Okay, this makes two weeks in a row that I’m bringing you a piece of purely digital art. I’m still not having an MG flare-up, but real-world intrusions, some fun (going to Columbus for Record Store Day and attending a cool talk about indie rock photography with Sham Voodoo) and some not (finishing up taxes) still kept me from spending any time making physical art last week, so this week I did a rough digital abstract design on the laptop while we were in Columbus, then emailed it to myself so I could finish it Sunday evening.

It’s called “Storm,” and it could mean a physical storm, an emotional storm, a giant karmic conflict of energies…I don’t know which. I’m only the artist. It was crafted with my antique PaintShop Pro program, which is the only graphics program I bothered to install on the laptop.

To see this week’s art bigger try clicking HERE.

Over in radioland, Monday beginning at 2 PM on The AIR, we bring you a classic episode of Psychedelic Shack, and then at 3 PM an also classic 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.

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. 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.

At 8 PM you can hear the madcap music of Spike Jones on a recent episode of The Comedy Vault.

Tonight at 9 PM for the Monday Marathon we bring you ten hours of Mel Larch’s showcase for showtunes, Curtain Call, with an emphasis on her shows devoted to Stephen Sondheim.

I have another radio note for you. Tomorrow I will not be delivering a new episode of Radio Free Charleston. There’s still too much real-life stuff to do. We should be back to normal in time for next week’s show, but Tuesday you can tune in to hear the first three-hour RFC, from January, 2020. That fact that we’ve done 220 of these since then still sort of blows my mind.

Five in a row cements this as a tradition, right?

As I may have mentioned four previous times in this space, hardly anybody is going to read this blog on Easter Sunday. Now, I could wait and run this next Sunday when nobody is reading PopCult, but this year I though that maybe some folks might want to see this classic ibt of Easter animation before the big holiday.

This year I’m going to drop a fifty-plus-year-old Rankin-Bass stop-motion animated special here for you a week early. “Here Comes Peter Cottontail” is based on a song that was written by Keyser native, and WVMHOF Class of 2011 indutee, Jack Rollins.  This is the fifth year in a row that I’m doing this. I’m not dropping it early because I’m out of town working on other projects or going to Record Store Day or anything. This is purely an altruistic move on my part.

Enjoy, and Happy Easter!

This week we go back to May, 2011 for an episode of Radio Free Charleston featuring host segments shot at The East End Yard Sale and music from the then-current Charleston Light Opera Guild show, The Drowsy Chaperone. This edition of the show does indeed feature a song from The Charleston Light Opera Guild, a jazz tune from C2J2, animation from Frank Panucci, and a couple of surprises.

Our first musical number this week was “Toledo Surprise,” from the Charleston Light Opera Guild peoduction of The Drowsy Chaperone. We were invited to bring our cameras in to a dress rehearsal of the show and had a ton of fun recording this tune. Our animation this time was “Changes,” the 47th piece of DEVO Energy Dome animation by Frank Panucci that we’ve featured on RFC. Rounding out the show this week was C2J2, a jazz quartet consisting of four veteran maestros, Chris Mickel, Jamie Skeen, Chris Hudson and Josh Cannon.

You can read the full production notes HERE.

The PopCulteer
April 11, 2025

Radio delayed is NOT radio denied as we bring you the new shows intended for last Friday on The AIR this afternoon.  Mel Larch’s MIRRORBALL and Sydney Fileen’s Sydney’s Big Electric Cat return with new episodes, Friday on The AIR.  The AIR is PopCult‘s sister radio station. You can hear our shows on The AIR website, or just click on the embedded player found elsewhere on this page.

Weather and other technical issues prevented us from bringing these to you last week.

Friday at 2 PM on The AIR, we have a new episode of MIRRORBALL where Mel Larch once again presents a selection of the best and brightest of the classic Disco era.

Don’t believe us? Check out the playlist. It’s got Disoc out the wazoo…

MIRRORBALL 113

Ralph MacDonald “Calypso Breakdown”
Nicolette Larson “Lotta Love (Disco Mix)”
Peter Brown “Dance With Me”
Hot Chocolate “Every 1’s A Winner”
Five Special “Why Leave Us Alone”
Phreek “Weekend”
Slave “Just A Touch of Love”

You can hear MIRRORBALL every Friday at 2 PM, with replays Sunday night at 11 PM and throughout the following week Monday at 9 AM and Tuesday at 1 PM plus there’s a mini-marathon that includes the latest episode Saturday nights at 9 PM

At 3 PM, it’s Big Electric Cat time as Sydney Fileen delivers a special NEW mixtape edition of her show that collects the New Wave hits and deep album gems of Sheffield’s letter men, ABC.

With Martin Fry out front and Trevor Horn orginally in the producer’s chair, ABC lit up the charts in the New Wave era with their post-punk blend of soul, dance, synth-pop and jazz.

For her two hours Sydney will bring you the sublime sophisticated music of ABC from the New Wave era that made them darlings of the MTV crowd and favorites on the 80s revival circuit.

The band is still around and making new music and touring, but The Big Electric Cat will focus on the music from the first of their five decades and present the Lexicon of ABC.

Check out this killer playlist…

BEC 126

ABC
“Poison Arrow”
“The Look of Love”
“Show Me”
“Tears Are Not Enough”
“The Look of Love Part 4”
“Overture”
“Many Happy Returns”
“Valentine’s Day”
“All of My Heart”
“Alphabet Soup (12″ Mix)”
“That Was Then But This Is Now”
“S.O.S.”
“King Money”
“How To Be A Millionaire (Bond Street Mix)”
“Be Near Me”
“Vanity Kills”
“Ocean Blue”
“Tower of London”
“So Hip It Hurts”
“When Smokey Sings”
“The Night You Murdered Love”
“King Without A Crown”
“Rage And Then Regret”
“One Better World”
“The Real Thing”
“The Greatest Love Of All”
“Where Is The Heaven”

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 it for this week’s PopCulteer, check back for all our regular feature, with fresh content, every day, even wehn we’re out of town on a secret mission.

Everybody’s a critic, as they say, but some people get paid to do it.

And those folks, on occasion, write something that leaves the average person scratching their head. You have to wonder why did they write that.

In The New York Times, Jesse Green’s review of BOOP!, a musical that I raved about when I saw it in Chicago sixteen months ago, left me asking “Why.”

Ironically, his beef with BOOP! is that he doesn’t like “why” it exists. He seems to have some sort of unusual problem with Betty Boop as a character, or person, or merchandising icon or something. I don’t get it. Was he frightened by a Betty Boop cartoon when he was little?

It’s not that he disagrees with my opinion of the show that much. I mean, an honest disagreement of opinion is normal. My problems with his review begin with the fact that he opens it with the rather embarrassiing sub-header, “The It girl with the spit curl looks great for 100, but her Broadway musical, which feels like one big merch grab, is boop-boop-a-don’t.”

I’m not even bothered by the pissy sitcom bitchiness of that “look at me I’m clever” intro as much as I am by the thought that he came up with that before seeing the show, and then tailored his review to match the “boop-boop-a-don’t” part.

I’m lead to this conclusion by this negative review because it includes the following remarks:

“As Betty, the flapper of early talkie cartoons, Jasmine Amy Rogers is immensely likable. She sings fabulously, sports a credible perma-smile, nails all the Boop mannerisms and has a fetching way with a tossed-off line. I can’t imagine anyone making more of the exhausting opportunity, let alone in a Broadway debut.”

“She is ably supported by other young talent in featured roles, luxury-cast veterans doing their damnedest and a hard-working ensemble selling Mitchell’s insistent, imaginative, precision-drilled dances. When his pinwheel kick-lines hop in unison, not one foot among 26 is left on the floor.”

“David Foster’s music, in a jazzy brass-and-reeds Cy Coleman vein, pops nicely; the lyrics, by Susan Birkenhead, are far better crafted than you dare hope these days…I laughed out loud at her show-off rhyme of ‘It girls” and “spit curls.'”

These observations are in a review that bemoans the very fact that this show exists. I mean, if it’s wonderfully-directed with great  choreography, music and lyrics and has a fantastic cast…isn’t that reason enough for it to exist? Is any musical that has an ounce of merchandising potential damned to hell in Mr. Green’s strange little worldview?

I think maybe Mr. Green let his predisposition to look down his nose at a certain type of show keep him from enjoying one of the most fun musicals I’ve ever seen. Eight years ago, Green did not review the exceptionally wonderful SpongeBob Squarepants: The Musical for the Times. I can’t help but wonder if Green hated that also wonderful musical, because he thinks cartoons are beneath him.

His argument that new musicals should not be based on old properties is more than a tad ludicrous. I mean, musicals based on the life of Alexander Hamilton or the works of L. Frank Baum seem to have done pretty well.  We won’t even go into the vast number of musicals that recycle the works of Shakespeare.  You gotta wonder if he would have dropped the once-mighty NY Times critical hammer on those.

Boop! deserved better than this from the Times, who had no problem running a big feature article on the history of the character a few days early so they could take advantage of all the buzz surrounding the show. His review seems like a calculated, but badly-crafted, hit job filled with snobbery and disingenuous claims.

April 11 Update: Since this was written, the same critic lavished praise on the musical Smash, which has been on the receiving end of reviews from other critics that are largely negative, some overwhelmingly so. There are two points here that I think are curious:  First, his criticism of BOOP! being based on a pre-existing property is interestingly not something that seems to bother him about Smash, which is based on the obscure and forgotten TV Show.  Second, his review of Smash allows comments from readers. His review of BOOP! does not.

I haven’t seen Smash, so I can’t compare the two shows, but at the very least, the treatment of them by the Times seems rather inconsistent.

We’re a little more than a week away from Easter/Wrestlemania weekend and we have a quick list of STUFF TO DO in and around Charleston, WV, this coming weekend and beyond, just like almost every week.

As always, you should remember that THIS IS NOT A COMPLETE LIST OF EVENTS.  It’s just a starting point, so don’t expect anything comprehensive, and if you feel strongly about me leaving anything out, feel free to mention it in the comments. Also, if you have a show that you’d like to plug in the future, contact me via Social Media at Facebook, BlueSky or Twitter. I dont charge for this, so you might as well send me something if you have an event to promote. Note that some links look like they shouldn’t work because they have lines through them, but that’s just a WordPress glitch, so click on them anyway. They should still work.

We are also very happy to remind you that Cristen Michael has created an interactive calendar that is way more comprehensive than this list of STUFF TO DO, and you can find it HERE. Just click on the day and the event and you’ll be whisked away to a page with more details about loads of area events.

You can find live music in and around town every night of the week. You just have to know where to look.

Most Fridays and Saturdays you can find live music at Taylor Books. There is no cover charge, and shows start at 7:30 PM. This weekend’s shows are not yet known to our intelligence sources.

You can find live music every night at The World Famous Empty Glass Cafe. Mondays feature open mic night. The first Tuesday of every month sees the legendary Spurgie Hankins Band perform. There’s both Happy Hour music and local or touring bands on Thursday and Friday, and live bands Saturday nights. On Sundays when there’s a new Mountain Stage, musicians from the legendary WV Public Radio show migrate to The Glass for the Post-Mountain Stage jam.

Live at The Shop in Dunbar hosts local and touring bands on most weekends, and is a nice break away from the downtown bar scene.

Louie’s, at Mardi Gras Casino & Resort, regularly brings in local bands on weekends.

In Huntington, local institution, The Loud (formerly The V Club), brings in great touring and local acts three or four nights a week.

The Wandering Wind Meadery holds several events each week, from live piano karaoke to bands to comedy to burlesque.

The multitude of breweries and distilleries that have popped up in Charleston of late bring in live musical acts as well. I tend to miss a lot of these because, being a non-drinker, they fly under my radar.

Roger Rablais hosts Songwriter’s stage at different venues around the area, often at 813 Penn, next door to Fret ‘n’ Fiddle in Saint Albans and also at The Empty Glass. You might also find cool musical events at Route 60 Music in Barboursville and Folklore Music Exchange in Charleston.

To hear music in an alcohol-free enviroment, see what’s happening at Pumzi’s, on Charleston’s West Side. You can also visit Coal River Coffee in Saint Albans for live music in an alcohol-free environment. I am looking to expand this list, so please contact me through the social media sites above if you know about more alcohol-free performance venues. The Huntington Music Collective has recently started hosting all ages shows at Event Horizon.

For cutting-edge independent art films, downstairs from Taylor Books you’ll find the Floralee Hark Cohen Cinema by WVIFF. Each week they program several amazing movies in their intimate viewing room that you aren’t likely to see anywhere else.

Please remember that viral illlnesses are still a going concern and 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. And if you’re at an outdoor event, please remember that it’s awfully inconsiderate to smoke or vape around people who become ill when exposed to that stuff.

Keep in mind that all shows are subject to change or be cancelled at the last minute.

Here we go, roughly in order, it’s graphics for local events that I was able to scrounge up online…

Continue reading

It’s a weird and trivial milestone week on a partly-new Radio Free Charleston for you today on The AIR.  To listen to The AIR, 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.  

You can hear Radio Free Charleston Tuesdays at 10 AM and 10 PM, with boatloads of replays throughout the week.

This week sees episode 221 of Radio Free Charleston: Volume 5, the current weekly three-hour radio version of the show that I’ve been doing since January, 2020. That equals the 221 episodes of Radio Free Charleston: Volume 2, the video version of the show, which is still ongoing, but pretty much on an annual basis these days. Ultimately, it’s not really a big deal, except for the numerologists, but I’m mentioning it here because I forgot to say anything in the show.

Because of real-life intrusions, this week’s show only has one new hour of content, but the second and third hours haven’t been heard by human ears in more than eight years, so it’s cool to revive the third episode of RFC: Volume 4, the old all-localish version of the show.

But our first hour has plenty of cool stuff in it, and by all rights you should be terrifically excited about the whole show.  We have brand-new tunes from Jim Lange, J Marinelli, the Waterboys and The Settlement, plus lots of really cool other stuff.

We also encore some great recent songs and dig into the archives a bit for you.

Hours two and three are like a time capsule of local and regional music from 2016, except that some of the music is older than that.

The links in the playlist will take you to the pages for the artists in the first hour of this week’s show where possible…

RFC V5 221

hour one
Jim Lange “Think I Like It”
J. Marinelli“Vegatables, Man”
Justin Hayward & Mike Batt “Life In A Northern Town”
Skyflake “Luminescent”
Saycouth “Phantom Love”
The M.F.B. “P H Steve”
Massing“September”
The Settlement “Sweetness (Live at The Foundry)”
Adrian Belew “One of Those Days (live)”
The Waterboys “Everybody Loves Dennis Hopper”
Ann Magnuson “M.K.C.F.”
Clownhole “Get A Grip”

hour two
Tape Age “So Happy”
David Synn “Battle of Anihilation”
John Lancaster “Phantom Moon”
Black Cross Brotherhood “Megido”
Bobflex “I’m Glad You’re Dead”
Lady D “Higher”
Spurgie Hankins Band “Dirty Rule”
Donny Iris “River of Love”
Company Stores “Rise”
The Boatmen “Heartbreak Hangover”
Joe Vallina “Year of the Wicked”
John Radcliff “Hanging On”
Foz Rotten “Funklips”
South Park Enterprise “Next Level”

hour three
Miniature Giant “Wendigo”
The Monsoon Band “Don’t Cry
The Horse Traders “Southbound 65”
Ona “Sleep Rinse Repeat”
Ghosts of Now “Alaska Looks Like Arizona”
Karma To Burn “Waltz of the Playboy Pallbearer”
Granny’s 12 Gauge “Full Speed Ahead”
Hasil Adkins “Roll Roll Train”
The Nanker Phelge “Killer Took A Holiday”
Crack The Sky “Robots For Ronnie”
Hellblinki “Bubbles”
The Jasons “We’re Going To Manhatten”
Joseph Hale “Time”

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 2 PM, Friday at 9 AM, Saturday at Noon and Midnight, Sunday at 8 PM and  Monday at 11 AM, exclusively on The AIR. Now you can also hear a different classic 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 give you an encore of two classic episodes of The Swing Shift.

 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.

This week I had to revert to presenting a piece of purely digital art. I’m not having an MG flare-up, but real-world intrusions kept me from spending any time making physical art last week, so I decided to go back and revise a digital piece from fourteen or fiften years ago.

In Warpscape Revisited, I took the original image, rotated it 90 degrees, mirrored it, and repainted it in a different color scheme with a bit more detail and contrast.  I’ve actually revised this once before, and I’ve used it as backgrounds for a few other header images.

I like it. It looks sort of spacey, or maybe like a shirt design on Temu.

To see this week’s art bigger try clicking HERE.

Over in radioland, Monday beginning at 2 PM on The AIR, we bring you a classic episode of Psychedelic Shack, and then at 3 PM an also classic 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.

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. 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.

At 8 PM you can hear more of Viv Stanshall’s Rawlinson’s End on last week’s new episode of The Comedy Vault.

Tonight at 9 PM for the Monday Marathon we bring you ten hours of our music specialty programs from April, 2020.

Back in December, 2023, I got to see the out-of-town trial run of the new musical, BOOP!  I raved about it HERE, and revised that review a few weeks ago when it started previews on Broadway HERE.

Well, last night it offically opened, and now the whole world can find out how much fun this musical is.

Today we’re going to bring you several videos about the new Broadway run of what I suspect will be a massive hit, and a major star-making vehicle for Jasmine Amy Rogers in the title role.

From May, 2011, we bring you Radio Free Charleston episode 129, “Adventure Wars Shirt. ” This week we featured music by Blue Million, HARRAH and Ryan Hardiman.  We also had a preview of a great CYAC show, “Airwaves.”  There was animation by Frank Panucci, too.

Before we got too far into the show, there’s animation by Frank, and we ran the promo for the 2011 East End Yard Sale again, just to be on the safe side.

Our first musical guest is Blue Million. We recorded Alan, Andy and Gary at The Empty Glass. I’ve known Alan Griffith and the guys for more than 35 years, and I’m always in awe of his songwriting and performing prowess. Blue Million treated us to the lead song off of their then-new 6 Song EP, “Down To A Groove.”

Austin Sussman contributed a great promo clip for the CYAC production, “Airwaves,” which people still talk about fourteen years later.

Our next musical guest was HARRAH.  This was Lee Harrah’s band, and he’s practically family, so going on and on about him would just embarrass the guy. HARRAH unleashed the song, “Green (Day of Rage),” inspired by Lee’s favorite super-hero, The Incredible Hulk.

Playing us out this week was Ryan Hardiman, star of countless local musical productions like “Jack The Ripper” and “Rent,” and a good friend of RFC. We brought you Ryan, backed by Mark Scarpelli, from the 2010 “Good Night” event, performing a great cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” recorded at Trinity Lutheran Church.

You may, if you wish, read the original production notes HERE.