Category: Uncategorized (Page 125 of 764)

It’s another rare RFC premiere on a Thursday on The AIR  as we deliver unto you a brand-new episode of Radio Free Charleston, which should have been ready two days ago for our normal timeslot, but wasn’t because of real-world stuff that kept happening.

However, having rectified and resolved all of that falderol, Thursday  at 2 PM and 8 PM you simply have to take your cursor over and point it at the website, or you could just stay right here and  listen to the cool embedded player found elsewhere on this page, and you get three full hours of Radio Free Charleston loaded with cool new local music and cool new independent music and some really interesting recycled material from April, 2018.

Our first hour (plus a few minutes extra) is almost all recently-released music, some of it less than a week old. We open with brand-new music from Matt Mullins & The Bringdowns, and heap on the new local stuff with fresh tracks from Corduroy Brown, Softeeth, Mediogres, Massing, Verdeant and Abandon The Ship (who will also supply the opening track for next Tuesday’s new RFC). The indies are represented by Audrey Smiley, Logical Fleadh and Novelty Island. We also have new music from The Zombies and Nashville’s Jonny Strykes, whose EP is slated for an April 14 release.

Our second and third hours resurrect two of our one-hour, all-local editions of Radio Free Charleston from April, 2018.  I was sick as hell that month, and whine about it through both shows, but since they’re packed with so much killer local music I decided to re-share them with you anyway.

I should warn you that over the course of our three hours we jump around many different musical genre and styles, because RFC is free-format radio, and we sorta do that by definition.

Check out the playlist below to see all the goodies we have in store (live links will take you to the artist’s pages where possible)…

RFC V5 125

hour one
Matt Mullins and The Bringdowns “Follow The Leader (Heath’s Theme)”
Massing “Daisies (Ska Version)”
Softeeth “Shingles (demo)”
Chloe Florence (Verdeant) “Reckless”
Mediogres “Chef’s Kiss”
Corduroy Brown “Secrets”
Novelty Island “GoGo”
Abandon The Ship “One More For The Road”
Audrey Smiley “Peppermint and Innocence”
Jonny Strykes “Painted Love”
Those Pretty Wrongs “Always The Rainbow”
The Zombies “Merry Go Round”
The MFB “WMVF”
Andy Prieboy “Home Ain’t Home”
Logical Fleadh “Coming Home”
Frenchy And The Punk “I’ll See You Again”

hour two
Poor Man’s Gravy “Leaving Today”
Brian Diller “Hey Mister Auctioneer”
Jordan Searls “Any Kind of Wind”
Dina Hornbaker “Black Coffee”
Sheldon Vance “Birthright”
Hitchcock Circus “Dirty Girl”
Three Bodies “My Friend”
Blue Million “Don’t Leave”
The Bounty “Buffalos”
Science of the Mind “Son of Sam”
David Synn “Anesthesia”
Karma To Burn “Bobbi, Bobbi, Bobbi, I’m Not”
BobaFlex “Strangle You”
Ptolemy “Event Horizon”

hour three
Speedsuit “Gwendoline”
John Inghram “Gospel”
Under Social “Away”
Tape Age “The Hanged Man”
Superfetch “Quirky Bubbles”
Bongwater “Schmoozedance”
Doktor Steamly “A Lab Near Arkham”
The BrotherSisters “Damn The Torpedoes”
Sasha Colette “Victory”
Total Meltdown “Wish You Were Here”
Sheldon Vance “Watch It Burn”
Feast of Stephen “Superfund”

You can hear this episode of Radio Free Charleston Thursday at 2 PM and 8 PM on The AIR, with replays Friday at 9 AM and 9 PM, Saturday at Noon and Midnight,  and  Monday at 11 AM, exclusively on The AIR. Now you can also hear a different episode of RFC every weekday at 5 PM, and we bring you a marathon all night long Saturday night/Sunday morning.

I’m also going to  embed a low-fi, mono version of this show right at the bottom of this post,  so you can listen on demand. We’ll be back to our normal schedule with our next episode next Tuesday.

Okay, it’s time once again for your guide to things you can do in and around Charleston as we get near the original day of the undead. In this week’s edition of STUFF TO DO, we’re going to start off with a radio note, and then suggest a very cool horror comic that you can Kickstart,  Decay.

First a note on Wednesday afternoon’s Curtain Call on The AIR: This week Mel wanted to salute the classic musical, Oklahoma, just a few days after the 80th anniversary of its first production. She’d planned to present the entire musical, made up of tracks from several different productions over the decades. However, I realized that we’d already dedicated an entire show to Oklahoma four years ago, when the acclaimed and horny revival won the 2019 Tony Award for best revival of a musical.

So Wednesday at 3 PM, Curtain Call will re-present that episode of our musical theater showcase, so your humble blogger can focus on catching up and working on this week’s delayed episode of Radio Free Charleston. You can tune in at the website, or you could just stay right here and  listen to the convenient embedded radio player lurking elsewhere on this page.

Now, onto our Kickstarter recommendation for the final two issues of Decay:

I picked up the first three issues of this five-part series, written by Anthony D. Stokes, last year, and now the final two installments are live at Kickstarter.

In case you missed them, you can still get your hands on the first three parts as well, as physical comics, or in digital form. Anthony does a killer job fullfilling his pledges, so chances are you’ll have your books a week or two after the campaign closes.

Let me quote liberally from the Kickstarter page here…

Jess brings her brother DK back from the dead when he gets shot at a house party but after he starts a murderous rampage for revenge she may come to regret that decision.

Decay is a 5 issue comic book series written by me (Stokes), illustrated by Marc Oliver, and lettered by Es Kay. The funds for this campaign will be used on art, lettering, and printing physical copies. This campaign is essential to continuing the series to its conclusion.

Morality plays have been a part of stories since the beginning of time. Putting characters in no-win situations and watching the consequences of their actions is timeless and I’m excited to show my take on it. I’ve always been a fan of mature comics that felt adult but aren’t gratuitous. There’s no excessive nudity, cursing, or gore just an adult story with mature themes.

Decay is a gritty grimy revenge thriller set in New Orleans. It is inspired by Frankenstein and The Crow.

Decay is qualitystorytelling, with a fresh take on horror that is so compelling that your ever-forgetful blogger has been anxiously awaiting this Kickstarter campaign since I grabbed the first two issues last summer. Stokes is a very gifted storyteller and in Decay he’s woven familar elements into something really new and exciting. The campaign has just been live for a couple of days, and its already one-third funded.

Stokes is directing the action here, but the art by Marc Oliver and the lettering by Es Kay perfectly suit the story and the end result is, as they say, an action-packed thrill ride. Check out the video here…

If you’re a fan of horror and want to support a very creative new take from a young Black writer. then visit THIS PAGE and kick in. There’s just about two and a half weeks to get in on this, and trust me, it’s a hell of a ride.

And now, onto STUFF TO DO…

Live Music is back at Taylor Books. There is no cover charge, and shows start at 7:30 PM. Friday it’s Chet Lowther. Saturday Friendly Fire entertains the crowd at Charleston’s beloved Bookstore/Coffee Shop/Art Gallery.

The Empty Glass has some great stuff through the week to tell you about.  Thursday from 5:30 PM to 7:30 PM, Swingstein and Robin play fiddle and piano and sing swing and early jazz standards. Each week they donate their tips to a local nonprofit.  Later on Thursday, Kenny Booth hosts “Shred Night” so metallically-inclined peoples can come out and jam and not worry about upsetting the folk singers. Next week they’ll have an open mic Monday night, and Songwriter Showcase on Tuesday. Other shows that have graphics are listed among the images below.

Please remember that the pandemic is not over yet. It’s still a going concern. 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.

If you’re up for going out, here are a few suggestions for the rest of this week, roughly in order.

Your humble blogger got tied up with real world stuff and was not able to record a new episode of Radio Free Charleston on Monday, so instead, this week we will debut our free-format program on Thursday at 2 PM, on The AIR. Tuesday we’ll run a specially-selected encore edition of the show. Either way, 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.  

Rather than leave you hanging with nothing much else here in PopCult today, how about I share just a few photos from my recent trip to Lexington, Kentucky for the Lexington Comic Con and Toy Show?

There are more photos and video on the way, and this show actually took place almost two weeks ago, but back-to-back trips meant I couldn’t even look at the images until yesterday. So over the next week, expect a few surprises. We’ll preview some of the fun here, like my comic-book nerd convention shirt that you see up at the top of this post.

We got back from Lexington on a Sunday, then left on a train for Washington, DC the following Wednesday. I didn’t take any cameras with me on that trip, preferring to spend a couple of days as a civilian for a change, but we did see a killer production of Pacific Overtures at Signature Theater. I’ll tell you about that on Friday.

For now, here’s just a taste of Lexington…

We got there really early, and got this photo of a nearly-empty hall Friday morning.

Thusday night, the VIP passes got us into the vendor area early. Man, they had tons of crap there.

We also got a free shirt each.

As a toy collector, I was a little disappointed to discover that 99.9% of the toys were from after 1980, and I really don’t collect Star Wars stuff at all, but if that’s your deal, there was a ton of it.

These were either cosplayers or delegates to a GOP convention.

This full-size dragon thing from “Avatar: The Last Airebender” was impressive as hell, and probably would be even more impressive if I had thought to include a human in the photo so you could tell that this thing was probably12 or 15-feet tall.

Kentucky Ghostubusters with an impressive Ecto-One, which wasn’t theirs. They said some guy just left it and told them not to let anybody sit in it. And also it didn’t run. It looks cool, though.

The reason we went. Tom Kenny signs a SpongeBob print for Mel (in the foreground). Video coming Sunday.

Aside from the convention, we went to visit the real-life Cocaine Bear. Actually it’s the stuffed carcass of the real-life Cocaine Bear, since he didn’t really go on a rampage and instead dropped dead on the spot, but that’s him! We’ll have more photos from the Kentucky 4 Kentucky Fun Mall in a day or two.

Outside the fun mall.

Just around the corner from Cocaine Bear we found an Army Surplus store. We’ll probably do a photo essay on them, too.

This week’s artistic greeting is a simple, smallish, figure sketch, done very roughly with pastel crayons on Paper For Pens. I did this a few weeks ago, and set it aside to use now, since I was riding the rails last week and didn’t have any time to work on any art.

This was just an attempt to do a figure study with no reference. It’s sort of a collision of Impressionism and Expressionism, only not really because it’s just a product of my imagination. Maybe we ought to call it “Illusionism,” since I was just trying to make it look real when it wasn’t.

Or it might just be considered a crude drawing of a naked lady.  It was scanned with a layer of acetate protecting the scanner bed, and a little color-correction in the computer to compensate for that.

To see it bigger try clicking HERE

Over in radioland, Monday at 2 PM on The AIR, we bring you 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 an hour of classic stand-up from Shelly Berman on an encore episode of Comedy Vault.

Tonight at 9 PM the Monday Marathon presents ten classic episodes of Psychedelic Shack.

Above you see the brand new video by our friends, Frenchy and The Punk.  “Church of Sound” is from their latest album, Zen Ghost, and to promote it, they’ll appear at The Empty Glass in Charleston on April 19.  I’ll give you plenty of reminders of that show over the next couple of weeks, and F&P are in heavy rotation on Radio Free Charleston, so you’ll have plenty of chances to find out more about this great band before they hit town again on the 19th.

Meanwhile, check out the video and go buy the album. It’s pretty epic stuff.

This vintage April 2007 episode of Radio Free Charleston features a road trip to Parkersburg, West Virginia. Shot at a “Songpull” event at John Radcliff’s house, this episode marked three appearances in a row by Rad, and also featured music from Don Baker, Deron Baker and Josh Buskirk, plus there’s a special rendition of the RFC theme song by John Radcliff and Jerry Fugate.

You can read the original production notes here.

The PopCulteer
March 31, 2023

We have reached the last day of March and Friday afternoon we offer up 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.

At 2 PM, Mel Larch uncorks a new MIRRORBALL!  Once again, we don’t have a fancy theme this week, just meaty, beaty, funky Disco music.

Check out the playlist…

MIRRORBALL 071

Boney M “Daddy Cool”
The Isley Brothers “That Lady”
Donna Summer “I Love You”
Grace Jones “Love Is A Drug”
Eddie Kendricks “Keep On Truckin'”
The Village People “YMCA”
Kool And The Gang “Hollywood Swinging”
McFadden & Whitehead “Ain’t No Stopping Us Now”
Gloria Gaynor “Never Can Say Goodbye”
Hot Gossip “I Lost My Heart To A Starship Trooper”
The Bee Gees “Stayin’ Alive”
Abba “Lay All Your Love On Me”
5000 Volts “I’m On Fire”
The Emotions “Best of My Love”
Love And Kisses “Thank God It’s Friday”

You can hear MIRRORBALL every Friday at 2 PM, with replays throughout the following week, Saturday at 9 PM, Sunday at 11 PM, Monday at 9 AM and Tuesday at 1 PM.

At 3 PM, Sydney Fileen graces us with a special mixtape salute to The Fixx on Sydney’s Big Electric Cat. The Fixx is a group that Sydney considers to be one of the quintessential New Wave bands, despite the fact that they found much more success in North America than they did here in their home country, the UK.

Formed in London 1979, and led by Cy Curnin, the band is still making new music with their recently reunited original line-up. This week will Sydney mines on their first decade of making music together with two solid hours of music that includes their hits, deep album cuts, extended mixes and even a few b-sides.

Sadly, because of your PopCulteer’s somewhat crazed schedule this week, I don’t have the playlist to share with you, but you know it’s all going to be great for fans of The Fixx.

Sydney’s Big Electric Cat is produced at Haversham Recording Institute in London, and can be heard every Friday at 3 PM, with replays Saturday afternoon,  Monday at 7 AM, Tuesday at 8 PM, Wednesday at Noon and Thursday at 10 AM, exclusively on The AIR.

That’s what’s new on The AIR Friday, and that is this week’s PopCulteer. Check back for our regular features every day.

At the risk of repeating myself, you should know the drill by now.  There’s plenty of STUFF TO DO in Charleston and all over the Mountain State as we bid ‘farewell” to March, and start to fool around with April.

Live Music is back at Taylor Books. There is no cover charge, and shows start at 7:30 PM. Friday it’s Brenna Dugan and Aaron Fisher. Saturday Brandon Costello entertains the crowd at Charleston’s beloved Bookstore/Coffee Shop/Art Gallery.

The Empty Glass has some great stuff through the week to tell you about.  Thursday from 5:30 PM to 7:30 PM, Swingstein and Robin play fiddle and piano and sing swing and early jazz standards. Each week they donate their tips to a local nonprofit.  Sunday sees the return of the Post-Mountain Stage Jam.  Next week they’ll have an open mic Monday night, and Songwriter Showcase on Tuesday. Other shows that have graphics are listed among the images below.

Please remember that the pandemic is not over yet. In fact, it’s sort of surging again. 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.

If you’re up for going out, here are a few suggestions for the rest of this week, roughly in order.

Wednesday afternoon The AIR brings you a special new episodes of Curtain Call and Beatles Blast.  You can tune in at the website, or if you’re on a laptop or desktop, you could just stay right here and  listen to the convenient embedded radio player lurking elsewhere on this page.

At 2 PM Beatles Blast revisits a theme we explored way back on our seventeenth episode, bands that deliberately tried to sound like The Beatles. This time we lead off with music from The Analogues, a Norwegian Beatles tribute band that, after releasing five live albums of meticulously-reconstructed Beatles covers, have come out with a studio album of very Beatlesque original songs.

You hear a few tracks from The Analogues, along with music from The Rutles, Utopia, Klaatu, Dukes of Stratosphere, Split Enz and more. Check out the playlist for this slightly deceptive mixtape show…

Beatles Blast 090
Not The Beatles II

The Analogues “Patience”
The Analogues “Good Foot”
Klaatu “Doctor Marvello”
Utopia “Crystal Ball”
The Rutles “Hold My Hand”
Dukes of Stratosphere “Shiny Cage”
The Analogues “Say That You Will”
Utopia “Alone”
Klaatu “Everybody Took A Holiday”
Dukes of Stratosphere “Vanishing Girl”
Split Enz “What’s The Matter With You”
The Rutles “Get Up and Go”
Novelty Island “Yes”
The Rutles “Let’s Be Natural (rehearsal)”
Klaatu “For You Girl”
The Knickerbockers “One Track Mind”
Julian Lennon “Let Me Be”
Sean Lennon “Wait For Me”
James McCartney “Fantasy”
The Analogues “Yeah, Yeah, Yeah”

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 on Curtain Call, Mel Larch brings us a mixtape of her own as she curates one track each from sixteen new, or upcoming, musical theatre productions from Broadway, The West End and around the world. Some have just opened on Broadway or in the West End, some are just preview songs from concept recordings, some are from upcoming revivals and some may never actually make it to the stage. The plan is to explore these new shows in more detail in the coming weeks.

This show is just a taste, with songs from Kimberly Akimbo, Bad Cinderella, Something’s Afoot, Parade, Maggie, CAGES, Ballad of Dreams The Musical, Darling Grenadine, Between The Lines, EPIC: The Cyclops Saga, McGyver: The Musical, Lighting The Fuse: Sparks From Treason, Baby, The Great British Bake Off Musical, Ride The Cyclone The Musical and Some Like It Hot.

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  presents a classic episode featuring the stand-up comedy of Shelly Berman.

We have come to Tuesday on a week filled with new programs on The AIR  and that means it’s time for a new  Radio Free Charleston and a new edition of The Swing Shift. 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.  

We have one new hour and two hours of classic RFC  from 2017 today on Radio Free Charleston this week. Our first hour is loaded with new releases from West Virginia an dindependen artists, plus a few ringers, like brand-new Depeche Mode.

Our new hour opens with the RFC debut of The Apurna Project, and pays a quick tribute to the recently-departed class of 2023 WVMHOF inductee, Fuzzy Haskins. We have great local tracks from the likes of The MFB, Hurl Brickbat, Massing and Buni Muni, plus we have some cool independent stuff to share.

We preview half of a two-track EP from Nashville’s Jonny Strykes in advance of its April 15 release, and we also bring you one-fourth of Story At Eleven, a new long-form composition by Chicago Jazz bandleader and composer, Shawn Maxwell.

Also, while I knew nothing of the band, Sweeny Todd, when I played them, I just learned that they were a 1970s glam-rock band from Canada that included Bryan Adams and Nick Gilder among their ranks. The track I play in this show features a 16-year-old Adams on lead vocals. Who knew?

Our second and third hours revive an a couple of classic one-hour versions of Radio Free Charleston Volume 4 from 2017, and it’s a nice time capsule of the music scene then, along with a healthy dose of treasures from the local music vault.

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

RFC V5 124

hour one
The Apurna Project “The Good Ole Days”
Fuzzy Haskins “Cookie Jar”
The MFB “Funkle Sam Needs You”
Shawn Maxwell “Answer & Arrival”
Hurl Brickbat “Blooms”
Test Subject 17 “Operation x5000”
Jonny Strykes “Save Yourself”
Massing “Daisies”
Buni Muni “Backyard Wrestling”
Damone “Just What I Needed”
Skyhooks “Broken Gin Bottle”
Payback’s a Bitch“Where Have All the Groupies Gone?”
Depeche Mode “My Favorite Stranger”
Sweeny Todd “Shut Up”

hour two
The Company Stores “So Good”
Todd Burge “Time To Waste Time”
The Defectors “Hesitation”
Radarhill and Nick Weckman “Hope-The Burning”
M with Chuck Biel “Fools Line Up”
Farnsworth “Roll Me Up”
Payback’s a Bitch “I Walk The Line”
Superfetch “Simple Mathematics”
Ann Magnuson “Cobras In Love”
Deni Bonet “Nuages”
Hybrid Soul Project “Just Friends”
Qiet “Mayfly Man”
Stark Raven “Irrational People”
The Amazing Delores “Love Magic”

hour three
Wren Allen Band “Nothing Ever Happens Here”
Bon Air “Bizarre Love Gun”
Todd Burge “Another Sunny Sunday”
Deni Bonet “Palisades”
Calendars and Kerosene “I’m Over You”
Speedsuit “Falling Star”
Sheldon Vance “What Remains”
Since We Set Fire “Halle Halle”
Wilbur By The Sea “Stillness”
Rain May Fall “Remember Everything”
Scrap Iron Pickers “Searching For The Scientist”
King’s Harem “Down By The Riverside”
Byzantine “My New Casket”

You can hear this episode of Radio Free Charleston Tuesday at 10 AM and 10 PM on The AIR, with replays Wednesday at 9 AM,  Thursday at 3 PM, Friday at 9 AM, Saturday at Noon and Midnight,  and  Monday at 11 AM, exclusively on The AIR. Now you can also hear a different episode of RFC every weekday at 5 PM, and we bring you a marathon all night long Saturday night/Sunday morning.

I’m also going to  embed a low-fi, mono version of this show right in this post, right here so you can listen on demand.

After RFC, stick around for encores of last week’s episodes of  MIRRORBALL at 1 PM and Curtain Call at 2 PM.

At 3 PM we offer up a special new mixteape episode of The Swing Shift. This time it’s a solid hour of the Swingingest tunes recorded by one Francis Albert Sinatra. Your humble blogger and radio host was raised on Sinatra, and that’s probably where my love of Swing Music originated.  We cover pretty much the entire career of “The Voice,” and it’s a killer hour of great music.

Just check out this impeccable playlist, baby…

The Swing Shift 140
Frank Sinatra
“On The Sunny Side of the Street”
“I’ve Got You Under My Skin”
“Something’s Gotta Give”
“This Can’t Be Love”
“I’ve Got The World On A String”
“Night And Day”
“Just One Of Those Things”
“Come Dance With Me”
“I Get A Kick Out Of You”
“I’m Gonna Live Till I Die”
“Dancing In The Dark”
“Let’s Face The Music and Dance”
“Ya Better Stop”
“The Song Is You”
“Fly Me To The Moon”
“Luck Be A Lady”
“The Way You Look Tonight”
“You Make Me Feel So Young”
“Get Happy”
“The Best Is Yet To Come”

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.