Author: Rudy Panucci (Page 99 of 581)

The PopCulteer
April 17, 2020

Friday afternoon The AIR brings you a third installment of Rudy & Mel’s Shut-in Show plus a new and very American episode of Sydney’s Big Electric Cat. It all starts at 2 PM, and you can listen at The AIR website, or just hit the “play” button on this nifty virtual player…

At 2 PM you can hear the third episode of The Rudy & Mel Shut-In Show. This is one hour of your PopCulteer and his wife talking–often in a not safe for work manner–about whatever pops into our heads. It’s unrehearsed, unplanned, spontaneous talk, presented with minimal editing.

This week the rambling conversation starts out with yours truly and his lovely wife talking about TV shows to watch during the quarantine, then we veer off into a history of British alternative comedy since the 1980s, before going off the rails in a discussion about how Rudy usually hates the most popular shows on TV, and how some stand-up comedians have ulterior motives for constantly dumping on West Virginia.

And like the first two installments, it’s not really safe for work.

It looks like we’ll be doing this show for a while, so keep listening as the topics grow thin and we have to vamp more to fill the air time.

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

Also at 3 PM on The AIR, we bring you the new episode of our weekly salute to New Wave Music, Sydney’s Big Electric Cat.  This is the one that should have debuted last Friday, but didn’t because of internet gremlins who were chewing at the wires inside my router.

This week Sydney brings us an All-American Mixtape, with two solid hours of great American New Wave Music. In her introduction, Sydney explains that she doesn’t want it to seem like she’s downplaying America’s contributions to New Wave, so she put together a show that collects the New World’s musical pioneers of the 1970s and 80s, with artists like The Cars, Blondie, DEVO, Wall of Voodoo, Missing Persons, Berlin and more.

Sydney tells me that she may revisit this topic in a few months, and when that happens she’ll devote one show to the East Coast, and one to the West Coast.

Check out the playlist…

The Cars “My Best Friend’s Girl”
The Ramones “Blitzkrieg Bop”
Mink Deville and Cabretta “Venus of Avenue D”
Missing Persons “Waiting For A Million Years”
Peter Ivers “Even Steven Foster”
Tom Tom Club “Genius Of Love”
The Dickies “Nights In White Satin”
The Dead Kennedys “Holiday In Cambodia”
Romeo Void “Never For Ever”
Johnathan Richman and The Modern Lovers “Roadrunner”
R.E.M. “Radio Free Europe (Live)”
Red Hot Chili Peppers “True Men Don’t Kill Coyotes”
Wall of Voodoo “Call Of The West”
Berlin “The Metro (extended mix)”
Talking Heads “Psycho Killer”
DEVO “Gut Feeling/(Slap Your Mammy)”
Television “Marquee Moon”
Cyndi Lauper “Money Changes Everything”
Tommy Tutone “Jenny (867-5309)”
The B 52s “Rock Lobster”
Sparks “Achoo”
Moon Martin “Bad Case Of Lovin’ You”
Jane Weidlin “I Will Wait For You”
The Humans “I Live In The City”
Marshall Crenshaw “Someday Someway”
Blondie “One Way Or Another”

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.

That’s this week’s PopCulteer. Your humble correspondent is a bit written-out this week.  But you should still check back every day for all our regular features.

The PopCult Comix Bookshelf

Pirates: A Treasure of Comics to Plunder, Arrr!
edited by Ed Catto and Craig Yoe
Yoe Books/ Clover Press, LLC
ISBN-13: 978-1951038045
$12.99

Pirates: A Treasure of Comics to Plunder, Arrr! is a slim, inexpensive collection of great Pirate comic book stories from the 1940s and 50s, curated by Ed Catto (of Captain Action Enterprises fame) and Craig Yoe (of Yoe Books fame). It’s loaded with fun stories and some terrific art. This is the good kind of comic book piracy!

Pirate stories, as a comic book genre, were never a dominant form, largely disappearing from comics until Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons created Tales of the Black Freighter as a comic-within-a-comic in Watchmen, in 1985. The idea behind that was that, in a world where superheroes are real, the comic book publishers there would turn toward other types of adventure stories to fill their pages, and Pirates ruled the comics world for decades.

But in our universe there were some great Pirate comics produced during the Golden Age of comics, and this is a great sampler of four-color swashbuckling adventures on the high seas.

The art on display here is practically a “who’s who” of great artists. We get full stories with art by Reed Crandall, Will Eisner, R.H. Webb (Who drew Sheena of the Jungle and other great features), Norm Saunders (Seen at left. Saunders painted the original Mars Attacks trading cards, as well as the 1966 Batman cards) and a very young Frank Frazetta, who has two stories printed here…one in his recognizable style, and one Pirate funny animal story drawn in an animated cartoon style that may shock the heck out of die-hard Frazetta fans.

In additon to the full stories, we are also treated to a cover gallery with work by Wallace Wood, George Woodbridge, Carl Burgos and others, some of it reproduced from the original art.

Or should I say, “Arrrrrrt?”

The book is lacking a text page to give us some historical context, but the main attraction is the comics, so it’s not a major point. Pirates: A Treasure of Comics to Plunder, Arrr! is a great introduction to an almost-forgotten hidden treasure of comics. I’m really glad that Catto and Yoe dug these stories up.

A nice touch is that the indicia/credits page is written entirely in Pirate speak.

This is a fun collection of great adventure stories, and is a wonderful addition to any Golden Age bookshelf in your library. Pirates: A Treasure of Comics to Plunder, Arrr! can be ordered from any bookseller by using the ISBN code, or if you hurry, you can pick up a hardcover limited edition with with an alternate cover by Howard Pyle directly from Clover Press.

Above you see a re-rendered version of a video I originally posted in December, 2019. A few minor mistakes have been corrected, and it has been rendered at a much higher bit rate to reduce the blockiness in the original clip. Sadly, I couldn’t do anything about the slow auto-focus on my phone. I didn’t really push this much when I originally posted it because the blockiness annoyed me.

This is a collection of footage shot out the window of Chicago’s Elevated Train as it barrels through town in December of last year. The speed of the video is manipulated, with time compressed or extended, depending on the view. Most of the film is shot on The Brown Line, in The Loop. You’ll get fleeting glimpses of some pretty cool landmarks.

This video starts on the Red Line of the famed CTA “L” train, but but quickly transistions to the Brown Line for a trip through The Loop.

I could have left out the Red Line footage, but then you wouldn’t get to see that cool shot of Wrigley Field.

This is all set to some spacey/relaxing YouTube library music, and the entire video is intended to be something you can just watch and zone out during it’s sixteen-minute running time. I figured now would be a good time to re-do this, since so many folks have more spare time to fill.

We offer up  brand new episode of Radio Free Charleston Tuesday morning and evening on The AIR. 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…

Tune into this week’s Radio Free Charleston at 10 AM and 10 PM Tuesday for a show opens with a mini-tribute to the late John Prine, and the offers up the remainder of its first hour to mostly-new music from local and international artists.

I first discovered John Prine in a comic strip. Before I got into music, I was obsessive about comedy and comic books, and in the mid-1970s I found a bizarre magazine that was published by Marvel, but which printed most of the greats of underground comics (except for Crumb, who wouldn’t have anything to do with it). It was here where I first saw Art Speigleman’s MAUS, and it was where I discovered folks like Howard Cruse, Jay Lynch and Skip Williamson.

It was Skip Williamson who did a two-page comic strip based on John Prine’s song, “Aw Heck,” and it made me an instant fan of both men.  So I opened this week’s show with that song because it still cracks me up more than forty-five years later.

I’d post the whole comic here, but it’s got cartoon nudity, so you have to settle for the second page at left (and maybe if you wish hard and click on it, you can see the whole thing).

Among the newness is a great new recording by The Scribblers of a tune by PopCult’s original editor, Douglas Imbrogno. “Bring Sunshine When You Come” is part of “SONGS of COMFORT, SONGS of HOME: Music for a Pandemic.” a project that you can read about at Doug’s blog, The Story Is The Thing. There is a video to accompany this song, and you can see it at Doug’s blog, or scroll down to the bottom of this post.

The first hour of RFC also has new tunes from Mark Beckner Group, Missing Persons, The Pixies, Nina Hagen, Tower of Power and The Strokes.  The second and third hours of the show are recycled from one-hour versions of RFC that originally ran in 2017 and 2018, and they are loaded with spectacular local music of many different genre. We reached into our sack of archives shows for these because of the fear of a power outage interrupting us while we put the show together. But it’s a pretty impressive three-hour block of great music.

Check out the playlist…

RFCV5014

John Prine “Aw Heck”
The Scribblers “Bring Sunshine When You Come”
Todd Burge “Comic Book Sleeve”
Captain Catfeesh “Plastic Pictures, Painted Pavement”
Jordan Searls “Equally Insane”
John Lilly “Tore Up From The Floor Up”
Paige Dalporto “Wreckless”
Mark Beckner Group “Winter In Kashmir”
Nina Hagen “Mama”
Slade “We’ll Bring The House Down”
Tower of Power “The Story of You and I”
Missing Persons “Love Will Tear Us Apart”
The Strokes “Eternal Summer”
The Pixies “In The Arms Of Mrs. Mark of Cain”
INXS/Queen/Pink Floyd Mash-up

hour two
Scarlet Revolt “Bleed”
Bon Air “Cloaking Device”
Wren Allen Band “Before Hello”
Christopher QiET Vincent “Ain’t No Man Gonna Change”
Fabulous Head “C U Move”
CHUM “Angels In The Snow”
Year Long Disaster “Names of God”
Byzantine “Ancestry of the Antirchrist”
HARRAH “Blood Moon”
Chuck Biel “Turtles All The Way Down”

hour three
Mark Beckner “Human Satellite (ode to Doris Day)”
Feast of Stephen “No Vaccination”
Poor Man’s Gravy “Victim of Myself”
Farnsworth “Free Me”
John Radcliff “Company Song”
Emmalea Deal “Ghost”
Hawthorne Heights “Hope”
In The Company of Wolves “The UpsideDown”
Membrane Cell “Architects of Reassimiliation”
Speedsuit “The Dawn”
The Science Fair Explosion “Demon Burger”
Johnny Compton “Pistol Whipped”
Stark Raven “16 Tons”
Creek Don’t Rise “Sometimes It Rains”
Crazy Jane “Frica”
Feast of Stephen “Mystery Hole”

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

Because of the potential of a power outage, this post is just about Radio Free Charleston. If we’re able to pull off new episodes of our other Tuesday programs, we’ll post about them later today.

But now, here’s that video we promised you…

Our art this week is a digital painting over top of a collage of six photos taken underneath the Fort Hill Bridge from Magic Island back around 2008. I found some old photos buried in a folder on a rarely-accessed drive, and after trying to figure out why I took six pictures of the underside of the bridge, I decided to throw them all together and paint over them to see how it came out.

I’m happy with the results. Also, with all the dark news going around these days, I thought it might be nice to run a picture of things looking up.

Ha ha, you can’t throw anything at me over the internet. Now that I think about it, I believe that I did another piece on the underside of this bridge four or six years ago, but that was based on a photo that I took at that time.

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

Meanwhile, over in radio-land, Monday on The AIR, our Monday Marathon runs from 7 AM to 3 PM , and brings you eight hours of Nigel Pye and Psychedelic Shack. Then 3 PM sees an encore of a recent episode of Prognosis with Herman Linte, because we’re still trying to work out our transmission bugs from London.

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

Because the news has gotten so depressing of late, this week and next we are going to bring you some animated cartoons from the vast National Film Board of Canada collection, just to help take your mind off the real world for a few moments.

This week our flashback takes us to a an episode of The RFC MINI SHOW from June, 2014. This particular show delivered footage of the band StychNTyme that had been recorded a year earlier at the ECMC Kick Cancer for Kids benefit show at The Eagles Club in Charleston.

StychNTyme performed a “farewell” concert in Charleston shortly before we originally posted this show, so we decided to go back and revive this previously unseen footage. We’d shelved this because, shortly after we recorded this performance, the band underwent a line-up change.

Our intention was to record StychNTyme again, when their line-up stabilized, but that didn’t happen, so we presentied these two killer songs to mark the passing of one of the area’s top metal bands.

The PopCulteer
April 10, 2020

We find ourselves once again with a PopCulteer that doesn’t have a single theme. We have a couple of short items, but not a lot of time to write them out, so let’s get started, shall we?

Friday On The AIR

Due to a technical glitch by your PopCulteer, we failed to retrieve this week’s episode of Sydney’s Big Electric Cat that Sydney Fileen had so lovingly crafted for us from the Haversham Recording Institute server. In its stead we will bring you an encore of Sydney’s show from a few weeks ago Friday at 3 PM, and we’ll bring you her newest show next Friday.

You can listen in at The AIR website, or on this cool little embeded player…

Because we didn’t want you to go without some fresh programming on The AIR, today at 2 PM you can tune in and listen to the second episode of Rudy & Mel’s Shut-in Show.

Recorded late last night, this rambling program starts out as a bit of an extension of my review of Paul Rees’ new book about John Entwistle, but then veers off into tangents that cover topics like Ken Russel’s version of Tommy, the use of inflatable T Rex costumes and copious amounts of blood in Shakespeare plays, streaming and podcast options for theatre, upcoming TV shows, The Bonzo Dog Band and more.

We’ll replay the whole mess at 10 PM, followed by a replay of last week’s debut episode. I’m still not sure when, or if, we’ll do more of these, but I’ll try to warn you all in advance.

Also at The AIR, by this afternoon, all of this week’s new programs will be available as podcasts if you click on the tab on the left of the screen.

Don’t Cross The Livestreams

One of the silver linings to come out of this Coronavirus mess is that many musicians have begun live-streaming intimate performances. I had planned to list them here because so many great local and international artists are doing this that I figured it would be a great way to help you pass the time.

But then, everybody started doing it. I began getting so many notifications of events so fast that it became overwhelming. I didn’t want to just mention one artist and perhaps miss another.

I just can’t keep up with them all, as cool as they all are.

So…I’m turning it over to you. If you have a livestream concert coming up, please feel free to share a link to it in the comments on this post. Say when and where and who you are and include a link so that PopCult readers can jump right over at the appointed time, and maybe even kick in on your virtual tipjar, if you have one.

And with that, this PopCulteer is over. I got stuff to do, and you will want to check to see if anybody left a link to a cool stream in the comments. Be sure to check back every day for fresh content here at PopCult.

The PopCult Bookshelf

The Ox: The Authorized Biography of The Who’s John Entwistle
by Paul Rees
Hachette Books
ISBN-13: 978-0306922855
$30.00

The Who are, of course, one of the greatest rock bands of all time. Their concept album TOMMY defined the Rock Opera genre, and their greatest hits include some of the most recognizable songs of our times.

Of the four men who made up the band, Pete Townshend, the flamboyant guitarist and main songwriter and Roger Daltry, the lead singer and face of the band have both written autobiographies. The short, tragic life of drummer Keith Moon has been detailed in several books, some of which have been optioned for the big screen. The band as a whole have had their history told in the pages of more than a few books.

But John Entwistle, the late bass player for the band who many consider to be the glue that held The Who together, remained a bit of an enigma, until now. Paul Rees, with the participation and support of Entwistle’s family and friends, plus access to Entwistle’s partially-completed autobiography, has crafted an in-depth look at the life of a complex and troubled man who made amazing music while living life as large as possible to soothe some deep wounds.

We see many sides of John Entwistle, the sickly wartime child of a broken marriage, the geeky fan of Mad Magazine, the immaculate musican, the heavy drinker who never seemed to get drunk, the collector, the control freak who had to stand in the background and ultimately a man who succumbed to his demons, albeit on a much more leisurely schedule than his bandmate, Moon.

Rees tells the story in a very British voice, completely appropriate here, and allows Entwistle to speak directly through large excerpts of his unfinished autobiograhy. This is enhanced with interviews of family members, friends and fellow musicians to create a oral history of the life of John Entwistle. It’s warts-and-all, as we see Entwistle at his most romantic and generous, but also at his most excessive and spiteful.

His friendship with Moon is touching and alarming at the same time, as Entwistle’s mischief often inspired Moon’s more notorious self-destructive and hotel-room-destructive antics. Entwistle’s relationship with his other band members is portrayed as cordial, but distant. John, Roger and Pete all went to the same school, but weren’t terribly close friends offstage.

In addition to the Entwistle angle of many key events like the Monterey Pop Festival, the recording of TOMMY and Quadrophenia and their appearance on The Smothers Brothers Show, we also see Entwistle’s frustration with his inability to have more of his songs recorded by The Who and his less-than-successful solo career.

I would have liked to have read more about the recording of his under-appreciated solo albums, where he enlisted the aid of musicans as varied as Peter Frampton, Tony Ashton and even Benny Hill’s back-up singers, The Ladybirds, but I suppose that might be a topic for an entire book on its own. One which would sell eleven copies.

We do get many glimpses of Entwistle as the obsessive shopper and collector. In one fun example his son talks about how, one year for Christmas, his father bought him every Star Wars toy on the market, and then goes on to explain how in the mid 1980s his dad became so enamoured of the British Comic Book, 2000 A.D., that he ran out and bought up the entire 600-issue run.

Entwistle’s decline and the dissolution of his marriage following the death of Moon is a stark contrast to the fast-paced party atmosphere we read about as the book covers the infamous touring history of the band. We see Entwistle cut loose from his moorings and entering a period where his excesses begin to get the better of him. The tragedy in Cinncinnati where 11 fans were tampled to death is mentioned, and we do get some new details about that, but it’s not a major point in the book.

If I have any real criticism of the book, it’s that it’s too short. The Ox: The Authorized Biography of The Who’s John Entwistle clocks in at over 300 pages, but you get the impression that there was enough material here for a book more than twice as long. Commercial considerations require the book to be kept to a manageable size, and the brisk presentation employed by Rees keeps the story of Entwistle’s life moving at an engrossing, almost breakneck, pace, but I could see myself readily buying a subsequent volume, or volumes, that cover each period of Entwistle’s life in greater detail.

The Ox: The Authorized Biography of The Who’s John Entwistle is a remarkable oral history of the life of one of the most overlooked, yet essential, elements in some of the greatest rock music ever recorded. You can order it from any bookseller using the ISBN code above, or take the coward’s way out and get it from Amazon.

Wednesday afternoon The AIR brings you a new episode of Curtain Call that celebrates the 60th anniversary of the longest-running musical in history, The Fantasticks. You can tune in at the website, or on this embedded radio player…

May 3rd marks sixty years since The Fantasticks opened at The Sullivan Street Playhouse in Greenwich Village. Nobody realized at the time that this charming musical adventure farce would remain there for forty-two years. To commemorate the anniversary of The Fantasticks’ off-Broadway debut, today at 3 PM Mel Larch devotes the entire hour of Curtain Call to music from the 2006 off-Broadway revival of the show, which ran an additional eleven years.

Based on a French play called The Romancers, The Fantasticks is the story of two neighboring fathers who pretend to feud in order to trick their children, Luisa and Matt, into falling in love.
Since its original run began sixty years ago, the show has played throughout the US and at least 67 foreign countries. An abbreviated version of the show aired on TV in 1964 as part of The Hallmark Hall of Fame and a feature film version was released in 2000. And during that time, the show’s songs by Harvey Schmidt and Tom Jones have become familiar standards, most notably the nostalgic and wistful Try To Remember.

In her introduction, Mel talks about her own experience performing in a local production of The Fantasticks, which involved an unauthorized gender-flip of one of the characters.

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..