It’s Tuesday on The AIR  and that means it’s Radio Free Charleston time, and we also have a new edition of The Swing Shift for you enjoy. 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 a fun hybrid show, with one mostly-local all-new hour, followed by a classic two-hour Radio Free Charleston International, at 10 AM and 10 PM Tuesday.   This week our latest Radio Free Charleston has killer new tunes from loads of artists, and I’m going to tell you all about them now.

We open the show with a new release from Nixon Black, which includes our old friend, Mark Beckner out in front, and we continue with a first hour filled with new tunes from All Torches Lit, Byzantine, Bottle and Bride, Payback’s A Bitch, Frenchy and The Punk and more. We also have the RFC debuts by The Red Book, and Blue Twisted Steel.

Our send and third hours resurrect an episode of RFC International from May, 2019, and it’s a mixtape presentation that celebrates the concept of free-format radio.

Check out the playlist below to see all the goodies we have in store. Live links will take you to the artist’s page…

RFC V5 112

hour one
Nixon Black “Winter In Kashmir”
All Torches Lit “Crown of Ash”
The Red Book “Behind The Stars”
Byzantine “Unhook Me”
John Radcliff “When We Were Gods”
Bottle and Bride “Snake Oil”
Blue Twisted Steel “The Carpenter”
The Long Lost Somethins “Sobriquet”
Novelty Island “Bees”
Payback’s a Bitch “No Reason”
Buni Muni “Strawberry Rose”
Frenchy And The Punk “Come In And Play”
The Company Stores “Castles and Cain”
Heavy Set Paw Paws “Grand Place”
Tyler Childers “Way of the Triune God (Jubilee Version)”

hour two
Jon Anderson “Ramalama”
Adrian Belew “Take Five Deep Breaths”
Harry Nilsson “Coconut”
Chess At Breakfast “The Senate Needs A Nightcap”
Dizzy Mystics “Jaunter”
David Byrne “Lazy”
Norah Jones “It Was You”
Eveline’s Dust “Rain Over Gentle Travellers”
Ringo Starr “Without Understanding”
Manfred Mann’s Earth Band “Blinded By The Light”

hour three
Camel “Lady Fantasy”
John Wetton “Be Careful What You Wish For”
The Wrong Object “Mr. Green Genes/King Kong”
Claypool Lennon Delirium “Blood and Rockets”
Greenslade “Sundance”
The Beat “Dangerous”
Gryphon “Haddock’s Eyes”
Fantasy “Widow”

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  MIRRORBALL at 1 PM and Curtain Call at 2 PM.

At 3 PM we have a new hour of The Swing Shift that’s loaded with classic Big Band Era artists, spiced up with some new European Swing Bands.  Check out this playlist…

The Swing Shift 135

Buddy Rich “Winding Way”
Louis Jordan “Knock Me A Kiss”
Glenn Miller “American Patrol”
Lombard “Deja Vu”
Sergio Caputo “Chewing Gum Blues”
Frank Sinatra “Just One of Those Things”
Benny Goodman “Sing, Sing, Sing (live)”
Lester Young “Bugle Call Rag”
Sugarpie & The Candymen “Are You Gonna Go My Way”
Peggy Lee “I See A Million People”
Duke Ellington “I Got It Bad and That Ain’t Good”
Phil Harris “Potato Chips”
Roy Hawkins “Highway 59”
Sheila Jordan “It Don’t Mean A Thing, If It Aint Got That Swing”

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 was in Chicago a couple of weeks ago and I took lots of photos around Daley Plaza, the site of the famed Christkindlmarket. In abut half of the photos, in one corner, I could capture this, or a similar clusterfudge of traffic barriers. There’d just be tons of them, all crammed into one spot. After cropping them out of, or in one case painting over them, several times…I came to like them.

I liked the way they looked, so on Christmas Even I used half a dozen of the raw photos for reference and did a small watercolor, which you see above, that pays tribute to the silent sentinels of trafficdom, huddled together on State Street, just to confound and bedevil innocent drivers.

To see it bigger try clicking HERE.

Meanwhile, Monday at 2 PM on The AIR, we bring you a special new episode of Psychedelic Shack, and then at 3 PM a specialp new 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.

I didn’t actually get these shows until Christmas Day, and neither of them came with a playlist, but they are certainly both worthy of a Boxing Day premiere.

On Psychedelic Shack, Nigel Pye offers up an hour-long collection of the solo music of one Syd Barrett, a proud, if overwhelmed father of Psychedelic Music.

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 classic Prognosis, Herman Linte presents two hours of highlights from the new boxed set In The Court of the Crimson King–King Crimson at 50.  In addition to  the recent highly-acclaimed documentary, the box set includes an alternate cut of the film, tons of raw footage and four CDs worth of audio, recorded during the band’s 2019 an 2021 tours.

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.

A 9 PM we bring you an overnight marathon of our Christmas decorations, before we take them all off the server and put them in the attic until next year.

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and whatever good tidings fill your bill from PopCult and the Larch-Panucci household.

2022 has been an improvement over recent years, but we still have pandemics, climate change and domestic terrorists to worry about, so let’s just repeat last year’s wish:

‘I hope that everybody can find some peace and well-being on this special day, and that the new year brings us all new happiness, joy, good health, and justice for the Democracy.”

As is our tradition on Christmas Day, we bring you Melanie Larch singing “Ave Maria” from the very first Christmas episode of Radio Free Charleston.

Let’s follow that up with the 2014 Christmas treat that saw Melanie backed by the late and much-loved and missed, Mark Scarpelli…

And we’ll continue with Mel’s 2009 Christmas song with Diablo Blues Band…

Let’s go back to Chicago, in 2019, for one more…

Wishing you and yours the best-

Rudy Panucci and Melanie Larch

PopCult wraps up out Flashback to Christmas Editions of Radio Free Charleston with three more holiday gems from the RFC video show. Enjoy and I hope this gets everyone in the mood for celebrating and not argung politics or other nonsense.

Check out The AIR  on the embeded player elsewhere on this page or at that link for more holiday cheer, as we plunge headlong into Christmas for the next week.  PopCult‘s going to be all Christmas-y, too.

The PopCulteer
December 23, 2022

Regular readers of PopCult may have noticed that I’ve been slacking off this week. Christmas and the Arctic Vortex seem to be racing to see who can get here first, and to be honest, I wasn’t quite ready for either.

So I’m going to knock out a quick PopCulteer and be on my way. I did promise you fresh content every day (even if some of it isn’t as fresh as it ought to be). So we will have our regular features all weekend long. Today it’s short notes and a few leftover photos.

We also have holiday programming all weekend on our internet radio station, The AIR. This will include several replays of our new, three-hour AIR Christmas Special that just premiered Tuesday.

Next week I plan to bring you a newish video episode of Radio Free Charleston. I’m not sure what day it will debut, or what’s exactly going to be in it, but since I haven’t shot video of any bands recently I think it’s safe to assume it’ll be vintage video from the RFC vaults.

I also wanted to mention that PopCult has officially left The Charleston Gazette-Mail.  I actually took the blog independent over two years ago, but I had continued to post my content at the old location to take advantage of the Google searches and Wikipedia entries that still wind up there, and also to point those new readers to this new version of the blog.

However I’ve noticed a disturbing trend over the past couple of years, even before I left their friendly confines, and to be honest, while I once considered it an honor to be associated with The Charleston Gazette,  for some time now their endorsements and op-ed editorials have been puzzling, if not embarrassing.  From printing carefully prepared think tank propaganda pieces as op-eds to welcoming one of the great villains of our time on a video show so they could soft-peddle his crimes and let him spout nonsense unchallenged, it’s been increasingly difficult to defend whatever the hell it is that’s going on there.

I mean, my fear when the paper was up for auction was that they’d be bought by the soulless and far-right-wing Ogden Newspaper chain. I was thrilled when The Huntington Herald-Dispatch swooped in at the last minute. However, over the last four or five years, it seems that the only difference is that Ogden would have destroyed the paper overnight, while HD Media has let it suffer a slow death of creeping corruption and political gamesmanship.

The last straw for me was when they fired four of the best reporters they had, because they dared to criticize the man who seems to be single-handedly ruining the paper. If you want to read the whole story, Kyle Vass, at Dragline, has an excellent account of what happened HERE.

So last week I stopped updating PopCult at The Gazette-Mail, and just put up one final post pointing readers here. My readership levels here at the new location have already matched what I was doing as part of the GM.  While the old blog still gets a couple or three dozen hits a day, it’s just not worth the extra effort to duplicate my efforts to keep a blog updated at a site that, to be frank, has become a bit of an embarrassment.

So that’s what happened there.

I hope you all have a very happy holiday season, and to fill up the rest of this post, here’s a few random photos…

Another look at the Pioneer Zephyr, at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry.

A classic Golden Age Christmas cover from the original Captain Marvel. Don’t call him “Shazam,” dammit.

More cool plastic at Rotofugi.

Recently uncovered in the Panucci family photo archives: The first-ever photo, from May 1989, of your PopCulteer wearing a fedora.

Finally, we go back to MSI for one of the millions of decorated trees they had on display. Actually, there are two of them in this picture. One is being bashful.

Don’t panic, folks, we are doing a photo essay of the Panucci/Larch Christmas Tree this year.  I’m just posting it later than usual because I wanted to save the easy stuff for me to post in the blog this week.

As with last year, we decided to go a bit low-key this Christmas, and not bury the tree under the many year’s worth of ornaments that we’ve accumulated.  So we gave the Batman, Walking Dead and most of the Beatles ornaments the year off, and stuck with new stuff that we got this year, and some of the classier ornaments we’ve acquired in our travels. We figure we’ll be rotating ornaments from now on, unless we add another tree…or trees…to the mix in the future.

In the captions below the photos, I’ll tell you a bit about what you’re looking at, and in some cases explain where we got the featured ornaments.  It’s a pop culture-heavy tree, which is what makes it a natural for coverage in PopCult.

I didn’t do a video this year because I’ve got too much other pre-holiday stuff to do. If you’d like to see what video would look like, call up this post on your phone, and move it around a bit.

Giving credit where it’s due, Mel did almost all of the decorating. I just brought the tree down from the attic.

Now, onto the pics…

In this photo you see our new alien ornament, an old astronaut and a rocket, Mel’s picks from The Walking Dead and SpongeBob Squarepants, a Beatles ornament and new to our tree is a star-shaped plush Santa that was used on my mother’s DayCare center Christmas tree, which had been packed away for over 25 years.

Here you get a better view of the new alien, plus a brontosaurus, Buc ee Beaver, a Mold-A-Rama choir angel, and at the bottom, three Chicago ornaments–the Bean, Christkindlmarket 2021 and The Water Tower.

More SpongeBobbery, plus disco balls, a rubber duck and two tiny ornaments that came in Kinder Surprise chocolate eggs.

Here you see our old alien, Santa, a wooden Knight with reflex action, a Trader Vic’s Pineapple Mug and an accordian.

Another Trader Vic’s ornament shows up here. This time it’s the rum barrel. Also, our Aquabats ornament and an L train.

Mel became enamoured of the Santa Fe “Warbonnet” Diesel engine, so I found her an ornament of it made by Lionel. You can also see one of our robots and that new alien again.

Mel found this cool, translucent Peacock on our trip to Chicago a couple of weeks ago. It echoes our topper this year.

As seen in our feature image, three new additions are front and center our the tree: Betty Page (from Retro A Go Go), Trader Vic’s Orchid Island canoe, and Buc ee. Another, much heavier, Buc ee ornament was added after I took these photos. Mel will continue rearranging, adding and subtracting ornaments until we take the tree down, sometime next year. Maybe as late as March, if things dont slow down around here. 🙂

Here we see our Moai, plus more SpongeBobbery and a little Pusheen stuff.

This year’s Christkindlemarket ornament is shaped like a pretzel haus. Plus theres the L again.

Some small, random ornements, all returning from years past.

A view of the middle of the tree, showing off the new alien and peacock again. Plus that’s a new SpongeBob.

Birds and squirrels, plus a cool tiny hot air baloon that I picked out.

Another look at our tree-topper, which I painted for you in Monday Morning Art this week. As with many of the glass ornaments on the tree, this came from Frank’s Ornament Haus at Christkindlmarket, which has already wrapped for this year, due to the arctic blast heading our way.

And there is our tree, head to toe, with the background blurred so you’re not distracted by the clutter.

And with that, Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays from PopCult. 

Sunday is the big day, but there’s still lots of cool things happening leading up to Jesus’s birthday. Let’s tell you about some. Note that there doesn’t seem to be anything going on on Christmas Eve. Suck it up and go spend time with your families.

A special note: ArtWalk happens again in Charleston Thursday from 5 PM to 8 PM.  This free event is open to the public as art lovers can walk to all the usual suspects and take in the majesty of the art. Some galleries will have music and/or munchies as well. It’s a really cheap way to support the local scene and get out and mingle a bit…if you are so inclined. This is also a good chance to pick up last minute Christmas gifts from local artists.

Live Music is back at Taylor Books. There is no cover charge, and shows start at 7:30 PM. Friday it’s Ryan Smith.

The Empty Glass has some great stuff through the week to tell you about.  From 9 PM to Midnight Wednesday, Grant Jacobs will be at the World Famous Empty Glass.  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.  Taking over at 9:30 PM Thursday, Four Chill brings the funk and smooth grooves. Friday from 5 PM to 8 PM Timmy “Courts and Friends hold down the fort at the Glass.

Friday, Minor Swing will be in Saint Albans, at Coal River Coffee Company.

Please remember that the pandemic is not over yet. 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.

Also, it’s the holiday season, so don’t be a jerk. If you need an extra injection of holiday spirit, tune into The AIR, where we’re in Christmas mode for the rest of the week.

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

The AIR is in Holiday Mode all this week, and Tuesday at 10 AM and 10 PM, replacing RFC on this week’s schedule, you can listen to The AIR Christmas Special 2022  at The AIR website, or on the embedded radio player located elsewhere on this page.

This is an all-new three-hour show where, like last year,  your host, Rudy Panucci, and his wife, Mel Larch, banter and play holiday music from lots of cool artists, but this year we have extra guests as our second hour sees Herman Linte, from Prognosis, Sydney Fileen from Sydney’s Big Electric Cat and Nigel Pye from Psychedelic Shack drop by to share Christmas tunes in New Wave, Progressive and Psychedelic styles. They even play a Ska tune for Dexter Checkers, who couldn’t make the taping.

The transAtlantic recording process was something we hadn’t done since I guest-hosted a dozen episodes of Prognosis a few years ago, and production took longer than expected, which is why this post is being written so late (it’s already Tuesday morning).  Still it was loads of fun, and will prepare us for a special project early next year.

We have some great new tunes this year, and since I’m not putting links in the playlist, I’ll mention a few of them here.

We open our show with a 33-year old location recording of Clownhole at The Charleston Playhouse. You can see the video of this performance in the Radio Free Charleston video show, which can be viewed HERE. I didn’t mention it in this show, but rumor has it that we’re going to hear new recordings from Clownhole in the new year. About time!

We also have a lovely new track from our Chicago pipeline. Lia Caton is an award-winning country artist and songwriter who splits her time between Naperville, IL and Nashville. Candy Fernaux is a critically acclaimed Music City recording artist whose upcoming album, Make Your Own Magic, is scheduled to be released via streaming platforms and on vinyl in 2023.  Lia and Candy have teamed up for a cover of “Beautiful Star of Bethlehem,” a traditional country song written by the late R. Fisher Boyce and popularized by The Judds on their 1987 album Christmas Time With The Judds.

Todd Burge is a WV music legend, and you can find his music on Bandcamp.

Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS is the philanthropic heart of Broadway. They provide groceries and medication, health care and hope to those in all 50 states, Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., affected by HIV/AIDS, COVID-19 and other life-threatening illnesses.  Mel’s picks to represent Curtain Call in our third hour come from their Carols For A Cure series of CDS, which you can buy HERE.

And now, the playlist…

The AIR Christmas Special 2022

Clownhole “Deck The Halls”
Lia Caton and Candy Fernaux “Beautiful Star of Bethlehem”
Todd Burge “Santa Canta Getta Down The Chimney This Year”
Diablo Blues Band with Mel Larch “Please Come Home For Christmas”
Donna Summer “Christmas Is Here”
Earth Wind and Fire “Every Day Is Christmas”
Mistletoe Disco Band “Winter Wonderland”
Boney M “Mary’s Boy Child”
Sukkerchok “Hele Julenat Hele Juledag”
Erasure “She Won’t Be Home”
Deni Bonet “It’s You and Me This Christmas”
Dr. Jazz & Dirty Bucks Swing Band “White Christmas”
Erin Harpe & The Delta Swingers “Christmas Swing”
Kate Fagan “Santa, What Do Bad Girls Get”
Brian Stezter Orchestra “Boobie Woogie Santa Claus”
Big Bad Voodoo Daddy “Christmas Is Starting Now”
Royal Crown Revue “Hey Santa”

hour two
Reel Big Fish “Skank For Christmas”
Cyndi Lauper “Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree”
Joey Ramone “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)”
Andy Partidge “Countdown To Christmas Partytime”
The Dickies “Silent Night”
The Damned “There Ain’t No Sanity Claus”
Steve Morse “Carol of the Bells”
Jethro Tull “Birthday Card at Christmas”
Pallas “Christmas on the Edge of Time”
ELP “I Believe In Father Christmas”
The Free Design – Close Your Mouth (It’s Christmas)
Byzantine Empire – Snow Queen
David Santo – Jingle Down A Hill
The Crossbeats – Snow Covered Mountains
Simon and Garfunkel – Star Carol

Hour Three
Mountain Laurel Ensemble “Oh Holy Night”
cast of Beautiful “Christmas Vacation”
cast of Chicago “Christmas in Fishnets”
cast of Jersey Boys “The 12 Days of Christmas”
cast of Million Dollar Quartet “Santa Claus is Coming To Town”
cast of Avenue Q “Ave Maria”
The Dollyrots “Christmas Don’t Be Late”
Cheap Trick “Father Christmas”
The Beatles “Christmas Outtake”
Ella Fitzgerald “We Three Kings/Oh Little Town”
Chuck Berry “Run, Rudolph, Run”
Louis Jordan and his Timpani Five “May Every Day Be Christmas”
Lionel Hampton “Merry Christmas Baby”
Tommy Lee & The Orbits “Jingle Rock”
Big Joe Tunrer “Christmas Date Boogie”
The Beach Bopys “Little Saint Nick”
Aretha Franklin “Joy To The World”
Shakin’ Stevens “Merry Christmas, Everyone”
Leon Redbone “Christmas Ball Blues”
ATHF “‘Twas The Night Before Jesus”

You can hear The AIR Christmas Special 2022  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.  We’ll also sneak in a few extra airings among our holiday marathons which will take over The AIR for the rest of the week.

Heck, I’ll even embed a low-fi version here so you can listen on demand…

Happy Holidays from PopCult and The AIR.

It’s Christmas week, and we’re still in tree mode here at PopCult. What you see above is a digital pastel painting over a quick photo I took of our tree topper this year. After using a spire for the last 20 years or so, I thought it might be time to shake things up a bit, so when Mel picked out a realy cool and huge blown-glass peacock ornament in Chicago, I had the idea that, being so huge, it might make for a good tree topper.

So I took a photo Sunday afternoon, blacked out the background, and did a quick digital painting over it. I would’ve done a physical painting, but the Myasthenia Gravis is being a bit Naughty at the moment, and my fingers are not up to the task.

Later in the week I’ll bring you a photo essay of the whole tree, so you can see what this year’s model looks like.

If you want to see this digital painting bigger, click HERE.

Meanwhile, Monday at 2 PM on The AIR, we bring you a recent episode of  Psychedelic Shack, followed at 3 PM by the special Christmas episode 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 at the top of the right-hand column of this blog.

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. Classic episodes can be heard Sunday at 9 AM as part of our Sunday Haversham Recording Institute collection.

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.

Our AIR Holiday Programming begins today with Prognosis, and will fill up most of the schedule all week long. We’ll have a new AIR Christmas Special in place of RFC tomorrow.

At 9 PM, our holiday programming kicks off in earnestwith a special overnight marathon. All week long we’ll be dropping in holiday treats in The AIR.

After being ousted from his own studio in the early 1940s, animation innovator, Max Fleischer, wound up working for Jam Handy, the Olympic Swimmer turned industrial filmmaker who produced instructional and commercial films.

The Jam Handy Organization produced a lot of films for the Army and Navy during WWII, and after the war, they were hired to produce an animated short for Montgomery Ward. That short turned out to be the first ever adaptation of the poem, Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer that Robert May had written as a giveaway book for Montgomery Ward in 1939.

A year before May’s brother-in-law, Johnny Marks, turned the story of Rudolph into a hit song, and sixteen years before the Rankin-Bass stop-motion-animated TV special that everybody knows, Max Fleischer brought May’s poem to life on the big screen. Above you see a newly-restored version that uses the 35mm print that belongs to The Library of Congress.

This restoration was done by Fabulous Fleischer Cartoons Restored!, who have a Patreon page you can support HERE.