With this week’s edition of the RFC Flashback, we have sort of come full circle with our chronological presentation of episodes of the video incarnation of Radio Free Charleston.

Five years ago I  decided to jump ahead about forty episodes in our chronological presentation of episodes of the Radio Free Charleston video progam.  The main reason for this is that your PopCulteer had fallen behind in his remastering of classic episodes, so rather than make a mad dash to get them done,we decided to save them for later. Eventually we caught up to the end of the run, and then we picked up almost where we had left off. Last year we went back and filled in most of that gap.

Starting next week I’m going to try to fill in more gaps and remaster and upload some of the shows that have fallen through the cracks and aren’t currently online. So don’t expect any logical order for a few months.

Meanwhile, this show is the first one that we re-presented, but in the ensuing five years it’s become a bit more important, so we’re running it again.

Radio Free Charelston 120, “Zombie Babies Shirt” was first posted in February 2011 as a tribute to the late David Russell, to promote a benefit show (held at The World Famous Empty Glass) for his memorial fund.

The show featured music from The ButtonFlies, Sierra Ferrell and The Diablo Blues Band, all of whom performed at the benefit. We also brought you the trailer for Porkchop, the Eamon Hardiman-directed movie on which Dave worked as cinematographer.   Since the last time I posted this show here, Sierra has become a world-famous Country Music chanteuse, performing all over the world and selling tons of records. So I thought it might be a good time to revisit this episode of the show.

The PopCulteer

September 2, 2022

It’s a double shot of new internet radio programming this Friday as we offer up shiny 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 on this very page.

At 2 PM, Mel Larch uncorks a new MIRRORBALL! The AIR’s showcase of classic Disco music presents a wild collection of classic Disco tracks from the classic era of people dancing in dark rooms on cocaine.

For one hour you can go back to the Golden Age of Disco, where the sideburns were long, the skirts were short and the dancing was endless.

Check out the playlist…

MB 58

Evelyn “Champagne” King “Love Come Down”
Earth Wind & Fire “Boogie Wonderland”
Eruption “One Way Ticket”
The Jacksons “Dancing Machine”
Teri DeSario “Aint Nothing Gonna Keep You From Me”
Jocelyn Brown “Somebody Else’s Guy”
El Debarge “Rhythm of the Night”
Average White Band “Let’s Go Round Again”
Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes “Don’t Leave Me This Way”
Gloria Gaynor “Reach Out I’ll Be There”
Yarbourough & Peoples “Don’t Stop The Music”
Boogie Box High “Jive Talkin'”
Bonnie Pointer “Heaven Must Have Sent You”
Luthor Vandross “Never Too Much”

You can hear MIRRORBALL every Friday at 2 PM, with replays Saturday at  9 PM (kicking off a mini-marathon), Sunday at 11 PM, Monday at 9 AM, and Tuesday at 1 PM  exclusively on The AIR.

At 3 PM, it’s Big Electric Cat time as Sydney Fileen delivers a special mixtape edition of her show that pays tribute to the band, Blondie.  As with our other Haversham programs this week, we don’t have a full playlist to share with you.  However, we can tell you that this two-hour epic is packed with huge hits, deep album cuts, demos of famous tracks and other rarities from Blondie’s New Wave era albums.

Blonide was the American New Wave band that sprung from the fertile punk spawning grounds of CBGBs in New York and are actually still touring the world today.

The classic line up of Clem Burke, Jimmy Destri, Frank Infante, Nigel Harrison, Chris Stein and of course, Debbie Harry took Blondie to the peaks of chart success, and helped drag New Wave Music into the mainstream.

This show is missing a couple of tracks at my request. I just didn’t feel that “Rapture” and “The Tide is High” were really new wavey enough to fit into the show’s format. Sydney made the call to leave out “Call Me,” because the band, except for Harry, doesn’t really play on that track.  I think Sydney has put together a great show that ought to make every fan of Blondie very happy.

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 on The AIR Friday, and that is this week’s PopCulteer.  This weekend The AIR will launch a marathon of Radio Free Charleston, to commemorate the debut of the original version of the show on broadcast radio 33 years ago over Labor Day weekend on WVNS radio. We’ll kick things off at 9 PM Saturday, and run until Tuesday morning, with a break Sunday at midnight for seven hours of The Swing Shift.

Check PopCult for all our regular features, with fresh content every day.

We have some suggestions for STUFF TO DO in Charleston, Huntington, and other Mountain State locations over the next few days, so let’s just dive in.

Our lead item is a benefit at The Alban Arts Center Friday night at 7 PM. The Carpenter Ants will present an evening with John Ellison, writer of the smash hit “Some Kind of Wonderful” and member of the West Virginia Music Hall of Fame.  This is a benefit concert for local resident Natasha Morgan who is in need of a multiple organ transplant.

This benefit concert is made possible through the sponsorship of Mr. Frank McCormick of 63 Olde Main Plaza and Mr Ellison. Admission is donation based with all proceeds going directly to Natasha’s transplant fund, so don’t be stingy. You’ll be getting some world-class entertainment out of this, and it’s for a very good cause. You can find more details HERE.

Live Music is back at Taylor Books. There is no cover charge, and shows start at 7:30 PM. Friday it’s Leslie Brooks. Saturday sees Ronald & The RayGunz at Charleston’s beloved Bookstore/coffeehouse/art gallery institution.

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.

If you’re up for going out, here are some suggestions for the rest of this week, roughly in order.  Some graphics are for multiple days’ worth of stuff, so they get to go first…

Sorry for the short notice,but Thursday, September 1st at Marshall University you have a chance to screen the pilot episode of Her Hope Haven. The showing will be in room 402 at the Drinko Library on the Marshall campus.

Her Hope Haven is a comedy-drama about a group of women working the steps toward their sobriety. Set in a women’s inpatient recovery center in Charleston, WV, Her Hope Haven is a place where women are given a chance to get their kids back, their dignity back, stay out of jail, and stay alive.

Their stories are more complex than only their addiction. Against the odds of societal expectations and the money-making business of recovery, the women seek redemption through small stories of levity, euphoria, and heartbreak. The women persevere through working together, and at times against one another, to keep their sobriety as they build bonds with one another during the hardest time of their lives. It’s not about the addiction, it’s about the recovery.

Check out the video and graphic below, and if you’re able, make the trip to Huntington to check out this cool local project. You can also follow Her Hope Haven on Facebook.

Her Hope Haven | Official Trailer from Taylor Napier on Vimeo.

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

At 2 PM Beatles Blast goes back five years for a show that collects some of the most entertainly awful covers of Beatles songs ever. As I said back when this show debuted (this is one of the few replays of it since it debuted)…

Beatles Blast, hosted by your PopCulteer, observes their 13th episode by presenting an hour of some of the unluckiest covers of Beatles songs ever recorded. Kicking off with David Bowie’s unfortunate take on “Across The Universe,” the show continues with celebrities who think they can sing, metal bands who don’t quite understand what they’re supposed to be doing and easy-listening vocal groups who should just say “no.” And we won’t even go into the abomination that is “Looney Tunes Sings The Beatles.”

There is entertainment value here, just not musical entertainment value.

Beatles Blast can be heard every Wednesday at 2 PM, with replays Thursday at 10 PM, Friday at 1 PM,  and Saturday afternoon.

At 3 PM on Curtain Call, Mel Larch presents a mixtape show that serves as both a tribute to the late Olivia Newton John, and to the 50th anniversary of the Broadway debut of the musical Grease.

In early August the music world lost Olivia Newton John. While she never performed on Broadway, her role as Sandy in the movie adaptation of Grease had a huge influence on how that musical was later performed on stage. Mel is a fan and wanted to give her a nod on Curtain Call, like she did on MIRRORBALL a couple of weeks ago.

Coincidentally, Grease is celebrating fifty years since its debut on Broadway. In addition to the movie, the show has been the subject of several revivals and touring companies, and this week Curtain Call brings you a mash-up of The movie soundtrack, the original Broadway cast recording, and the recording of the 1995 Broadway revival, which starred Brooke Shields.

The movie made several changes to the story, with some songs removed and new songs written for the film. With the film being so successful, the new songs were incorporated into later stage versions along with some other changes. This show will let you hear some interesting juxtapositions as it jumps from one version to another, beginning and ending, of course, with a few of the movie versions of the song, featuring Olivia Newton John.

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, a new edition of The Comedy Vault features the best musical numbers from The Simpsons. The Comedy Vault can be heard every Wednesday at 11 PM, with the new episodes replayed a couple of weeks later, Monday at 8 PM.

It’s a fun day on The AIR  as we premere new episodes of The Swing Shift and Radio Free Charleston! 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 elsewhere on this page.

Following up in the format we used for Radio Free Charleston Volume Five #100 two weeks ago, our newest show, which you can hear at 10 AM and 10 PM Tuesday is yet another three-hour show loaded with local and independent music, and presented as double-shots with two tunes each of musical artists from all over the RFC Archives of the last 30-plus years.

We have some vintage local goodies, some brand-new local goodies and some great new stuff from our friends in Chicago. We even explain how “The Chicago Pipeline” came to be.

We open the show with a brand-new single from David Synn, whose new album “A New Dawn” hits all streaming platforms on September 16.  I did cheat the double-shot format a bit. I included three songs by The Settlement, because one song morphed into another and it just didn’t sound right chopping it off abruptly.

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 101

hour one
David Synn “Island of Gorgo” “The Feeding”
Red Audio “Girl From Outer Space” “Castles (Michalangelo’s Nightmare)”
The Alright Maybes “Kurt” “The Man Who Played The Part”
Curious Grace & Black Rabbit “Taylor’s Hill” “”Believer”
Dropcoat “Black Metal Parade “Do You Ever Wonder”
Blue Million “I’m On The Run” “”Will You Think of Me”
Joe Vallina “I Haven’t Got Enough” “To The Phonomatic”

hour two
Mad Scientist Club “My Transmission” “Save The Whales”
Deni Bonet “Why Not You” “Frankenstein”
The BrotherSisters “The Mountains of Instead” “This Man Won’t Stand Down”
Sierra Ferrell “Jerimiah” “Why’d Ya Do It”
The Settlement “Reason” “Recognize” “Enter Mission”

hour three
The Renfields “From Beyond” “Circle of Fakes”
Tautologic “Rocket Surgery” “The Whistler”
Wren Allen Band “What Are You Waiting For” “Skate”
Beggars Clan “Maiden Voyage” “Divide and Conquer”
Spencer Elliott “Rain Shadow” “There’s Something In The Airlock”
Speedsuit “As Long As Yesterday” “Roller Coaster of Booze”

You can hear this episode of Radio Free Charleston Tuesday at 10 AM and 10 PM on The AIR, with replays Thursday at 2 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.

Then at 1 PM we have two hours of  MIRRORBALL.

At 3 PM a new hour of The Swing Shift arrives  with a special mixtape show that I can’t give you a playlist for because that show hasn’t been recorded yet as I write this, for the second time in a row!

I can tell you that it’s nearly a solid hour of one of the leading Swing Revival bands of the 1990s, The Cherry Poppin’ Daddies. They crossed over from Ska to Swing, but did some of the greatest new Swing numbers of the time, and they still dip into their Swing grab bag once in a while. You’ll hear all their hits and several more recent Swing forays from the band led by the “other” Steve Perry.

You can hear The Swing Shift Tuesday at 3 PM, with replays Wednesday at 8 AM, Thursday at 9 AM, Friday at 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.

This week’s art is me playing with a Basil Gogos color palatte, but applying it to a traditional pin-up pose instead of a movie monster, and going just a little abstract. This is acrylic paint on thick illustration board, but I used thicker paint to try to emulate oils. I photographed it rather than trying to scan it before it dried. Because of that I color-corrected it and cropped it a bit for publication here.

This was just me attempting to learn some new techiques.

To see it bigger try clicking HERE.

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

On Psychedelic Shack, Nigel Pye offers up an hour-long salute to Jefferson Airplane, with tracks from the Airplane, plus The Great Society and the KBC band. I’m writing this in advance before going out of town, so I don’t have a playlist for either of today’s new shows from our friends at Haversham.

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.

On Prognosis, Herman Linte presents a two-hour career retrospective of Jethro Tull

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.

Tonight at 8 PM you can hear an hour of vintage comedy from The Goon Show on The Comedy Vault. Wednesday evening at 10 PM, we’ll have another new episode of The Comedy Vault.

Then, at 9 PM we bring you an overnight marathon of Mel Larch’s showcase of Disco Music, MIRRORBALL.

Today is the seventeenth anniversary of PopCult.  My first post appeared on this day in 2005.

As those of you gullible enough to believe me here know, the traditional gift for a 17th anniversary is something made of Velvet.

That’s crap. It’s actually furniture,  but there’s a payoff here so just pretend.

Today, for our 17th anniversary we bring you about 20 minutes of The Velvet Brothers, recorded at The Cantina in Kanawha City,  in 2017. Because you can never go wrong with The Velvet Brothers.

We take you back to February, 2011 for Radio Free Charleston episode 119, “Transformer Shirt.” This episode featured the RFC debut of Sasha Colette, a song from “Norman Rockwell’s An American Love Story,” a special surprise song from Symphony Idol winner Ryan Hardiman and DEVO/Valentine’s animation by Frank Panucci.

This is a bittersweet show, with host segments shot at Hubbard Hospice House, just hours before Mel’s mother, Betty Larch, passed away. Making it even more bittersweet is the presence of Mark Scarpelli on two of the songs in this show. It’s a great time capsule of theatre and music from early 2011, but it’s tinged with a bit of sadness.

You can find the original production notes HERE.

The PopCulteer
August 26, 2022

The original plan for today’s PopCulteer was to just reprint an old post to commemorate an anniversary, and I’m still going to do that below, but something else came up.

Wednesday the city of Charleston and the Kanawha County Commission announced plans for a huge investment in an indoor sports complex to be built at the site of the now-closed Macy’s and one of the parking buildings adjacent to The Charleston Town Center.

At first glance this is a great idea. Sports tourism is a new industry, and it’s great to see our local governments invest in that rather than wasting tax money propping up a dying fossil fuel industry. The plans unveiled Wednesday are ambitious, very clever in places, and can definitely help the city in many ways.

Young people will have more stuff to do in town. Physical activity is good for the general health of the people in the area. Attracting people from out of town to come here and spend money is always a great idea. Creating so much more foot traffic to the Town Center Mall can only help them to lure more retailers to what is currently West Virginia’s fastest-growing ghost mall.

Best of all, no beer is involved and it’s not a freaking casino. It’s fantastic that, for once, we’re going to see a public investment in something that does not involve feeding one of the public’s addictions.

With that established, I think it’s a great idea, but I have a lot of questions.

First, how much of this planning was done behind closed doors before what appears to be a heavily-researched and elaborate spending program was sprung on the public? Were open meeting laws violated?

ZMM did a great job with the initial plans. Was the contract for this job put out to bid? (our images for this post are taken from their concept illustrations)

Has anybody figured out exactly who owns the Lee Street parking garage, part of which is slated to be demolished to build this new sports complex?

Just exactly how feasible is it to demolish only the top three floors of a five-story parking building? Wouldn’t that technically be “dismantling” those floors? Has anybody done a deep dive on the logistics of this? Might it not be quicker and more cost-efficient, not to mention safer, to take down the whole parking structure, and build it back up from scratch, with two floors of parking below the athletic center?

Why weren’t there any representatives of The Hull Group, the current owners of the Town Center Mall, on hand? Are they okay with this plan, or will they file numerous lawsuits to block this, like they’ve done with the demolition of the old Sears building?

It seems like, in addition to being generally difficult to work with, the Hull Group might have some legitimate concerns about losing five or six mall entrances and half their parking. Could their stubbornness result in this sports complex not having a direct mall entrance so that people can avail themselves to what’s left of the food court and the Starbucks? Is it possible that they’ll resist this project simply to keep the value of their property–and therefore their property taxes–depressed?

Likewise, is JC Penny on board with this. They’re going to lose access to some parking as well.

With all the Lee Street garage parking shifting over to the Quarrier Street garage (at least during the construction phase), will anything be done first to prevent that structure from collapsing?

It is well-known that the Charleston Town Center was built where the Triangle District, an historic Black neighborhood in Charleston, once stood. Once completed, will this new sports complex be open and available to Black kids and poor kids and underprivileged people, or are we spending tens of millions of dollars to build a tourist attraction that, when it’s not being used for tournaments will simply be a plaything for wealthy folks who live in South Hills or The East End?

Kanawha County Commissioner Ben Salango says that they plan is to sell memberships to allow locals to use this facility. Isn’t that dangerously close to what they do at country clubs? How expensive will these memberships be? Will there be programs in place to grant memberships to deserving young athletes whose families can’t afford to join?

What exactly is the projected time frame for this project? Dozens of cities are investing in building sports complexes, many of them within easy driving distance of Charleston. Is it going to be possible to get this sports complex built in time to be competitive with all the other cities who are making a play for a piece of the sports tourism pie?

Will the city and county reach out to work with the state on improving the roads into town? I know that things are progressing, slowly, around the Nitro-St. Albans bridge, which once completed will give us six to eight lanes on I-64 all the way to the Kentucky border, but what about our other two major interstates? What kind of committement can we pry loose from the WV DOH to maintain all the major roads into Charleston?

Who is going to run the finished facility?  It’s been said that the city and country will appoint a joint committee.  Isn’t that how we got the mess we currently have trying to figure out who owns the parking structures?

It seems like this idea has not exactly sprung forth in the most transparent manner. Going forward, now that the cat’s officially out of the bag, will public input really be seriously considered? Can the questions I’ve posed off the top of my head be answered? There’s a lot to ponder here.

I think this is a great idea, and could potentially be a major boon to the city of Charleston and the surrounding area. It’s forward thinking, attractive to young people and could potentially revitalize the Charleston Town Center Mall (if the owners are willing). The $80 million price tag seems like a sound investment in our future. Now it only has to pass the smell test.

Anniversary Day

I’ve written this post in advance because your PopCulteer and his bride have ventured Northward for a couple of days to observe our eighth wedding anniverary. In honor of that, and in an effort to make my life easier, I planned to re-post our wedding announcement, which originally ran here the day after we exchanged vows on stage at The Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago. I wound up cranking out that longish item above, but here’s a flash back to 2014…

Hey, y’know that top secret project I’ve been talking about all week?

Well, if all goes according to plan, by the time you read this, Melanie Larch and I will have become a married couple. And to think, it only took 24 years for us to tie the knot. With all our elder-care commitments fulfilled and no other obstacles in our path, we can finally be together.

The ceremony is to have taken place Tuesday morning on the Stage of the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago. We wanted a quiet ceremony in a special place, and that fit the bill perfectly. Every PopCult post that has been published since last week was written on Wednesday, August 20. That’s why the tense is all wonky.

If you’re wondering why we decided to get married in Chicago, there are many reasons. First of all, I hate cermonies. I just can’t stand the pomp and circumstance and other related BS that fuels the Wedding Industrial Complex. I just want to be with the woman I love. I don’t want to go through the Spanish Inquisition.

On top of that, Melanie and I didn’t feel right getting married in a state that does not allow all of our friends the same right. I know it’s inevitable that marriage equality will come to the Mountain State, but we didn’t want to wait any longer.

Add to that the moronic law passed a couple of years ago that coerces people, even people who have been together more than two decades, into undergoing religious and/or psychological counseling before they can tie the knot, and it was clear that, as far as getting married goes, West Virginia is not open for our business.

We were planning to go to Chicago anyway, and Melanie holds Steppenwolf in very high regard, so I suggested she ask if we could get married there. She did. And they said yes. And we said “I Do.”

We’re hoping that none of our friends feel slighted that we did this out of town. In the event that anyone reading this really feels the need for us to have a huge reception with tons of guests, please, feel free to throw one for us. We’ll be there… as long as we don’t have to do any planning or pay for it.

That is our PopCulteer for this week. Over on The AIR you can catch the remainder of Friday’s 24-hour marathon of Sydney’s Big Electric Cat until midnight. At midnight, the next marathon, of yours truly hosting Beatles Blast takes over for a day, and then a midnight Saturday night/Sunday morning, settle in for 24 hours of The Comedy Vault.