shows on The AIR website, or just click on this ingenious little embedded player…

Last August, when your PopCulteer and his wife were driving around Pennsylvania looking for toys and chocolate for our anniversary, we were passing the driving time by listening to the porn-nostalgia podcast, The Rialto Report. In particular, we were listening to a two-part podcast about porn-star turned Disco Queen, Andrea True.

This got Mel (Mrs. PopCulteer) talking about her love of Disco music of the late 1970s, and we came up with the idea of doing a Disco Music special for The AIR, with the idea that it might turn into a series if enough people like it.  Life, as it is wont to do, kept getting in the way, and it wasn’t until the Coronavirus shutdown that we had time to pull the trigger on the show.

MIRRORBALL is Mel’s baby. While I hated Disco during its peak, I have come to appreciate the production and the musicianship and actually like the best of it now, but Mel knows this stuff inside and out, so I just follow her lead while producing the program.

You can tune in at 2 PM and hear how it turned out. Later today, it will go up in the Podcast section of The AIR website, so you can listen on demand. Let us know what you think. Mel would love to do more of these, and we plan to bring you more specials that focus on different types of music in the future.

Check out the playlist of this mixtape-style show…

MIRRORBALL PILOT

Chic “Le Freak”
Heatwave “Boogie Nights”
LaBelle “Lady Marmalade”
Earth Wind and Fire “Boogie Wonderland”
Andrea True Connection “More, More, More”
The MIracles “Love Machine”
Sister Sledge “We Are Family”
Van McCoy “The Hustle”
The Village People “YMCA”
Thelma Houston “Don’t Leave Me This Way”
K.C. and the Sunshine Band “That’s The Way”
The Trammps “Disco Inferno”
Gloria Gaynor “I Will Survive”
Kool And The Gang “Get Down On It”
The Bee Gees “Night Fever”
Donna Summer “Last Dance”

You can hear MIRRORBALL Friday, May 1, at 2 PM and 10 PM, with replays Saturday at 7 PM and 11 PM, and Sunday at 9 AM and 5 PM.

Earlier in the week, when Sydney Fileen got word that her show would be preceded by a Disco special, she decided to delay her originally-planned show and produced a new episode made up entirely of 12″ Dance remixes of New Wave Tunes. You can hear the results at 3 PM Friday on Sydney’s Big Electric Cat.

This is the second time that Sydney has devoted an episode of her show to dance mixes, and as what I suspect is a bit of an in-joke, it’s the second time that she has opened the show with a dance remix of “I Ran” by A Flock of Seagulls. I think she’s just showing off the fact that she has more than one different mix of the tune.

Check out the rest of what’s on Sydney’s Big Electric Cat this week…

BEC 057

A Flock of Seagulls “I Ran (So Far Away)”
Depeche Mode “Route 66”
Howard Jones “Like To Get To Know You Well”
Kim Wilde “Kids In America”
Joy Division “Love Will Tear Us Apart”
Kate Bush “The Big Sky”
INXS “Need You Tonight”
New Order “Blue Monday”
Chris Spedding “Pogo Dancing”
Missing Persons “If Only For The Moment”
Climie Fisher “Rise To The Occasion”
808 State “In Yer Face”
The B 52s “Dance This Mess Around”
The Clash “Radio Clash”
The Cure “Hot Hot Hot”
The Thompson Twins “Love On Your Side”
Frankie Goes To Hollywood “Relax”
M “Pop Muzik”
Romeo Void “Never Say Never”

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. You can also hear select episodes of Sydney’s Big Electric Cat as part of the overnight Haversham Recording Institute marathon that starts every Monday at 11 PM.

And that is it for this week’s PopCulteer. As always, check back for fresh content every day, including all our regular features.

The PopCult Comix Bookshelf

Doom Patrol: The Silver Age Vol. 2
Written by Arnold Drake, Art by Bruno Premiani and Bob Brown
DC Comics
ISBN-13: 978-1779500984
$39.99

Doom Patrol, the original Doom Patrol comic from the 1960s, was decades ahead of its time. This team of misfit superheroes brought the concept of a dysfunctional psuedo family of heroes in a world where people react to them naturally to comics long before the great wave of surrealist British comics writers tranformed superhero comics forever.

These are the adventures of Robotman, Negative Man and Elasti-Girl, all working under the direction of the wheelchair-bound Chief, Niles Caulder, and alongside their allies, Mento, the world’s fifth-wealthiest man (equipped with a helmet that gives him psychic powers) and Beast Boy, a teen with green skin, who can turn into different animals.

Before Alan Moore and Grant Morrison, there was Arnold Drake. Drake was a mainstay of DC comics, but he proved with Doom Patrol that, given free reign, he could out-Marvel Marvel. Drake, working with a full script, created wild and bizarre adventures that rival (and possibly inspired some of) the work of Stan Lee at Marvel.

Unlike Lee, who took credit for plot work done by the artists under the “Marvel Method,” Drake crafted his tales on his own, pacing the stories and writing all the dialogue before sending the script off to his main Doom Patrol collaborator, Bruno Premiani.

Premiani brought those scripts to life with a fine, illustrative style that, while lacking the dynamic quality of Jack Kirby, perfectly suited Drake’s stories of a team that fought among themselves as much as they fought their enemies.

The Team was made of up three people who, due to different twists of fate, were turned into freaks with amazing powers. Brought together by The Chief, who was intrinsically tied to their mishaps, they did battle with a rogues gallery unlike any other. With an evil immortal, an alien warlord, a disembodied brain, a super-evolved speaking (with a French accent) ape, and a man with the powers of all the elements, all of them hell-bent on world domination, and all them willing to work together to kill the Doom Patrol, the stories in this volume take you on a wild ride, indeed.

This is the second paperback collection of Silver Age Doom Patrol stories, and if DC holds true to formula, in about two years we should see the final volume in this series. They are also collecting the later versions of the team, all of which are used in the streaming TV series.

In Doom Patrol: The Silver Age Vol. 2 we see the introduction and origin of Beast Boy. We also get a three-part crossover with DC’s Challengers of the Unknown, and a team-up with The Flash. That’s in addition to the wedding of Elasti-Girl and Mento, and short stories that tell us about Robotman and Negative Man before they joined the Doom Patrol.

There are adventures under the sea, on the edge of space, and all sorts of weird locations, and their enemies employ mind control, zombies, dinosaurs and even embezzlement to wreak havoc on the planet.

These stories, from 1965 and 66, put the lie to the myth that DC was just publishing staid, traditional superhero comics during the heyday of Marvel. Doom Patrol, which had an obvious influence on Marvel’s X-Men, holds up a lot better than many of Marvel’s lesser titles, and at times rivals the work of Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko in terms of pure imagination.

This collection presents issues 96 to 107 of Doom Patrol, as well as a crossover issue with Challengers of the Unknown and an issue of Brave and the Bold. All the scripts are by Drake, with Premiani drawing the bulk of the stories. The underrated Bob Brown fills in on a few stories and covers, and draws the crossover issue of Challengers, for which he was the regular artist. The team up with The Flash is drawn by Dick Giordano and Sal Trapani. It’s over 350 pages of great, unorthodox comics.

The Doom Patrol (Spoiler Alert here) were killed off in the final issue of their comic a couple of years after the stories collected here. It was nearly a decade before DC resurrected the team, with only Robotman surviving from the original team. The revived team, originally written by Paul Kupperberg, went through a few changes and reboots until the early 1990s when Grant Morrison took over writing the adventures of the team, and managed to out-weird the original run.

The TV series, which debuted on DC Universe and will soon begin a second season on HBO MAX, is based on parts of all three eras of the Doom Patrol, but the core of the personality clashes between Robotman, Negative man and Elasti-Girl, are found in the original series.

A lot of the roots of modern superhero comics can be traced back to the Doom Patrol. This collection is a great sampler. An earlier volume collects the first third of these stories, and I hope that DC comes through with a third volume ahead of schedule. My only complaint is that the final issue collected in this volume is the first half of a two-part story, and ends with a big cliffhanger. I don’t want to wait two years to see how it all turns out (and I don’t want to have to buy the original comics).

These comics were among the first I remember ever reading as a young child, and they’ve stuck with me for more than five decades. I can’t recommend them enough. You can order Doom Patrol: The Silver Age Vol. 2 from any bookseller using the ISBN code, or get it from Amazon at a considerable discount.

Wednesday afternoon The AIR brings you a new episode of Curtain Call that kicks off a series of shows that pay tribute to the legendary composer/lyricist, Stephen Sondheim, in his 90th year. You can tune in at the website, or on this embedded radio player…

At 3 PM Mel Larch devotes the entire hour of Curtain Call to music from last weekend’s streaming tribute to Stephen Sondheim, Take Me To The World: A Sondheim 90th Birthday Celebration.

In this hour you will hear performancs of classic Sondheim songs by such artists as Meryl Streep, Audra McDonald, Neil Patrick Harris, Laura Benanti, Randy Rainbow, Brian Stokes Mitchell, Linda Lavin, and many more.

The event was a benefit for Artists Striving to End Poverty, or ASTEP, a program founded by Broadway musical director Mary-Mitchell Campbell which connects visual and performing artists with youth from underserved communities in the US and all over the world to provide them with access to the arts–and help break the cycle of poverty. You can find out more by visiting their website at ASTEP.org

This is the first of at least three episodes of Curtain Call devoted to the works of Mr. Sondheim. Next week Mel continues with her tribute to one of her theatrical heroes with a show filled with more all-star renditions of the most memorable songs composed by Stephen Sondheim.

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.

Fans of Mel get an extra treat this week, as Friday at 2 PM sees an AIR Music Special, MIRRORBALL, also hosted by Mel Larch, which will present a solid hour of the top hits of the Disco era. This is a bit of a pilot for a potential series, so if enough people like it, Mrs. PopCulteer may be adding a second show to her internet-radio arsenal.

We only offer up one new episode of our speciality music shows Tuesday on The AIR with a fresh edition of The Swing Shift at 3 PM (all times EDT). Radio Free Charleston brings you the show that debuted last Thursday, and we’ll have details on that below. Meanwhile, you can naviagate your cursor over and tune in at the website, or you could just stay on this page, and  listen to this embedded radio player…

At 10 AM and 10 PM you can hear the special episode of RFC that I told you about in this space last week. It’s the show featuring Battleship Battleship! and you can read all about here HERE. This show wasn’t ready last Tuesday, so we’re going to run it all this week in our regular replay spots to give everyone a chance to catch it. You can also listen to it on demand at the Podcast tab at The AIR website. Just click on the tab and look for”Radio Free Charleston V5 015.”

Radio Free Charleston can be heard Tuesday at 10 AM and 10 PM, with replays Thursday at 3 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 1 PM today, we’ll replay last week’s edition of Rudy & Mel’s Shut-in Show. 2 PM sees an encore of a great episode of Steven Allen Adams’ NOISE BRIGADE. Steven is still being held hostage by the governor’s daily Coronavirus briefings, but we’re hoping he’ll return with new shows soon.

Speaking of new shows, we do have a new episode of The Swing Shift at 3 PM Tuesday, as yours truly indulges in his love of the music that means a thing, indeed. This week we take our slogan, “Bringing You The Best Swing Music of the last 100 years,” seriously, as our newest song is six days old (our show-opening number from Mike Batt) and our oldest, “The Fives” by Hersal Thomas is 99 years old. What they have in common is that they, and every song recorded between them on this show, really swing!

Our opening track is a charity single that Batt composed and debuted last week incorporating words suggested to him via Twitter. It’s being sold at iTunes, and there’s an animated video at YouTube. You can find out more about the NHS Charities at this link. It opens up a pretty swingin’ show, as you can tell by this playlist…

The Swing Shift 090

Mike Batt “Welcome To Wormtown”
Eyal Vilner Big Band “I’m On My Way To Canaan Land” (Brianna Thomas)
The Puppini Sisters “Groove Is In The Heart”
Bobby Darin “The Right Time”
Gustav Brom “Contraband”
Benny Goodman “After You’ve Gone”
Gary Moore with B.B. King “The Story Of The Blues”
Tyler Pedersen “Solar Molar”
Hersal Thomas “The Fives”
Stehane Grappelli “Chicago”
Diana Krall “I’m Confessin’ That I Love You”
Erskine Hawkins “Hawk’s Boogie”
Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald “Who Walks In”
Atomic Fireballs “Calypso KIng”
Colin James & His Little Big Band “Something’s Going On In My Room”

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.