So yesterday I told you all about the 35th Anniversary episode of Radio Free Charleston, and it turns out that a lot of folks who read PopCult and listen to the show were not aware of the history of the show and how it came to be. So today I’m going to recycle an edition of The PopCulteer that ran in this blog exactly 15 years ago, but I’ll update it a bit and fill in some more details. At the end of it, I will compile a series of posts from 2007 that talk more about the original broadcast incarnation of the show, and provide a few audio snippets.
Be prepared for a long, long post.
IT WAS TWENTY (Thirty-Five) YEARS AGO, TODAY (Yesterday)
Well, sort of. Thirty-five years ago, in 1989, during Labor Day weekend, at 2 AM Sunday Morning September 3, Radio Free Charleston debuted on WVNS, 96.1 FM. It was part of my reward (in lieu of a raise) for working over a hundred consecutive days at the station. After starting out as the night deejay who wasn’t trusted to talk, and winding up as the assistant program director I had become indispensible. Part of my job was filling the weekend schedule with part-timers, and I was having a hard time keeping anyone in the Saturday late night/Sunday early morning spot.
Since the station owed me–I’d been filling up to three shifts a day, sometimes using three different voices and personas–I made a proposition: We had syndicated programming in my regular 7 PM to Midnight shift on Friday nights, so I really wasn’t needed. I offered to give that spot to a part-timer in order to take the Saturday Midnight timeslot…on one condition.
They had to give me total freedom to play anything I wanted.
The station was so poorly managed that they agreed. And I went nuts assembling a four-hour show (starting at 2 AM due to contractually-obligated syndicated programming). Inspired by the 1970s incarnation of WVAF, which had no real format, I put together a show featuring New Wave music from the early 1980s, 70s progressive rock, headphone comedy, local music and bizarre stuff that I did myself. We snuck onto the unsuspecting airwaves that Labor Day weekend, and the in-studio photos in today’s post were taken by Frank Panucci during that very first broadcast.
I should point out that “Radio Free Charleston” was what I wanted to call it. Our program director hated that title and insisted I call it “After Hours,” a title I hated. From the first minute, I called it by both names, but by the second week I’d dropped “After Hours” and re-cut all the promos for the show to omit that part of the name. That was the first of my tiny subversive victories.
The first episode had no local music. It didn’t have a theme song, or interstitials or promotion, either. I just got the okay to do it two days earlier. It was always my intention to include local music but I was timid about asking too much of my unpredictable program director. When I worked up enough nerve to ask him if I could play Hasil Adkins’ “Big Red Satellite” in the second week of the show, he cut me off first and asked me to play a single by “Cheryl,” a wannabee teen pop singer, and the daughter of a local car dealer who advertised on the station.
I immediately agreed and said, “I’ll even play some other local acts so that it won’t look like we’re playing favorites!”
And a legend was born. By the third week I was playing songs by Stark Raven and Big Money (Michael Lipton’s pre-pre-Carpenter Ants band). My program director had no idea what he’d unleashed.
Largely because of the local music, at one point we had over ten thousand listeners. That was more than the station’s morning and afternoon drive dayparts…combined. Once the show was successful enough to attract interest (and advertisers), forces within the station conspired to kill it after eight months. I wrote about the man who pulled the trigger a dozen years ago, but in 2022 I finally revealed his name.
It took 16 years for me to revive the show at The Gazz as a video program. In the interim, there had been multiple radio pilot episodes recorded and several false starts, but the video concept, with much help from Brian Young, Frank Panucci and Mel Larch, brought RFC back to stay. Then, in 2014, I returned to radio–internet radio this time,–via Voices of Appalachia radio, which has since mutated into The AIR. Since November, 2014, Radio Free Charleston has been your source for local music every Tuesday at 10 AM and 10 PM. At the beginning of 2020 I expanded the show to three hours and began to emulate the free-format style of the original show, mixing local music with national and international artists, including independent and major-label releases.
When I was diagnosed with Myasthenia Gravis in 2016, I cut the video show back to one show a year, and I’ve restarted the count on the radio show with volumes 3, 4 and 5, but we’ve been a Tuesday institution for nearly ten years. All told, there have been over 500 episodes of the RFC radio show, and over 300 video episodes, when you combine the main show with The RFC MINI SHOW.
I think that deserves a little self-horn-tootery, don’t you?
After the jump, let’s wallow in a little more nostalgia, there’s a series of posts from this blog from December, 2007, newly-restored with their little audio clips and compiled into one huge post…
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