The PopCulteer
February 10, 2023

After a busy and hectic week at Stately Radio Free Charleston Manor, we’re a little PopCulted out. So all we have to share today is the playlist for a new episode of MIRRORBALL, on The AIR, for you Disco fanatics.   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.

Getting right to that, at 2 PM, Mel Larch uncorks a new MIRRORBALL! The AIR’s showcase of classic Disco music presents the second of two episodes devoted to the music of The Trammps.

Emerging from the ashes of the 1960’s R&B band, The Volcanos, vocalists Jimmy Ellis and Earl Young teamed up with the Wade brothers, from MFSB to form a Disco Music powerhouse. In this and the next episode of MIRRORBALL, Mel will bring you their hits along with important album tracks and a few oddities from their career. Disco wouldn’t have been the same without “Disco Inferno,” but there is so much more to The Trammps than that one iconic hit.

Mel played that big hit last time, but there’s still plenty of Disco Gold left in The Trammps’ mine. This time Mel brings you some deep album cuts along with five top-ten hits, including the band’s first hit, a cover of the Broadway standard, “Zing Went The Strings of My Heart.”  The Trammps even merge hard rock with Disco years before Run DMC teamed up with Aerosmith to mix hard rock and rap.

Check out the playlist…

MIRRORBALL 068

The Trammps
“The Night The Lights Went Out”
“That’s Where The Happy People Go”
“Don’t Burn No Bridges”
“Hold Back The Night”
“The Whole World’s Dancing”
“Hard Rock And Disco”
“Everybody Let’s Boogie”
“Let Me Dance Real Close”
“Is There Any Room For Me”
“Zing Went The Strings of My Heart”
“Where The Happy People Go”

You can hear MIRRORBALL every Friday at 2 PM, with replays throughout the following week.

At 3 PM we bring you an encore of an episode of Sydney’s Big Electric Cat from last May.  This was the show where Sydney Fileen delivered a special mixtape edition of her show that, rather than flowing smoothly, attempted to be as jarring and disconnected as possible. It was all designed to jar your senses with the type of random diversity that you’d have experienced at the time. You can find the playlist HERE.

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. Two classic episodes can also be heard every Sunday, starting at 10 AM.

And that is this week’s PopCulteer. Check back every day for fresh content, and more stuff from Winterfest over the weekend.

The PopCult Bookshelf

DIRECT CONVERSATIONS: Talks with Fellow DC Comics Bronze Age Creators
by Paul Kupperberg
Independently published
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 979-8373651769
$16.00

For an aged comic book nerd like me, this book is pure gold. As the title says, it’s a collection of conversations between writer, Paul Kupperberg, and the people he worked with at DC Comics back when he was breaking into the business in the 1970s. This was a crowdfunded project, but it’s now available for general sale.

Kupperberg engages in trips down memory lane with Howard Chaykin, Jack C. Harris, Tony Isabella, Paul Levitz, Steve Mitchell, Bob Rozakis, Joe Staton, Anthony Tollin, Bob Toomey, and Michael Uslan. These are casual, but very informative chats that serve as a terrific oral history of a pivotal time in the comic book industry, as seen by some of the younger creators of the time.

On the creative side, comics were making the transition from being produced by long-time pros who’d been around almost since the begginging of comics to the first generation of comics creators who had grown up as fans. On the business side, comics were changing from a ubiquitous form of cheap, disposable entertainment for kids into a niche market sold in specialty shops aimed at teens to adult readers.

These guys were there for that. Some are still producing great comics, while others have moved on to other pursuits…and Michael Uslan gets a new mansion and yacht every time they make a Batman movie. In Direct Coversations we get treated to the kind of candid exchanges between friends that a hardcore researcher might not elicit.

This book really hits my sweet spot because I’m the perfect age to have lived through this time as an enthusiastic fan, primarily of DC Comics. I already knew all the names of the folks interviewed here. I’m even Facebook friends with more than a few of them. They’re all six to fifteen years or so older than I am, so when I was just getting heavily into collecting comics, they were the fresh new faces behind the scenes. It’s weird to realize, but I’ve been fans of some of their work for damned close to fifty years.

Kupperberg does a great job of steering these conversations into relevant and cohesive directions. The book is filled with terrific anecdotes, like Rozakis talking about his time driving the DC Comicsmobile one summer, or Steve Mitchell telling how knocked out everybody in the office was when the art for an Alex Toth-drawn Batman story arrived.

We also get a lot of insight into the business at the time, largely from Paul Levitz, who went from being a gopher to eventually become the president and publisher of DC. There are more than a few small mysteries I remember from those days that are solved here: Why some books got cancelled early while others didn’t, and just exactly what was going on with all the experimental formats DC came up with in the 70s, just to name a couple.

While this book is an absolutely necessary read for longtime DC Comics fans like me, who grew up getting to know most of the people interviewed here from letters columns, credits boxes and The Amazing World of DC Comics fan magazine, Direct Conversations is also an invaulable historical document for any comic book fan interested in the “inside baseball” story of how comics were made at such an eventful and important time.

It’s great that these old friends got together and preserved their memories of this memorable era of comics. Over the past couple of decades there have been several books dedicated to the creators of the Golden Age and Silver Age of comics, and the march of time pretty much dictates that we need to preserve the history of the Bronze Age while the people who were there are still with us.

A reminder of that is that Direct Conversations is dedicated to comics writer Marty Pasko, who unfortunately passed away before he could be interviewed for the book.

Direct Conversations is a fun read for anybody with an interest in DC Comics of the 1970s, or anyone with an interest in comics, period. You can order it from Amazon, or try using the ISBN code to order it from a local bookstore…or get a signed copy directly from Kupperberg himself (that’s the best option).

It’s the weekend before Valentine’s Day and there’s plenty of STUFF TO DO in Charleston and the surrounding area, and not all of it is lovey-mushy stuff.

The first DualCon happens this weekend. A convention devoted to both videogames and board/card/role-playing games, DualCon happens February 11 at The Charleston Coliseum and Covnetion Center in the North Hall.  The day starts at 9 AM and runs to 11:30 PM. There will be videogame and table-top game tournaments with cash prizes.  You’ll also find vendors, and special guests, like Richie Ray, whose “Oh Crap” card game was plugged last year here in PopCult. Lonely Heroes Games, out of Beckley, will also be on hand, as will several other Mountain State game designers. There will also be game demos and free-play pinball machines.  There will also be a cosplay contest.

DualCon will be split into two “sides.” Tickets to either the video or the table-top sides are ten bucks each, and can be purchased in advance HERE. In addition, there is a charity aspect to the convention. Several autographed pop culture and gaming items will be auctioned off for the West Virginia chapter of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP WV). That auctio kicks off at 3 PM.

Live Music is back at Taylor Books. There is no cover charge, and shows start at 7:30 PM. Friday it’s Gerald Potts. Saturday Steve Himes serenades the crowd at Charleston’s beloved Bookstore/Coffee Shop/Art Gallery.

You can also head to Unity for Ron Sowell‘s open mic this Friday, February 10 at 7:30 PM at Unity of Kanawha Valley, Charleston, WV. Performer sign ups start at 7 PM. General admission is $5.00 with seniors, kids and performers $2.00. It will be a wonderful evening of entertainment with some of West Virginia’s finest talents.

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 (details below). Each week they donate their tips to a local nonprofit.  Friday from 5 PM to 8 PM Timmy “Courts and Friends hold down the fort at the Glass.  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.

THURSDAY

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Once again it’s Tuesday on The AIR  and that means it’s time for a new  Radio Free Charleston and a new 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 three full hours of new stuff on Radio Free Charleston this week, with loads of new music, tons of indie stuff, a few themed sets and a nod to the late Mark Scarpelli, and his awesome Beatles Tribute Marathon, which happened a little more than five years ago.

Our new local tracks this week come from John Lancaster, Jim Lange, The Switch, Byzantine, Corduroy Brown and more.

New Indie music is courtesy of Lia Caton, SkyFlake, Austin Grimm, Logical Fleadh , The Anchoress, Annie Capps and more.

On top of that, we have just-released music from Jethro Tull and The Smashing Pumpkins.

Check out the playlist below to see all the goodies we have in store. Live links 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 118

John Lancaster “A Bloodrunner Conspiracy”
SkyFlake “Kingdoms”
The Dirteez “Shark Smile”
SPSHL SNWFLK “Nothing Sir”
Law Biting Citizens “9 Lives Of The Alley Cat”
The Switch “Deadman”
Byzantine “Red Skies”
Lia Caton “Are We Gonna Fall In Love”
John Bunkley “Once In A While I Find Love”
Austin Grimm “Unconditional Love”
Actors “Post-Traumatic Love”
Nixon Black “No Ordinary Love”
Payback’s a Bitch “If You Don’t Love Me”
Jim Lange “Aimless Days”
Novelty Island “Eureka I Can See”

hour two
Corduroy Brown “Survivor’s Guilt”
Logical Fleadh “Glasgow Smile”
Jethro Tull “Shunt and Shuffle/Kismet In Suburbia”
Duane Eddy and Ravi Shankar “The Trembler”
Zhang Ling “Drinking Blues”
Todd Burge with Joseph Hale “On Feeling Strong”
Hello June “Fight Don’t Fight”
The Anchoress “This Is Yesterday”
Annie Capps “The Silent”
Heavy Set Paw Paws “Famous In Heaven”
Blue Twisted Steel “The Carpenter”
The Paranoid Style “Until Birnam Woods Comes To Dunsinane”
John Radcliff “Falls Apart”
Buni Muni“Much More”

hour three
The Long Lost Somethins “Ghosts and Spirits”
The Smashing Pumpkins “ATUM/Butterfly Suite”
Kanga “Magnolia”
Bane Star “Perfectly Designed”
Tyler Childers “Angel Band (Joyful Noise Version)”
Marianne Faithfull with Beck “Sex With Strangers”
David Synn “Dali’s Kaleidescope”
Rubber Soul with Mel Larch “Cry Baby Cry”
Rubber Soul wih Ted Rose and Michelle Toliver “Hey Jude”
Rubber Soul with Rusty Marx “You Like Me Too Much”

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 another new episode of The Swing Shift. Every week yours truly strives to bring you the best of over 100 years of Swing Music on one of our most-listened-to programs.

This week it’s a mixtape presentation of “Gypsy Jazz.”  I’m trying to find a name for this genre that isn’t quite as culturally insensitive, but I haven’t yet. This show is a full hour of music inspired by Django Reinhardt, Stephane Grappelli and their Paris Hot Club band.

The Swing Shift 138

Django Reinhardt “I’ll See You In My Dreams”
Minor Swing  “Primavera”
The Hot Club of San Francisco “Hey Jude”
The Rosenberg Trio “Dream of You”
Noe Reinhardt “Vette”
Aurelien Trigo & Chriss Campion “Shine”
Pink Turtle “Money Money Money”
Gadjologie “Swing 85914”
Tchavolo Schmitt “Sweet Sue, Just You”
Romane “Swing For Ninine”
Dorado Schmitt Quintet “Raiza Ouna Endo”
Chorda Trio “Ecoutez Ca”
Wawau Adler “Cherokee”
Hot Club USA “Stompin’ At Decca”
Django Reinhardt & Le Hot-Club De France “Charleston”

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.

I’m still playing with ink this week. This time I found an old black and white publicity still of silent movie star, Betty Blythe, and printed it out on cheap photo paper, then painted over it with my Winsor & Newton inks, this time Violet, Orange, Black and Red, with a little mixing among them for shading and effects.

To be honest, I wanted to do something a little more ambitious and abstract with it, but my fingers were not cooperating. Maybe next week.

This week’s experimental technique was the use of plastic brush picks (for good oral health) for some of the finer lines. It worked better than I expected, but the little bastards are hold to hold. I may have to wedge one into an X Acto knife handle or something in the future.

To see it bigger try clicking HERE.

Meanwhile, 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.

On Psychedelic Shack, Nigel Pye offers up an hour-long mixtape of Psychedelic Music that brings you music from Jefferson Airplane and some of their affiliated side projects.

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.

On a recent Prognosis, Herman Linte presents two hours of the late-1970s Prog Supergroup, UK, performing live. This is John Wetton, Eddie Jobson and Terry Bozzio, performing in front of audiences around the wrld.

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 a classic episode of The National Lampoon Comedy Hour on the latest Comedy Vault.

Tonight at 9 PM we bring you an overnight marathon of multi-part episodes of our musical specialty programs. Kicking things off, we have both parts of Mel Larch’s  Curtain Call devoted to the musical Ragtime.  At 11 PM we deliver yours truly, hosting two episodes of Beatles Blast featuring the Fab Four singing about animals. Overnight you’ll hear multi-part episodes of MIRRORBALL and The Swing Shift.  Its our way to let the completists among you play catch up.

The PopCult Toybox

Kentuckiana’s GI Joe Winterfest wrapped more than a week ago, but I still have loads of pictures to bring you. Today we’re going to look at some of the vintage toys on display that weren’t GI Joe-based.

There were loads of classic toys, lots of new toys and even a few Barbies scattered among the gems on display at Winterfest. I saw great stuff dating from the 1960s to today, and there was even a smattering of foreign toys and custom creations.

After this batch of stuff, I have one more photo essay up my sleeve. We’ll go back to the well for another look at the cool 12″ GI Joe offerings.

That photo essay will drop Monday or Tuesday, and then, with luck and a lull in outside assignments, I’ll have a video for you next weekend.

But now, dive into the exquisite miscellaney, starting off with goodes from the land of MEGO…

A display case dominated by vintage MEGO figures, with a little extra from Marx, Pez and more.

More vintage MEGO, plus a rapidly decaying Captain America bendy figure.

Brand New WGSH MEGOs and other cool stuff.

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It’s hard to believe that it’s been seven years since the last time your PopCulteer attended the International Toy Fair in New York City.

That’s the quick music video I made for it up above this text. It’s five and a half minutes of what, at times, seems like a furry convention on acid.

For decades, Toy Fair in NYC was a February tradition, but then the pandemic hit, and they didn’t even have it in person for a couple of years. The truth is, I knew about COVID back in December, 2019 because so many Chinese vendors were pulling out. Mel and I had toyed with the idea of going in 2020, but bailed on it due to the virus concerns before we made any solid plans. Turns out to have been a wise move.

After two full years of not having Toy Fair in person, it was decided to move the event to the fall, closer to the holiday season. The show’s dual purpose of hooking up toy buyers with toy makers  and getting plenty of free press seems to have proven to be two things that don’t necessarily have to happen at the same time anymore.

I got nothing.

Toy buyers will meet up with toy makers virtually, all year long and at specialized events organized by the big companies, while the fall show will be timed to maximize the effect of all that free press on the general public in time for the holiday shopping season.

So I’m posting this video as a virtual salve for any phantom pains that folks might be having over there not being a Toy Fair in the US to report about this February.  Next week I hope to have some video from last weekend’s GI Joe Winterfest, There just wasn’t enough time to do it this week. There will be another Winterfest photo essay later on Sunday, just to tide you over.

The PopCult Toybox

I promised you more photos from last weekend’s Kentuckiana GI Joe Winterfest, and I’ve got a second batch for you today, but there will still be more! I managed to get so many good photos of the toys for sale at this cool show that I’m going to have to divvy them up and spread them out over the next few days.

Today we’re going to look at the Marx action figures on display, and then we’ll pivot and focus on the modern GI Joes.

There were several dealers who devoted the bulk of their displays to the original Real American Hero GI Joe, and several who had the current, GI Joe: Classified figures and sets. Since so many collectors are interested in those, we’re giving them plenty of space.

I doubt that I’ll have video from the show ready to go this weekend, but I do plan to run another photo essay on Sunday that will show off MEGO, Major Matt Mason, Barbie and more cool toys.

Following that, sometime next week, we’ll revisit the vintage 12″ GI Joes, because there was just so much cool stuff at the show.

For now, let’s start off with Johnny West and his pals from Marx…

MARX ACTION FIGURES

First off, it’s Dave Roth, Marx collector/dealer extraordinaire, and your’s truly, in a selfie photo I swiped from where Dave posted it on Facebook.

Dave’s booth, and I think that’s his brother tending to things.

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This is Radio Free Charleston‘s tenth episode, originally posted to Gazz TV on November 29, 2006, and remastered october 4, 2013. This episode, “Captain Action Shirt,” features music from The Sleeping Dons and The Heydays, vintage animation remixed, and a short film starring Danny Boyd as an evil dwarf.

Host segments were shot on the grounds of the State Capitol Building, and if you look at the montage under the end credits, you can see the lovely fountain that they have since bulldozed. The title shirt of this show features the logo for Captain Action, the classic action figure that I’ve literally been writing about in PopCult since our first month.

The “TV Tabloid” short comes to us courtesy of Danny Boyd. This short film was made at West Virginia State College back in the late 1980s.  The animated opening for this bit was done by Frank Panucci back in his pre-computer days.

Our first musical guest was The Sleeping Dons, back for an encore after treating us to the Native American baseball tune, “Story Of The Coyote People” on our second show. This time around they gave us “Wild River.” This video showcases the band set against a montage of illustrative footage of rivers and nature, which was necessary when we lost two camera angles in a hard drive crash.

The Heydays came into Livemix Studio following a performance at Taylor Books. It was the first time that our esteemed Gazz Editor, Douglas Imbrogno, had been up to visit the musical home of RFC. Doug and master guitarist Paul Callicoat were The Heydays, and in this episode they performed their arrangement of “Shady Grove.”

You can read the original production notes here.