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…
THREE BODIES FROM KEY WEST
We’re going back to March 1990 for a series of interlinked audio clips from the original Radio Free Charleston radio show. Once you get the chance to hear all of them, they’ll make perfect sense, really. This exercise in nostalgia was originally designed to provoke my readers to come out in huge numbers for our big night at the La Belle Theater late in 2007, on Saturday, Dec. 1. I’m still not clear on how posting clips from the old radio version of the show was supposed to convince people to come out to a retrospective of stuff from the video version, but it was a blast sifting through these old tapes, so I’m not complaining.
Three Bodies (above right) was one of the most popular Charleston-area bands during the original Radio Free Charleston era of 1989-90. Kris Comandy, Brian Lucas and current RFC Big Shot Brian Young made up this dynamic trio who had a sound not unlike that of Nirvana, who made it huge a couple of years later. During Spring Break 1990, Comandy and Young made the trek to Key West, Florida, which that set into motion a series of events that culminated in the clips I’m bringing you here in PopCult today.
This was in the days of the legendary Charleston Playhouse, the Bohemian supernova that burned brightly at the center of the Charleston arts community for almost a year before being consumed by it’s own intensity. (That may be a little more poetic than it has to be–they really went out of business because they weren’t making any money and the twenty-or-so owners were no longer all on speaking terms.) But it was a very special place that people still recall fondly over 30 years down the road, even though the building no longer stands.
Three Bodies at The Charleston Playhouse
But the playhouse doesn’t really factor into this clip. This was the week Brian Young and Kris Cormandy went to Key West for Spring Break. By this point, I did a nightly “Radio Free Charleston Preview” at 11:35 PM, during my top-rated regular shift as an oldies DJ at WVNS, 96.1 FM (back in the days before it was “The Wolf” or whatever the hell they’re calling it now). I’m still remarkably proud of what I accomplished during the short life of my old radio show. I was able to play tons of local music, and I also got to play some of the hippest artists in the world over the air, right here in Charleston. Listeners could hear Captain Beefheart, Kate Bush, The Cure, REM, Van Der Graaf Generator, DEVO, Wire and more. With the nightly preview, we even managed to sneak some of that stuff into prime time. (Note: This was written before the 2014 rebirth of the show as a radio program)
But during this week in March, on Thursday night, instead of playing previously-recorded music, I took a phone call from Key West on the air. I knew that Brian and Kris were going to call in and play a song over the phone. I thought that they’d do it from their hotel room. I was wrong. You can hear the results in the clip below.
That was a wild night. The song, “Broken Vase” was a tune Kris had written for a previous incarnation of the band called “Atomic Cafe.” But he and Brian re-worked it and played it, busker-style, at a pay phone on the street in Key West. And it was broadcast live in Charleston, West Virginia. There were so many requests for me to play it again that I replayed the entire phone call during that week’s regular Saturday-night episode of RFC. Later in that show (which featured various Swivels in the studio milling about–you’ll hear from them later in this post), Brian Young called in to extrapolate about the events of the previous Thursday.
As you’ll hear, Brian and Kris performed the song on Thursday, then Brian flew back into town on Friday. Brian had fallen asleep in the sun during his stay and was sleeping off the mother of all sunburns, but set his alarm so he could wake up around 3:30 a.m. and call into the show with “The Rest Of The Story.” You can tell he was still wiped out from the trip.
You can get a hint of the controlled chaos that I kept in the studio during Radio Free Charleston broadcasts. There was a certain amount of shtick at play here, but the wild unpredictability was part of the fun. By way of explaining the context of some of my and Brian’s remarks, this was near the end of the run of the radio version of the show. Among the trumped-up complaints that the new station management had was the accusation that we were glorifying drug use and drunkenness. So that’s why we started making so many sarcastic remarks about those things on the air. We weren’t afraid of repercussions, since we knew that the powers-that-be at the station weren’t actually listening to the show. If they had been, we probably would have caught some flak for all the f-bombs that went over the air live and unbleeped.
Short Bursts Of Absurdity With Bridget
A few weeks before I originally posted these clips, I wrote about the stunning revelation that Bridget Lancaster (then Sapp, seen right, on the set of her new cooking show), the second jingle singer for Radio Free Charleston, and one of my running buddies back in the day, had gone on to become a major television celebrity on “America’s Test Kitchen” on PBS. Well, it just so happens that the same week that Brian Young and Kris Cormandy called in from Key West was the first week that I used jingles and comedy bits that Bridget and I had recorded for the show.
We called these “liners” but they were essentially just short bursts of absurdity designed to amuse and confuse the casual listener who may have tuned into RFC in the middle of the night in some sort of inebriated state. The more twisted, the better. As you’ll hear, I also had a habit of using these liners to return fire to a few rival DJ’s in town who made the mistake of bad-mouthing me. I got away with murder on that show.
On the night that Bridget came in to record the new jingles for the show, we took the opportunity to clown around in the studio a bit, and came up with about an hour’s worth of material that I later whittled down into bit-sized pieces, much the way they take a majestic Redwood tree and turn it into toothpicks. You’ll hear Bridget and me doing our old Jewish couple routine and a bit of our “Hey Doll” shtick that we used to do to annoy people at the Charleston Playhouse. You’ll also get to hear Bridget speak the words that she always wanted to while working in retail.
Bridget isn’t just content co-hosting America’s Test Kitchen, editing several related magazines, and being the best cooking writer in the world, no, let’s go to the press release to see what’s next from my old compatriot:
“America’s Test Kitchen is the most-watched cooking show on public television, attracting 3 million viewers per week. The 8th season of America’s Test Kitchen starts in January 2008. The same folks behind America’s Test Kitchen are also cooking up a brand-new show, America’s Test Kitchen: Cook’s Country, which is filmed in a Vermont farmhouse and relies on the practical, no-nonsense food that has made Cook’s Country magazine so successful. The show features 13 episodes that were taped in Vermont from September 21 to October 5, 2007. It will air on public television stations beginning in July 2008. America’s Test Kitchen: Cook’s Country is hosted by Christopher Kimball, Bridget Lancaster, and Julia Collin-Davison. There are new testing segments with Adam Ried and a live audience tasting in each tasting segment led by Jack Bishop. Each episode gets the test kitchen detail — taking recipes from disaster to foolproof — that viewers rely on and expect from America’s Test Kitchen.”
Wow, and I knew her back when she was happy just to say “hell” on the air. We had a lot of fun on the old show. (Note: Since this was written, Bridget and her cohort, Julia, have taken over as hosts and executive producers of both America’s Test Kitchen and Cook’s Country.)
The Supergroup of Beckner, Price and Panucci
Stephen Beckner
Now, I’m going to inflict upon you some of the most gloriously inept drumming ever caught on tape. Let me explain. We’re still in that fateful week in March 1990. If you’ve been following the story so far in our audio clips, you know that Brian Young, then the drummer for Three Bodies, was in Key West Florida falling asleep in the sun and getting his face half burned off. On Thursday of that week, he and Kris Cormandy called in and performed a song live on the Radio Free Charleston preview show I did at 11:35 p.m. each night. You heard that clip above.
There is a clear domino effect going on here. You see, Brian was also the drummer for The Hepcats, the all-star house band for the Tuesday Night Jam Sessions at the Legendary Charleston Playhouse, my old stomping grounds and the most-favored venue of the radio version of Radio Free Charleston.
The Tuesday night Jam Session was a weekly epic of open-mic madness. Bands would come out and do a few tunes, but they’d also intermingle. New collaborations took place. Insane moments happened there that people still talk about, like Michael Friedman’s punk rendition of “Me And Bobby McGee,” and the formation of the Charleston Playhouse Quartet, who perform the theme song that’s still used today for Radio Free Charleston. That theme song was recorded on stage at the Playhouse, improvised live.
As I mentioned, the Jam Session was hosted by a band called “The Hepcats.” The Hepcats were a loose conglomeration of members of other bands, most of them regulars on RFC. On most weeks, Brian Young, from the aforementioned Three Bodies, was the drummer. Gary Price, of the Swivel Rockers (later shortened to “The Swivels”) was the regular bass player. The guitar spot rotated. Some weeks it would be Price’s fellow Swivel John Radcliff, while other weeks it would be Go Van Gogh’s Stephen Beckner (You can see Stephen above). Occasionally John “Sham Voodoo” Estep, Alan Griffith, or Third Body Kris Cormandy would hold down the guitar slot.
But Brian was not in the state on the night this recording was made. Stephen Beckner had just written a new song, “Got Drunk, Got Married, Got Screwed,” and wanted to debut it with The Hepcats that night. Only — there was no drummer. There was a drum kit on stage. I think it was Brian’s, in fact, but there wasn’t a qualified drummer in the building. I was sort of emceeing the evening, so I was onstage with the band when Gary Price jokingly suggested that I get behind the kit and start playing.
I had never sat down behind a drum kit before. I didn’t know a paradiddle from a rim shot, but I put my performance-anxiety issues aside. I took a running leap at keeping the beat. You can sample the results yourself.
It’s a great song, strong enough to overcome the lousy drumming. Later, when Stephen performed the song with Go Van Gogh, I got to hear how the drums were supposed to sound. I played it sort of like Keith Moon falling down a flight of stairs in a drum kit…backwards. Tapes were rolling, and the results aired on RFC the following Saturday night. It’s still not clear if it was egotisical of me to air my own horrible drumming, or if I was being humble by proving how bad I could be at something. You be the judge.
I was so bad up there that halfway through the song, when I finally remembered to hit the cymbals, you can hear the crowd cheering for me. Luckily, after one song, Tommy Medvick showed up and took over. Tommy was the ace drummer for the Swivels (you can see him as part of The Feast Of Stephen in episode 23 of RFC).
Chaos In The Studio With The Swivels
One of the fun things about the radio incarnation of Radio Free Charleston was that I had total freedom. It was the kind of freedom you get in radio only when you’re working for a completely mis-managed company that didn’t know what it was doing. I was basically allowed to start the show as a reward for working over 100 days straight without a day off, sometimes filling two or three on-air shifts — and not expecting a raise. It was a cheap way to keep me happy while I was doing the work of five people.
And happy I was. I was able to bring all sorts of new music, much of it local, to an area that hadn’t heard anything approaching free-form radio since the old WVAF-FM mutated into V-100 back in the late ’70s. I got away with playing stuff on the air that hadn’t been played before and hasn’t been played since. And I also got to have live guests in the studio, because the show aired at 2 a.m. and it wasn’t like anyone in station management was listening.
On the fateful night of this long-lost broadcast, I did not have any guests planned, but some showed up anyway. Gary Price, John Radcliff and Tommy Medvick from The Swivels showed up. Along with them came Sue Gaines, who stayed quiet except for laughing, Jennifer Green, and a young lady named Jeannie, who seemed to have spent much of the night having a running argument with Tommy. That’s a photo of Price and Radcliff taken at one of the Tuesday night jam sessions at the Charleston Playhouse at the right. If you look close, you can also see Charleston filmmaker Bob Gates seated in the background. This is a rare photo of Bob, showing him awake at the Playhouse.
Here we’re going to bring you clips from the first hour or so of the show with The Swivels chipping in and with me doing the back-announcing that other radio stations in town were forbidden to do. It’ll give you a good idea of the type of controlled chaos that was Radio Free Charleston.
If you’re scoring at home and want to re-assemble the show from the scraps that I’m posting here, this is where I re-played the song “Broken Vase” by Three Bodies.
In the next clip you get an idea of the type of music I was playing on the show and you get to hear from John Radcliff, the “Quiet Swivel.”
There’s a passing reference in this segment to a couple of bands that I’d caught the previous night. The Velvet Brothers had played at The Levee. Among the members of that band were Jim Lange, now the host of Eclectopia on West Virginia Public Radio, and Greg Wegmann, co-owner of LiveMix Studio. See how everything all comes back into one neat package? The Velvets, including Jim and Greg are still playing locally and I really need to get out and see them now that I’ve had vaccine shot number eight.
I also mention seeing a band called “The Visitors.” The drummer for that band was my old grade-school buddy David Dunkley, who has been otherwise occupied for several years drumming behind Tim McGraw in Nashville. (Dropping names is fun.)
I decided to edit out a bit of the exchange here, because some people might have their feelings hurt, even thirty-five years later. We pick up the show in our next clip just in time to see how seriously I took edicts from management about using certain elements of language on the air. It was an open secret that live guests in the studio on RFC would occasionally slip up and drop an “f-bomb.” That didn’t happen on this show. It was the first time in 17 weeks that nobody uttered that word. Luckily, none of my bosses could stand to listen to the show so we never caught any flak over it.
You can also get a hint of the conflict brewing between Tom Medvick and Jeannie, who worked in ad sales for WSAZ-TV (she may have just left her job there, I’m not sure). They’d been having a loud disagreement over whether TV advertising was more effective than radio advertising. It’s a quaint argument these days, when the advertising industry is in a trillion-dollar tailspin.
One of the other rules I bent was the prohibition on allowing my guests to appear with the aid of certain types of liquid courage. Since station management was not listening, and nobody complained, I didn’t see how it hurt anything as long as the guests did not leave any evidence behind. I didn’t imbibe, so I wasn’t in violation of any FCC regulations.
The Swivels were a self-lubricating band, and when they’d show up unannounced it was usually the result of an evening of partying that ended with “Let’s go see Rudy!” The repeated references to Pepsi or RC bottles were actually clever euphemisms for the other popular bottled beverages in which the band was indulging. The cool thing was that we were so slick that NONE OF THE LISTENERS EVER KNEW that people were drinking alcoholic beverages on the air. Really. Listen for yourself.
The next clip picks up right after Gary Price threw the cap from a beer bottle across the studio, and it landed in Tom Medvick’s shirt pocket.
Portarit of a young, underpaid radio star
One of the pitfalls of doing the coolest radio show in the world was that it started at 2 AM, and ran until 6 AM. And that was once a week. The rest of the week I kept somewhat normal hours. So when the weekend rolled around, and I got to do the fun stuff, I was usually not at my sharpest.
That was one reason that I had “feature albums” on Radio Free Charleston. The official reason was that we wanted to recreate the olden days of WVAF FM, when they’d play a full album, uninterrupted, every night, right before bedtime. The real motive was that by playing a full CD in the final hour of the show, I could doze off without anything catastrophic happening. Sometimes I even left before the show was over, and let the guy who came in at 6 AM play a recording of the outro of the show while I drove home. Sadly, playing entire albums on broadcast and most internet radio stations is no longer compatible with commercial radio licenses.
When last we left this particular episode of RFC, Tommy Medvick had gotten into a bit of a verbal spat with a young lady named Jeannie. In this next segment we can hear that the debate was still raging. We also hear an announcement for a surprise birthday party for Sham (John Estep of Clownhole). This was written by The Stunning Janice, then Sham’s lady friend and a copy writer for V 100. As you can hear, her talents did not include penmanship. However, her talents did include distracting Sham so that he wouldn’t hear the party invitation.
By the way, I hope you realize that the phone numbers and addresses I give out in these recordings are over 34 years out of date, so don’t go calling or mailing them, okay?
This segment begins with a less-than-enthusiastic in-studio reaction to Captain Beefheart.
Up next, for those of you trying to follow chronologically, was the phone call from Brian that I posted on Monday. Brian provided a calming influence, and in our next bit, you can hear the Swivels peacefully bidding farewell to your host, as they go off into the night. You can also hear me start to obnoxiously flirt with Bridget over the air, since I was no longer distracted by in-studio guests. It’s highly unlikely she was still listening by this point.
Left alone in the studio, I was having trouble staying awake. It had been a hectic week, after all, and it was well after 4 AM. To keep myself going, I started playing with the stereo separation and I also managed to flirt even more shamelessly with our new jingle singer, Bridget. Here in quick succession are clips of me struggling to stay awake until we got to the feature album.
At this point in the narrative, let me digress and share with you a commercial that I wrote and produced. Greg Miller, owner of Comic World on Charleston’s West Side, was a friend of mine, and he wanted to advertise on the show. It fell to me to produce a commercial on spec just to give him a rough idea what it would sound like. So I wrote this fun little exchange between a husband and wife, and started to record it. I was going to do my “wiseguy” voice, and get one of the female announcers at the station to play his wife. My boss, the aforementioned program director, Garrett Majors was supposed to do the bit at the end with all the “money info.”
Sadly, Garrett was having sobriety issues that made him unavailable. Also, the female announcers at the station were either too busy to record the spot, or they were refusing to speak to me. So I had to do all three voices myself. I figured it wasn’t too bad, since this was only a spec spot, and would never be aired.
I forgot about Greg’s sense of humor. When he found out that I did all the voices, including the woman who sounds a bit like a drag queen, he insisted that they use the rough spot on the air. I became known as “The man of a dozen voices.” You can hear for yourself.
If anybody knows Greg’s current whereabouts, leave them in the comments. I haven’t heard from him in years. (Note, I originally wrote that 17 years ago. It’s still true)
Back to the show, in the last hour I was really having trouble staying awake. I wasn’t even hitting the right songs on the CDs that I was playing. That feature album couldn’t get here fast enough.
I read the songs from the feature album in advance because I knew that I wouldn’t be sticking around for the end of the show. I think I took off right after the first or second cut from “Key Lime Pie.”
But before the feature album, I had to play the special station ID/feature album intro. This was created for the show by…..me.
Yes, that’s me singing, over a sped-up Benny Goodman Orchestra.
I hope you enjoyed this look back at a classic installment of the radio version of Radio Free Charleston, and I hope I didn’t scare off too many listeners with this and all the Charleston Playhouse Jam recordings on this week’s show. You need to keep listening. Really. Radio Free Charleston has only gotten better with age.
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