It’s Christmas week, and we’re still in tree mode here at PopCult. What you see above is a high-detail digital painting over a screenshot from one of my security cameras.  When we put up the tree this year, we had to unplug this camera, and when we plugged it back in the tree would have blocked its normal view, so we just sat it on top of a package under the tree while we made a quick trip out of town. When I checked the camera, I was struck by the composition of the image, and decided to grab it and email it to myself. I colorized a few of the boxes in the shot, but I loved the way the ornament from Christkindlmarket looked from that angle, so it’s mostly as is.

Then I went over the image in digital paints to cover up the jpg artifacts and make it look more artsy.  And there you have it. I made sure our housesitter wasn’t freaked out because we had cameras hooked up. You should always do that, unless you don’t trust your housesitter, in which case you might want to reconsider going on a trip.

If you want to see this digital painting a bit bigger, just click on it.

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 Radio Free Charleston Christmas episode tomorrow.

At 5 PM, our holiday programming kicks off with a special overnight marathon.

The Charleston music scene lost an extraordinary man yesterday. Charlie Tee, singer and saxophone player with The Carpenter Ants and many other local bands passed away from COVID following years of poor health. You’d be hard-pressed to find a more beloved man than Charlie, and my heart is breaking for his wife, Lynn Rosseau, and his bandmates in The Carpenter Ants.

I was fortunate enough to get to hang out with Charlie a couple of times, and he was one of those people you just become friends with immediately. I came away thinking, “I really need to spend more time with Charlie.” It is a major regret that I didn’t get the chance.

I first met Charlie when I recorded The Carpenter Ants for Radio Free Charleston. He was not well enough to perform with the band that day, but he still came out to support his bandmates, and we stuck around The Charleston Bazaar afterword and got to know each other a little. Charlie was just such a sweet, supportive guy, And it’s truly tragic that the world didn’t get to enjoy his presence longer.

I apologize for the sparseness of this post. I’m more than a little gutted. I had been following Charlie’s struggle with COVID on social media all week, and found out that he’d passed while returning home from a quick weekend trip. Charlie and Lynn (another very supportive friend and a wonderful person) got together late in life, and while I’m certain that they treasured every second they had together, I still wish that they’d had more. Theirs was a true love story.

The videos you see above and below are from Bud Carroll’s “Live at Trackside” series, from about ten years ago. You’ll see Charlie with his Carpenter Ants bandmates performing a couple of great songs, that give you a hint of what a cool guy Charlie Tee was.

The header image is a photograph by KD Schuman Photography which was shared by The Carpenter Ants on social media. The digital painting is by Rudy Panucci.

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…alone…at your house…without going over the river and through the woods to kill grandmother.

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. So if you’re a Grinch…well, you probably had a pretty good year so far, so just deal with it.

The PopCulteer
December 17, 2021

Well…not really “catastrophic.”  It’s more like a cool afternoon of music for everybody! The calm before the holiday storm finds two new shows debuting on our sister internet station Friday afternoon.  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 at the top right column of this blog.

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 that all have the word “Dance,” or some version of it, in their titles.  It’s al all-star line-up of classic Disco artists.

Check out the playlist…

MIRRORBALL 039

Liquid Gold “Dance Yourself Dizzy”
Jackson 5 “Dancing Machine”
The Gap Band “I Don’t Believe You Want To Get Up And Dance”
The Nolans “I’m In The Mood For Dancing”
Lief Garrett “I Was Mad For Dancin'”
Sister Sledge “He’s The Greatest Dancer”
Bee Gees “You Shuld Be Dancing”
Carrie Lucas “Dance With You”
Sparque “Let’s Go Dancin'”
Gino Soccio “Dancin”
Donna Summer “Last Dance”

You can hear MIRRORBALL every Friday at 2 PM, with replays this Saturday at  8 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, Sydney Fileen graces us with the second mixtape episode of Sydney’s Big Electric Cat in three months devoted to The Synthesizer. It’s two hours of fantastic, keyboard-heavy New Wave Music, interspersed with Ms. Fileen’s insightful commentary and pithy comments.

Just check out this star-studded playlist to be amazed…

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The Human League “The Sound of the Crowd”
Orchestral Manouvers In The Dark “Messages”
Scritti Politti “Absolute”
Erasure “Drama”
The Cure “The Walk”
Furniture “Brilliant Mind”
Eurythmics “Love Is A Stranger”
Visage “Fade To Grey”
Landscape “Einstein A Go Go”
Spandau Ballet “To Cut A Long Story Short”
Blancmange “Living On The Ceiling”
Japan “Quiet Life”
A Flock of Seagulls “I Ran (So Far Away)
Yello “The Race”
Paul Hardcastle “19”
New Order “Blue Monday”
Howard Jones “New Song”
Thompson Twins “Love On Your Side”
Nik Kershaw “Wouldn’t It Be Good”
Peter Schilling “Major Tom”
Iggy Pop “Nightclubbing”
Simple MInds “Glittering Prize”
The Passions “I’m In Love With A German Film Star”
Ministry “Anything For You”
Propaganda “Duel”
The Wild Swans “Bible Dreams”
The Other Ones “Losing It”
Yaz “Midnight”
Soft Cell “Say Hello, Wave Goodbye”

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. Check back because we have a fresh post every day and next week I will be finding new and exciting ways to slack off for the week before Christmas.

Above you see a video, equal parts artsy AND fartsy, of the Panucci-Larch Christmas Tree for 2021. Mel did all the decorating, your humble blogger simply provided the menial labor, and then took the photos and video.

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.

This is our third year using our “new” fancy, pre-lit tree, and we thought it’d be cool to able to actually see the lights for a change.

The video was a spur-of-the moment thing. While shooting the photos, I decided to fire up the video feature on my ancient digital camera, and shot Standard-definition footage of the tree. Then, when editing,  I zoomed in, blew up the saturation, found some YouTube library music and had it rendered less than an hour after I shot it.

It was something different to do, and you folks can consider this video and photo essay our Christmas card, since we stopped sending out real cards years ago.

We have a few more holiday treats up our sleeves for PopCult over the next week, so keep checking back, and have a happy and peaceful season.

Here are fifteen or so photos with captions, for your amusement and enjoyment…

We still had plenty of room for Chicago, robots and NYC ornaments on the tree.

A mid-truck view, with some Christkindlmarket mugs in the background.

This year’s new Christkindlemarket ornament. We didn’t get to go in person, but there’s always online ordering.

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Wednesday afternoon The AIR brings you brand-new episodes of Beatles Blast and 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 over in the right-hand column of this blog.

At 2 PM,  we go to India with The Beatles on Beatles Blast. Specifically we bring you a mixtape of the album, “Songs Inspired By The Beatles And India,” which is a companion piece to the documentary which is streaming now, and on sale on Blu Ray and DVD next month. The documentary tells the story of The Beatles’ visit to Rishikesh in 1967, which resulted in the band writing a ton of classic songs. The album presents those songs (and a few others) reinterpreted by some of the top artists of India. It’s a wild collision of styles that sounds pretty fantastic.

I presented these highlights in mixtape form so I could spare myself the terror of trying to pronounce these names, but here’s the playlist…

Beatles Blast 078

“The Inner Light” – Performed by Anoushka Shankar / Karsh Kale
“Tomorrow Never Knows” – Performed by Kiss Nuka
“Mother Nature’s Son” – Performed by Karsh Kale / Benny Dayal
“Gimme Some Truth” – Performed by Soulmate
“Across The Universe” – Performed by Tejas / Mali
“Everybody’s Got Something To Hide (Except Me And My Monkey)”
– Performed by Rohan Rajadhyaksha / Warren Mendonsa
“I Will” – Performed by Shibani Dandekar / Neil Mukherjee
“Julia” – Performed by Dhruv Ghanekar
“Child of Nature” – Performed by Anupam Roy
“The Continuing Story Of Bungalow Bill” – Performed by Raaga Trippin
“Back In The USSR” – Performed by Karsh Kale / Farhan Ahktar
“I’m So Tired” – Performed by Lisa Mishra / Warren Mendonsa
“Sexy Sadie” – Performed by Siddharth Basrur / Neil Mukherjee
“Martha My Dear”– Performed by Nikhil D’Souza
“Revolution” – Performed by Vishal Dadlani / Warren Mendonsa
“Dear Prudence” – Performed by Karsh Kale / Monica Dogra
“India, India” – Performed by Nikhil D’Souza

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 takes to the skies with a show devoted to Superheroes in Musical Theatre. Calm down…she doesn’t play anything from that musical.  Instead she opens with “Save The City,” the song from Rogers: The Musical, the fake show that we see in the first episode of the Marvel/Disney+ series, Hawkeye. It’s a pretty terrific homage to the grand spectacles of Broadway. After that, Mel brings us highlights from two real-world superhero musicals.

First up, from the 1966 Original Cast Recording, she presents the best of It’s a Bird, It’s A Plane, It’s Superman, featuring music by Charles Strouse and lyrics by Lee Adams. You’ll hear Bob Holiday as Clark Kent and Superman, Patricia Marand as Lois Lane, Jack Cassidy as Max Mencken, and Linda Lavin as Sydney.

Then Mel brings you highlights from a musical about a young superhero fan who makes up his own stories, and begins to suspect that an actual superhero has a romantic interest in his mother. Superhero is a musical with music and lyrics by Tom Kitt, and a book by John Logan. The musical premiered Off-Broadway in February 2019 and struck a chord with longtime fans of comic book heroes.

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.

It’s the week before Christmas and the final non-holiday Tuesday of the year on The AIR  and that means cool new internet radio for all of you. Today we deliver unto you a partly-new episode of Radio Free Charleston and a brand-new, bright and shiny edition of The Swing Shift. That’s two new programs totalling four hours of great ear candy!  You simply have to poke your cursor over and tune in at the website, or you could just stay on this page, and  listen to the cool embedded player over at the top of the right column (If you’re reading PopCult on a desktop, that is. Phone readers have to go to the website).

We have a  killer new Radio Free Charleston at 10 AM and 10 PM Tuesday.  This week we open with Static Fur kicking off an all-new first hour, then we go back to a classic and fun episode of Radio Free Charleston International that has not been heard by human ears in over three years.

It’s a fun show, loaded with great music, and I figure you’ll probably love the holy hell out of it. Our second track this week comes from Chicago American artist, Peter Joly, and we pack the first hour with a great mix of local, independent and big-name musical artists. Our second and third hours are pretty special too, with the final hour including bit of a trivia game hook (with no prizes).

Check out the playlist below to see all the goodies we have in store (live links will take you to the artist’s pages)…

RFC V5 072

hour one
Static Fur “Insomnia”
Peter Joly “Friend”
Joseph Hale “Famously Unknown”
Sierra Ferrell “Why’d Ya Do It”
Alicia Keys “Nat King Cole”
Rod Stewart “Some Kind of Wonderful”
John Ellison “Wake Up Call”
Red Audio “Castles (Michaelangelo’s Nightmare)”
Slow Children “President Am I”
The Railway Children “Music Stop”
The Renfields “Handbook For The Recently Horror Punk”
The Science Fair Explosion “Cosmic Girl”
The The “This Is The Day”
Duran Duran “All of You”
Hawkwind “Psychic Power”

hour two
The Irreplaceables “Bad Moon Rising”
Paul Weller “Wake Up The Nation”
Faith No More “Arabian Disco”
Neil Young “Seed Justice”
Dinosaur Jr. “Good To Know”
No Doubt “Squeal”
DEVO “Think Fast”
Peter Garrett “Night And Day”
Owl City “Fireflies”
They Might Be Giants “Call You Mom”
The Liverpool Sound Collage “Free Now”
Dirty Heads “Red Lights”
Deborah Harry “White Out”
The War Between “Silent Alarm”
The Temptations “Plastic Man”
Stingray “Sucker Born Every Day”

hour three
Mike Batt w/Roger Chapman “Imbecile”
3 “Runaway”
Atomic Rooster “Seven Lonely Streets”
King Crimson “I Talk To The Wind”
The Nice “War and Peace”
PM “Children of the Air Age”
ASIA “Gravitas”
Keith Emerson “Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll”
Greg Lake “Manouvers ”
Emerson Lake and Powell “Touch and Go”
Emerson Lake and Palmer “Fanfare For The Common Man”

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

At 3 PM we have a brand-new episode of The Swing Shift. This week it’s a random collection of great Swing Music from the last century or so. You know, like our slogan.

Check this playlist.

The Swing Shift 122

The Speakeasies “I Istoria tou Zompa”
Dany Brilliant “Rock and Swing”
Echoes of Swing “Southern Sunset”
Jack’s Cats “Phil’s Boogie”
Jack Teagarden “That’s A Serious Thing”
Lester’s Blues “Lester’s Be-Bop Boogie”
Maria Muldaur with Tuba Skinny “I Like You Best of All”
McKinney’s Cotton Pickers “Cherry”
Duke Ellington “That Feeling of Jazz”
Megan and her Goody Goodies “Goody Goody”
Swing Ninjas “The Day I Go”
Sassy Swingers “Joseph, Joseph”
Louis Armstrong “C’est Si Bon”
The Chris MacDonald Orchestra “Take The A Train”
Tommy Dorsey “Opus One”
Nat King Cole “Straighten Up and Fly Right”

You can hear The Swing Shift Tuesdays at 3 PM, with replays Wednesday at 7 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 a digital psychedelic distortion of the Panucci-Larch Christmas tree (my contributions were mainly bringing it down from the attic). After a few weeks of real-world art, I decided to slack off and give my fingers a rest, and just push stuff around with the mouse this week.

Look for a full-blown photo essay of our tree later this week.

If you want to see this thing a bit bigger, just click on it.

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

Nigel Pye went above and beyond this week. He had already put together and finished an entire hour of wild experimental and Psychedelic music by The Monkees.  When word came down that Mike Nesmith had passed away, he asked me to scrap that episode so he could redo his introduction. I was able to download the updated version Sunday afternoon, and that is what you’ll hear today.

It’s a full hour of music by the band that Nigel says, did more to make Psychedelic Rock a mainstream phenomenon than any band, save The Beatles. He also promises that this hour contains no major hits by The Monkeees, and you can see for yourself with this playlist…

Psychedelic Shack 054
The Monkees
“Porpoise Song”
“Can You Dig It”
“As We Go Along”
“Carlisle Wheeling”
“Dream World”
“Auntie’s Municipal Court”
“Writing Wrongs”
“Goin’ Down”
“Star Collector”
“Randy Scouse Git, East Virginia”
“Shades of Gray”
“Mr. Webster”
“Through The Looking Glass”
“Angel Band”

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.

Following that hour of Psychedelic wonderments, Herman Linte will bring us two hours of instrumental Progressive Rock, with a big chunk of the first hour devoted to Tubular Bells by Mike Oldfield. Check out this largely wordless playlist…

Prognosis 082

Frank Zappa “G Spot Tornado”
Mike Oldfield “Tubular Bells”
ASIA “Bolero (live)”
Keith Emerson Band “Finale”
ELO “In The Hall of the Mountain King”
ELP “Fanfare For The Common Man (live)”
Cyan “Snowbound”
Vangelis “Juno’s Quiet Determination”
King Crimson “Formentara Lady”
Camel “Ice”
Rick Wakeman “Pavonis Mons”
Van Der Graaf Generator “Theme 1”

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, we bring you eleven hours of Nigel Pye, with more of the best of Psychedlic Shack.

We lost an unjustly unsung pioneer Friday. Mike Nesmith, most famous as one of The Monkees, a manufactured teen band/TV show of the 1960s who managed to transcend their less-than-pure origins to become influential in many areas.

Nesmith was the de-facto leader of the band, the one who fought for the band’s right to play their own instruments and write their own songs, and he continued to lead after the group’s initial split following the cancellation of the TV Show.

I have to mention here that the TV show was a pretty huge personal influence on a developing PopCulteer, with the blend of music, corny humor and wild surrealism, it was different than anything else on TV. It certainly prepared me for a life of liking really cool weird and funny stuff.

While the band had to fight for their musical automony, they had pure comedic chemistry on screen from the start. Equal parts “A Hard Day’s Night” era Beatles and classic Marx Brothers, The Monkees paved the way for the more experimental television that followed. Everything from Laugh-In to Saturday Night Live to The Young Ones owes a debt to the choreographed anarchy of The Monkees.

Post-Monkees, Nesmith sort of invented country-rock and Americana with The First National Band, realized the commercial potential of music videos and is credited by some as inventing MTV, and produced cult movies like Repo Man and Tapeheads.

Nesmith played his final show with his fellow Monkee, Micky Dolenz, on November 14.

Above you see a video I posted a few years back in this space. It’s the 16mm pilot for The Monkees from 1965. Below we have a random episode of The Monkees, so you can see some of what all the fuss is about.

2021 has seemingly turned into a bad sequel to 2020. Sometimes it feels like the pandemic has slowed the passage of time to a crawl, while other times it feels like  a year passes every ten days. It’s difficult to comprehend that we are just two weeks away from Christmas, but this week and next we will bring you some of the best Radio Free Charleston Christmas specials, to help you try to get in the mood. Above you see our first, from 2006. Below, you’ll find a few from later years. We’ll have more next week.