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Here we are, heartily enveloped in Fall, and we have hit Fall Festival season, with tons of cool shenanigans to get into around the Mountain State and a few points beyond. As I have been doing of late, this a good time to remind you that THIS IS NOT A COMPLETE LIST OF EVENTS.  It’s just a starting point, so don’t expect anything comprehensive, and if you feel strongly about me leaving anything out, feel free to mention it in the comments.

In Charleston, Tsubasacon, West Virginia’s Anime, Gaming, and Cosplay Convention. begins Friday and runs through the weekend the Charleston Coliseum & Convention Center. Tsubasacon is West Virginia’s first Anime, Gaming and Cosplay convention.  Originally founded in 2004 in Charleston, the convention switched hands a couple years later, moving to the Big Sandy Superstore Arena and Conference Center, where it spent quite a few years bringing anime, gaming and cosplay once a year to the residents of Huntington.  In 2019, Tsubasacon returned to Charleston, and brought with it 2,000+ attendees to celebrate the weekend with anime, gaming, pop culture and of course, cosplay. It’s The Mountain State’s fandom Utopia.

Milton’s famed Pumpkin Festival begins Thursday and runs throughout the weekend, and if the idea of pumpkinry excites you, get thee to Milton, where they celebrate such things. I suppose that it’s The Mountain State’s Pumpkin Utopia.

At Tamarack Marketplace, in Beckley, it’s time for their Fallfest, which sports a stellar lineup of local musicians from right here in Appalachia. The fun starts at noon, Saturday.  It’s all free and a lot of the names on the performer list should be familiar to listeners of Radio Free Charleston:

LIVE MUSIC LINEUP
Main Stage:
12 – 1 PM: Bad Keys of the Mountain
1 – 2 PM: Jared Stout
2 – 3 PM: Alabaster Boxer
3 – 4 PM: One Eyed Jack
4 – 5 PM: Matt Mullins & the Bringdowns
5 – 6 PM: Redline Band

Courtyard Stage:
12:30 – 1:30 PM: Randy Gilkey
1:30 – 2:30 PM: Ginger Wixx
2:30 – 3:30 PM: Andrew Adkins
3:30 – 4:30 PM: 18 Strings
4:30 – 5:30 PM: The Carpenter Ants

These are outdoor shows, so bring a lawn chair and dress accordingly.

Saturday at 11 AM in Princeton, celebrate the birthday of The Princeton Railroad Museum. There will be free birthday cake/cupcakes and drinks. At 2 PM you can see a play by Bramwell Players titled Dusk to Dawn. Be warned that there will be an appearance by Abraham Lincoln and Seltoee, a Native American.

Live Music is back at Taylor Books. There is no cover charge, and shows start at 7:30 PM.  Friday Steve Himes takes the stage. Saturday a sterling talent, yet to be determined performs at the beloved bookstore/cafe/art gallery.

The World Famous Empty Glass Cafe has some great stuff this week  to tell you about.  Thursday at 5:30 PM, Swingstein and Robin return with Swing for a good cause. Friday Tim Courts plays during happy hour.  We have graphics below for the rest of the weekend shows at The Glass.

Please remember that the pandemic is not over yet. It’s still a going concern with the ‘rona surging again. And now there are seasonal allergies, the flu, wayward motions to remove, rabid attack fleas, Pumpkin Spice Zombies and other damned good reasons to be careful. 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.

Keep in mind that all shows are subject to change or be cancelled at the last minute.

If you’re up for going out, here are a few suggestions for the weekend, roughly in order…

WEDNESDAY

THURSDAY

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Tuesday on The AIR  we offer up a bit of a  patchwork edition of Radio Free Charleston. The fates conspired to rob me of my normal production time for the show on Monday, so I decided to punt, and re-present three hours of fantastic local music from five years ago in the form of three long-unheard episodes of Radio Free Charleston Volume Four.

We’re going back to October, 2018 to splice togther a show that’s jam-packed with three hours of great local stuff. 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 over at the top of the right column.

At 10 AM and 10 PM you can hear this combination of RFC volume 4, episodes 90, 91 and 92.  Thats three consecutive episodes from the fall of 2018, which seems sort of like a lifetime ago, don’t it?

Due to time constraints, I can’t do the live links for this show, either. While this is a great collection of music, you’re only getting it because Monday was such a beeyotch.

Check out this playlist.

RFCV5 148

hour one
Karen Allen “Satellite”
William Matheny “Blood Moon Singer”
Mark Beckner “Proverbs”
Stonebeard “Time”
Tom Rader “Angels”
Half Batch “Either Way”
Todd Burge “Don’t Water My Whiskey Down”
Mind Garage “Paint It Black”
Holly and The Guy “Love Runs Out”
Axis Everything “Stymie”
Poor Man’s Gravy “Let Me Go”
Speedsuit “Forever, Never Mind”
Jay Parade “Jimmy”
The Stars Revolt “Goodnight, Goodnight”

hour two
William Matheny “Moon Over Kenova”
Jim Wolfe “The Goober Special”
Atomic Cafe “The Trax”
Blue Million “Everything Inside Out”
Brian Diller and the Ride “Don’t Stop at Anything”
Sasha Colette, John Lilly and Jonathan Glen Wood “Walking Cane”
Hitchcock Circus “I Want You”
Karen Allen “Shake Me”
From The Future “For Jaco”
Io and the Ions “There’s a Light”
Trielement “Seven Dirty Words”
Stephen Beckner “Falling Star”
Paul Calicoat “Trampled Flowers”

hour three
The Stars Revolt “All For Show”
Go Van Gogh “I Am The Walrus”
Miniature Giant “Dawn”
69 Fingers “Die Happy”
Time And Distance “Copperfield”
Whistlepunk 2.0 “Satellite”
Don Baker “Keep On Walking”
The Hey Days (Doug and Paul) “I Never Slept With Alan Ginsburg”
Professor Mike “Greater Good”
The Big Bad “The Omen”
HarraH “Blood Moon”
A Place of Solace “Sing”
Against “My Better Half”
Scooter Scudieri “The Price We Pay”
Stephanie Deskins “Nothing Left To Lose”

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 2 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 classic 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 last week’s episodes of  MIRRORBALL at 1 PM and Curtain Call at 2 PM.

At 3 PM we offer up two recent episodes of The Swing Shift.  You can hear The Swing Shift Tuesday at 3 PM, with replays Wednesday at 8 AM, Friday at 10 AM and 8 PM and Saturday afternoon, only on The AIR . You can also hear all-night marathons, seven hours each, starting at Midnight Thursday and Sunday evenings.

Over the past several years I’ve told about the first five issues of the horror comic, Forbidden Gallery. Created by William Mull, with several top-notch collaborators, it’s a bit of a cross between classic EC Comics horror and the television show, Night Gallery.

The books are filled with terrific scary tales that mix a little gore and sci-fi with O Henry-styled twists and some great macabre humor.  Now after a couple of years off while Mull was making music with SkyFlake and working on other projects, Forbidden Gallery #6 is available for pre-order, and I was lucky enough to get a digital preview.  So without any further introductory stuff, here’s what I think…

The PopCult Comix Bookshelf

Forbidden Gallery #6
Edited by William Mull
Writers: Ed Devore,  Martin Powell, Dan Johnson, William Mull
Artists: Mike Montgomery, Dan Day, Jeff Austin, Karl Comendador, Portiveritas and Craig Hamilton
Published by ACP Comics
Pre-order now from ACP Comics

As with the previous issues of Forbidden Gallery, each story is preceded by a pin-up/splash page which acts as an introduction by the book’s host, Archimedes, and gives the presentation a cool Night Gallery vibe.  I highly recommend this for any fan of horror comics in the classic EC Comics mode.  The gallery of the forbidden returns with a new twist this time as the first story in the book introduces Victoriana Verletz, the significant other of Archimedes and new co-host of the comic.  It’s a cute story of hanky-panky, betrayal and ultimately, true love, with more than a hint of supernatural shenanigans.

Next up is “Blood of the Mummy,” which is a brisk tale of post-mortem vengeance, set in the 1930s, at the plundering of an ancient tomb in Egypt. “Bleeding This Town Dry” is a romantic tale of a loving couple who put aside their differences to thrive in the Old West.  Well, there’s more to it than that, but every marriage has a few secrets.

Shifting into outer space, “On The Rocks,” is a delightfully gory tale of space exploration gone wrong, with yet another married couple involved.  The final story, “Scattercrow & Particle Man is a wild tale that mixes supernatural superheroics with Kaiju and a touch of Lovecraft, and it sure seems like a really strong pilot for a series of stories in the future.

Forbidden Gallery #6 is rock-solid entertainment, with great writing and amazing art and storytelling.  ‘Tis the season for the scary, and if classic short-form horror comics are in your wheelhouse, you’ve come to the right place.  I highly recommend this for any fan of horror comics in the classic EC Comics mode.

You can pre-order Forbidden Gallery #6 HERE, and

This week’s art is a decent-sized acrylic study that is the serious flip side of the joke painting I posted a few weeks ago.

This is a painting of the view from the Jackson Boulevard-facing window of our room at the Canopy by Hilton in Chicago’s Loop district, last July. I really like the challenge of painting the architecture, but also the reflections in the windows.

This is not really an attempt at emulating Edward Hopper. I did use a few of the techniques I’ve picked up attempting to mimic him, but reflections in glass was not something he often bothered with.  Many of his paintings of windows make no attempt to to even acknowledge the existence of glass, and many of the windows in his more notable works just look like open holes in the sides of buildings.

With this painting, that would’ve made things a bit boring. So this is more me stepping out of his influence, and trying something on my own.  Based on a series of photographs, It was painted over the course of a month, using acrylics on heavy illustration board. It’ll probably make a good giant-sized canvas painting someday.

I wish there was some deep meaning behind this, like a major statement about lonliness or man’s inhumanity against cheese or something, but it’s really just a mechanical attempt at capturing something in paint that I thought looked really cool.

To see it bigger try clicking HERE.

Over in radioland, Monday at 2 PM on The AIR, we bring you encores of a recent episode of Psychedelic Shack, and then at 3 PM a recent 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.

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. 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 8 PM you can hear Ali Wong doing stand-up comedy while seven months pregnant on last week’s episode of The Comedy Vault.

Tonight at 9 PM the Monday Marathon presents ten more hours of The Swing Shift, just for the heck of it.

I ran this video, which I slapped together myself, about eleven months ago, but since today is the first day of October, and I’m not planning on going overboard with Halloween stuff in the blog this year, I thought I’d bring it back to life and share it again so we can start the month with just a bit of spookiness. With minor re-writing, here’s the story of how this video came to be…

Above, you see me basically scratching a 40-plus-year itch.

Forty-one  or forty-two years ago, when I was a communications major at what was then West Virginia State College, I was taking a film appreciation class called “Horror and Fantasy in Film.” Because it was so long ago, I’m not certain who the professor was. My fuzzy memory says it must have been Bart Weiss, but my heart tells me it was my old friend, Danny Boyd.

The reason I think it was Bart was because I’m pretty sure that this was prior to the time Danny started teaching at State. However, the characteristics of this story sound more like something Danny would do.

One night early in the semester, we were to watch the silent horror classsic, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. It was being shown with a silent, 16mm print (that I have since learned was more than a tad butchered).  Since there was no sound, the professor asked if anybody had any appropriate music handy (this was in the days before the internet, wifi and Spotify).  I remembered that I had a recently-released album by The Stranglers on a home-made cassette in my car. A quick run to the parking lot for Wallace Hall and I retrieved the C-90 with the full album on it.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is a very influential 1920 German silent horror film, directed by Robert Wiene and written by Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer. Considered the quintessential work of German Expressionist cinema, it tells the story of an insane hypnotist (Werner Krauss) who uses a somnambulist (Conrad Veidt) to commit murders. The film features a dark and twisted visual style, with sharp-pointed forms, oblique and curving lines, structures and landscapes that lean and twist in unusual angles, and shadows and streaks of light painted directly onto the sets. Some folks consider it a zombie movie, but it really isn’t. It is dripping with style and without this movie, we likely would not have had Nosferatu, Dracula, Frankenstein, Freaks, or any of the other major works of cinematic horror. You can see visual cues swiped from this film in everything from Forbidden Zone to Edward Scissorhands.

It’s an extremely influential film. Even 102 years after its release it served as the inspiration for the second half of 2022’s Halloween episode of SpongeBob Squarepants, which featured “Dr. Calimari” and lots of German Expressionism.

Back to our story: With a cassette player set to go, the film was started and, in my memories and other people who were there, it synced up perfectly. Even some of the songs with lyrics fit perfectly with the narrative.

The only problem was that, even in its butchered form, this print of the film ran nearly an hour, but The Strangler’s album, The Gospel According To The Men In Black, only ran about 42 minutes. At the very end of that side of the tape, with three minutes to fill, I’d dropped in a song from Joe Jackson’s Jumpin’ Jive album, which did not fit the mood of the movie at all.  A mad dash to the cassette player and a quick rewind, and we had our unexpectedly appropriate music back.

Flash forward to 1990.  Among my many friends made at the Charleston Playhouse was one John Estep (Sham Voodoo to his friends), who had been in both The Defectors and Clownhole, two legendary Charleston bands. We were hanging out one night, talking about horror movies, and Sham brought up Dr. Caligari.  He started telling me about this weird film class he was in that showed it, and that they’d set it to music by The Stranglers. It was at that point that we realized that, even though we first met in 1989, we had been in the same class together at State eight or nine years earlier.

Flash forward again, this time to the Friday before Halloween last year: I’d just gotten home from my guest stint with Ann Magnuson on Josh Gaffin’s Afternoon Show on Status Quo, and I had some time to kill before dinner, so I grabbed a copy of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari off of Archive.org, and pulled up a folder of Stranglers music, and slapped ’em together in my trusty video editing program. This was rendered very quickly and is pretty low-res and blocky, but that sort of adds to the charm.

This is not a perfect recreation of the experience that night in 1981 or 82.  The copy of the film I downloaded was painstakingly restored to its original length, and had color tints added to it to replicate the original film experience. That night so long ago that it lined up with The Stranglers’ album,  it was with a stark black-and-white print, and big chunks of it were missing.  So I supplemented this version with cuts from other Stranglers albums and repeated a few tracks. I also eliminated one song that didn’t work too well.  I’d been planning to do this since probably 2007, when I learned to edit digital video.

While at first blush this may seem a little elaborate and obsessive, I only spent about half an hour on it, so don’t expect a freaking masterpiece. If you haven’t seen The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari yet, it’s probably not a good idea to make this the first version you watch.  Think of this one as a bizarre fan edit that will only be truly appreciated by one or two living people.

This installment of Radio Free Charleston from July 2008 features full songs from Casi Null (singing about the infamous Blue Haze) and Dog Soldier (singing about the infamous Christmas).

We also have parts of songs from then-future RFC guests The Buttonflies (in the 120 Second Art Show) and The Diablo Blues Band (over the end credits). The Diablo Blues Band is reuniting for a tribute show to their late drummer, Tommy Fontaine, Saturday, September 30 at The Empty Glass. you will see a full performance by the band in the following episode of RFC, which will be posted here next Saturday.

Our animation was a segment of “Duffy’s Mascot,” and your host is lethargic after eating a wonderful meal at Bluegrass Kitchen. You can read the original production notes HERE.

The PopCulteer
September 29, 2023

It’s new radio day here at PopCult, as we (finally manage to) finish up a week with bright, shiny new editions of all of our music and comedy specialty programs on The AIR. This afternoon we survey the land of Disco and New Wave music, with new episodes of MIRRORBALL and Sydney’s Big Electric Cat! The AIR is PopCult‘s sister radio station. You can hear these shows on The AIR website, or just click on the embedded player found elsewhere on this page.

MIRRORBALL

Friday at 2 PM on The AIR, Mel Larch devotes a yet another full hour to extended mixes of classics of the Disco era.  Her most recent episode was devoted to this topic, but it was so well-received (and we also scored a huge haul of Disco singles) that we decided to revisit the concept of extended mixes of Disco classics for the second show in a row.

One of the most creative things to come out of the Disco-era club scene was the extended 12″ Disco Mix of songs, so that the folks enjoying the joyful noise could stay on the dance floor just a little longer, and the DJ’s could have more time between spinning the records.

This week we are going to bring you another seet batch of Disco Mixes of Disco Classics. It’s Disco squared times two on a full hour that brings you twelve inches closer to extasy as you dance the mid-afternoon away.

Check out the playlist…

MIRRORBALL 083

Yarbrough & Peoples “Don’t Stop The Music”
Shalamar “A Night To Remember”
Sharon Redd “Can You Handle It”
George McCrae “Rock Your Baby”
Dan Hartman “Relight My Fire”
Oliver Cheatham “Get Down Saturday Night”
Sylvester “You Make Me Feel”
KC & The Sunshine Band “That’s The Way (I Like It)”

You can hear MIRRORBALL every Friday at 2 PM, with replays throughout the following week Monday at 9 AM and Tuesday at 1 PM and a mini-marathon Saturday nights at 9 PM

Sydney’s Big Electric Cat Returns To 193

Also on The AIR  at 3 PM (EDT), Sydney Fileen graces us with special mixtape-style new episode of Sydney’s Big Electric Cat. This week Sydney presents a salute to the year 1983.

Forty years ago we witnessed a very significant year in the New Wave Era. As Sydney says in her intro, “This week, instead of spanning the entire New Wave era, we are going to zero in on one year that many people consider to be the peak of New Wave Music. In this week’s show, we will hear songs that debuted as either singles or album cuts in the year of our Lord, 1983.”

This was when MTV was taking over the nation, but hadn’t yet been corrupted by Hair Metal and crappy reality shows. Music lovers were mainlining innovativeand exciting new musical forms and a generation had their musical expectations turned on its head.

With this episode filling in the blank, Sydney’s Big Electric Cat has devoted entire shows to each year from 1978 to 1984. That means the next time Sydney decides to grace us with a “yearbook” show, she’ll be covering the fringes of the early, either in the very early days, or the very end.  I’m looking forward to seeing what she does.

Check out the playlist…

Sydney’s Big Electric Cat 108

Frankie Goes To Hollywood “Relax”
The Cure “Love Cats”
Orange Juice “Rip It Up”
Eddie Grant “Electric Avenue”
Siouxsie and the Banshees “Dear Prudence”
Madness “Our House”
Bananarama “Cruel Summer”
Tears For Fears “Pale Shelter”
Fun Boy Three “Our Lips Are Sealed”
Style Council “Speak Like A Child”
Kajagoogoo “Too Shy”
Public Image Limited “This Is Not A Love Song”
Yazoo “Nobody’s Diary”
Heaven 17 “Temptation”
New Order “Blue Monday”
Joe Jackson “Steppin’ Out”
Freeze “I O U”
Human League “(Keep Feeling) Fascination”
Nik Kershaw “I Won’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me”
U2 “New Year’s Day”
Duran Duran “Is There Something I Should Know”
The Pretenders “Middle of the Road”
Minor Detail “Columbia”
Re-Flex “The Politics of Dancing”
Art of Noise “Beat Box”
The Stranglers “Midnight Summer Dream”
Ultravox “Hymn”

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. Classic episodes can be heard Sunday morning at 10 AM.

That’s it for this week’s PopCulteer, check back for all our regular feature, with fresh content, every day.

Here we are, less than a week into Fall, and there are loads and loads of cool things happening all over the area this weekend, in and around the Mountain State. and this is probably a good time to remind you that THIS IS NOT A COMPLETE LIST OF EVENTS.  It’s just a starting point, so don’t expect anything comprehensive, and if you feel strongly about me leaving anything out, feel free to mention it in the comments.

First up this week is the final weekend for the Mountain Roots Theater production of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  This is sort of the bonus weekend, after it was delayed for a week due to illness.  Mel and I went to see this show last Sunday, and we had a blast.

It was our first time at Mountain Roots, and we were impressed by the space. It reminded us a bit of the storefront theaters in Chicago. This production, brilliantly directed by Mandy Petry, mines all the laughs of one of Shakespeare’s most celebrated comedies, and a large cast headed by Kevin Pauley, Brian Hatcher and Kayla Lynn Marcum absolutely slays the audience with their comedic prowess.

As they say on their FB page, “set in the Roaring Twenties, where gangsters, flappers and suffragettes have replaced fairies. This magical tale has been adapted by Mandy Petry to a reasonable 90-minute length, without losing any of the original magical elements.” It’s loads of fun and you can see it Friday, Saturday and Sunday at Mountain Roots Theater in Quincy.

Live Music is back at Taylor Books. There is no cover charge, and shows start at 7:30 PM.  Friday the legndary Carpenter Ants, take the stage. Saturday Sean Richardson & David McGuire with SeaScout featuring Arthur Deras work their magical music at the beloved bookstore/cafe/art gallery.

Saturday, Alien Super J3SUS hosts an open mic night at the Nitro Antique Mall starting at 7 PM. I think this may be the first time they’ve had music there.

The World Famous Empty Glass Cafe has some great stuff this week  to tell you about.  Thursday at 5:30 PM, Swingstein and Robin return with Swing for a good cause. Later Thursday, it’s Shred Night with RFC‘s show-opener for this week, Kenny Booth, at 10 PM.  Friday Tim Courts plays during happy hour.  We have graphics below for the rest of the weekend shows at The Glass.

Please remember that the pandemic is not over yet. It’s still a going concern with the ‘rona surging again. And now there are seasonal allergies, the flu, summary judgements, released WWE talent, stray loons who don’t like Martin Short and other damned good reasons to be careful. 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.

Keep in mind that all shows are subject to change or be cancelled at the last minute.

If you’re up for going out, here are a few suggestions for the weekend, roughly in order…

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In our week of all-new shows we have hit Wednesday afternoon, and The AIR brings you new episodes of Curtain Call and Beatles Blast.  You can tune in at the website, or just stay right here and  listen to the convenient embedded radio player lurking elsewhere on this page.

At 2 PM (EDT) Beatles Blast brings you an hour of covers of Beatles classics by a wide variety of artists working in a wide variety of styles. Since it’s a mixtape show, here’s a playlist so you can follow along…

Beatles Blast 099

Stephen Marley “Don’t Let Me Down”
Emmaline “With A Little Help From My Friends”
Beck “Wah Wah”
Matthew Sweet and Sussanna Hoffs “Gimme Some Truth”
Tina Turner “Come Together”
Billy Preston “Get Back”
Bodies of Water “Dear Boy”
Peter and Gordon “A World Without Love”
Silkie “You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away”
Alison Moorer “Here Comes The Sun”
Fairground Attraction “Do You Want To Know A Secret”
The Thompson Twins with Nile Rodgers, Madonna and Steve Stevens “Revolution”
Brad Mehldau “Baby’s In Black”
Joel Paterson “Drive My Car”
Fiona Apple “Across The Universe”
Hollywood Vampires “Cold Turkey”

Beatles Blast can be heard every Wednesday at 2 PM, with replays Thursday at 11 PM, Friday at 1 PM,  and Saturday afternoon.

At 3 PM (EDT) on Curtain Call, Mel Larch comes to the defense of Martin Short, in response to the recent hatchet job profile in a website that is not deserving of a link or any attention.

Everybody loves Martin Short, from his time on SCTV to his current role with Steve Martin in Only Murders In This Building, he is universally loved…except by one person.

A low-level writer for {CENSORED} Magazine (which is really only a website) penned a hate letter to Mr. Short recently, complaining that he had no talent. The backlash was instantaneous and massive, and with this edition of Curtain Call, Mel would like to add to the dogpile and extend a virtual middle finger to that writer, who shall remain deservedly nameless, and devote most of her show to the cast album of Martin Short’s mock-autobiographical musical, Martin Short: Fame Becomes Me, from 2006.

And that’s after opening with a duet between Short and Bernadette Peters from his Tony-nominated turn in the musical version of Neil Simon’s The Goodbye Girl. He later won a Tony for another show, and that goes along with several Emmy awards and other accolades. Fans of Short (and there are billions) will get a kick out of Fame Becomes Me, and the cameos by Short as some of his most beloved characters.

Curtain Call can be heard on The AIR Wednesday at 3 PM, with replays Thursday at 8 AM, Friday at 10 AM, Saturday at 8 PM and Monday at 9 AM. A six-hour marathon of classic episodes can be heard Sunday evening starting at 6 PM, and an all-night marathon of Curtain Call episodes can be heard Wednesday nights, beginning at Midnight.

Also on The AIR, Wednesday at 11 PM,  The Comedy Vault brings you an hour of stand up from Ali Wong.

It’s an all-new week on The AIR and that means it’s time for a new  Radio Free Charleston and a new edition of The Swing Shift on Tuesday! You simply have to point your cursor over and tune in at the website, or you could just stay here, and  listen to the cool embedded player found elsewhere on this page.  

You can hear Radio Free Charleston Tuesdays at 10 AM and 10 PM, with tons of replays throughout the week.  This week we have three full hours of glorious free-format radio with lots of local acts mixed in with independent artists from around the world and a few classic tracks from major artists, just to keep you on your toes.

We open with a new song written and performed entirely by Kenny Booth , the guitar maestro for such bands as Disarm The Fallen, HARRAH, Membrane Cell and others. This is a killer tune and I hope Kenny has more up his sleeve. This was one of the three cool local tunes we told you about last Friday.

Following that we have a newly-remixed classic from The Tunesmiths, Mark Beckner’s old band that we used to feature back in the broadcast radio days of RFC. Mark’s been tidying up his archives for eventual release on Bandcamp, and we’ll let you know as soon as that project goes live.

Another remixed archive project is in pre-order mode now from Todd Burge. He’s retooled a 1980s album by his legendary first band, 63 Eyes. You can order it now, and get two tracks early. One of them is in this show.

We also feature new releases from Hello June, David Synn, Lydia Loveless, The 3 Clubmen, Sgt. Van and the Highway Dogs, Duck City Music, Sideshow Villians, Buni Muni, Emily Kinney and more. Sideshow Villains come to us courtesy of our friends in Chicago and they have a big show coming up there next month. We’ll tell you more about that as we get closer.

We also veer into a few themed sets with more oddball cover tunes and a big batch of dark cabaret music. And we end the show with a set of new surf music.

It’s three hours of quality music, crammed into three hours!

Check out the playlist below to see all the goodies we have in store. Live links will take you to the local and indie artist’s pages (where possible)  so you can find out more about them, buy their music and find out where to see them perform live…

RFC V5 147

hour one
Kenny Booth “Big Brain”
The Tunesmiths “Wish”
Hello June “Sometimes”
Mapped By A Forest “Scars”
63 Eyes “The Cellular Cellar”
Tom Robinson “Let My People Be”
Lydia Loveless “Sex and Money”
Astrodot “Sunday Too Far Away”
The 3 Clubmen “Look At Those Stars”
Sgt. Van and the Highway Dogs “Animal Farm”
David Synn “Running Backwards”
Dhani Harrison “Damn That Frequency”

hour two
Duck City Music x CHJ x NdaKut x DiagNosis “Skippin’ Remix Freestyle”
Emmaline “Seven Nation Army”
The Folksmen “Start Me Up”
Big Daddy “Burning Ring Come On Light My Fire”
The Monkey Swingers “I Wanna Be Like You”
Me First and the Gimme Gimmes “You’ve Got A Friend”
Big Daddy “Once In A Lifetime”
Sideshow Villains “Be The Wicked One”
Qiet “Pet Driftwood”
Hellblinki “Kerosene”
Linnfinity “Babel”
Galen and Paul “Lonely Town”
Frenchy And The Punk “Forever and Ever MC Escher”
Andy Prieboy “Psycho Ex (live)”

hour three
Logical Fleadh “Over The Moor to Maggie-Rakish Paddy-Flogging”
Brian Diller “Freedom Rings”
Crazy Jane “Silver”
Buni Muni“Looney Toons”
James Blake “Loading”
Emily Kinney “Walkin’ Round Your Dreams”
The Shapiros “Cry For A Shadow”
Stephen Marley “Cast The First Stone”
Rasta Rafiki “Pushin'”
Test Subject 17 “Seismic Disruptions of a Disproportionate Scale ‘
Guitarmy of One “Espionage a Trois on the Open Sea”
The Madeira “Ancient Winds”
The Tentakills “Drawn and Quartered”

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 2 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 classic 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 last week’s episodes of  MIRRORBALL at 1 PM and Curtain Call at 2 PM.

At 3 PM we offer up a brand-new episode of The Swing Shift. This time we correct a massive oversight. In nearly 150 episodes, we have yet to devote an entire episode to the Wildest, Louis Prima. To make up for it we present a mixtape packed with fifty-nine minutes of one of the most influential artists in Swing.

Sadly, I can’t post a playlist here because…I haven’t recorded the show yet, as I write this. I will tell you that it kicks off wit Louis’ version of his own composition, “Sing, Sing, Sing,” and the show will contain a mix of his biggest hits and my favorite deep album cuts. This is a show you’ll want to PLAY LOUD.

You can hear The Swing Shift Tuesday at 3 PM, with replays Wednesday at 8 AM, Friday at 10 AM and 8 PM and Saturday afternoon, only on The AIR . You can also hear all-night marathons, seven hours each, starting at Midnight Thursday and Sunday evenings.