It’s a mix of new music and a storm-induced throwback to 2016 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.

We open this week’s show with a new track from The Heavy Hitters Band. We also preview upcoming singles from Chicago-connected musicians, Ascendant and AJ Rosales, and offer up new tracks from David Synn, Suzanne Vega, Novelty Island, Ghoulbox, Messer Chups, Propagandhi and The Settlement.

Our second and third hours bring a couple of episodes of Radio Free Charleston Volume Four out of cold storage because a storm whipped up while I was putting the show together, and I was afraid I wouldn’t have time to get a three-hour show assembled before the power went out. I’m actually still racing that while I write this post, which is why we have recycled graphics this week.

Both of these shows are from August, 2016, and they have not been heard by anyone for more than eight years. I’m not including links for those hours because this is a bit of a race for me.

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

RFC V5 224

hour one
The Heavy Hitters Band “Voicemail (Tiny Desk version)”
Ascendant “Love Saved My Life”
David Synn “Sea of Tranquility”
Novelty Island “Blood Pressure Music”
Suzanne Vega “Witch”
Jennifer Lynn & The Groove Revival “Soul Saver”
AJ Rosales “Lietmotif”
Ghoulbox “Dead, White, & Gloom”
Messer Chups “Big Foot’s Shadow”
Sting & The Radioactors “Nuclear Waste”
The Dollyrots“Still Holding On”
Massing “Million To One”
Propagandhi “At Peace”
The Settlement “Wagon”

hour two
Under Surveillance “Pushed Me Too Far”
Time And Distance “Live A Lie”
Westerberg High “Walking With A Ghost”
Hellblinki “Rust”
Charlie West All Stars “Frankenstein”
Charlie West All Stars “Snortin’ Whiskey”
Unknown Hinson “Peace Love and Hard Liquor”
The Nanker Phelge “Killer Took A Holiday”
Joe Vallina “Haven’t Got Enough”
QiET “Hirundieans”
Mike Morningstar and Rick Roberts “East End Bar”
Swivels “Chemical City”
The Company Stores “Rollin’ In”
J Marinelli “Acceptable Faces”
Bobaflex “You Don’t Wanna Know”
The Renfields “Forbidden Planet”

hour three
The Irreplaceables “PC Paradise”
Mark Beckner “Ain’t It Hard”
Amon’s Horn “Bookworm”
Justin Johnson “Trail of Tears”
Treasure Cat “Queen of Spades”
John Lancaster “A Burning Farewell”
Chum “Live In A Circle”
Axis Everything “Beat Cop”
Calendars and Kerosene “I’m Over You”
What Now “Not In Glenville”
600 lbs of Sin “Tidal Wave”
The Horse Traders “Nothing At All”
Sheldon Vance “Watch It Burn”

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’s art is a leftover from a batch of small studies I did last year.  This is an acrylic on cheap canvas board study, really just an attempt to capture the color and set the composition, for a view of Lake Cove, in Caryville,  Tennessee.

I’ve given thought to trying to apply some of my lessons learned studying and imitating Edward Hopper to a more finished version of this, but you don’t see any of that technique here. This barely hints at the atmospheric perspective or the fog.

It’s basically just rough…sort of like last week,  which is why I’m digging into the slush pile again this week.

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 third installment 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 bonus hours of The Swing Shift, my weekly (ish) show devoted to Swing Music. This batch of ten shows is here to make up for ceding last week’s regular Thursday night marathon to MIRRORBALL for it’s fifth anniversary.

Today is the day that devout fans of late-1970s sci-fi celebrate their favorite outer-space adventure, Space Trek. To honor that, we present the debut episode of the related show, Spaceteen 99.

Enjoy the thrills as Darth Khan hurls the moon through space trying to hit Captain Kirkwalker and the crew of the Starship Falcon.

Because I’m so sick of that “May the Fourth” crap that I’m just trolling you now.

For the next couple of months The RFC Flashback will go back to the most ambitious series of episodes in Radio Free Charleston history.  In June, 2011 I decided to try and do something sort of crazy. I’d managed to crank out Radio Free Charleston on a weekly basis before, which was no mean feat since the show was basically produced by me alone, with camera help from my now-wife Mel Larch and occasional help from other friends. Since I somehow managed to pull that off (with an undiagnosed case of Myasthenia Gravis, no less), I wanted to do something completely insane. Taking advantage of the wealth of local events happening during FestivALL, I hatched a crazy scheme.

I wanted to see how close I could get to producing the show daily.

I came close enough for honors. Starting on June 20, with the show you see posted above, I delivered four episodes in four days, with a total running time of 88 minutes. The next week I delivered three more shows on consecutive days, then I skipped a day and posted the final 33-minute installement on July 1. If that wasn’t crazy enough, five days after that I dropped our fifth-anniversary show, which ran more than an hour. That was more than four hours of multi-camera performances by local artists that I shot, mixed the audio, edited and stitched together into shows in less than three weeks.

This was back near the peak of FestivALL. It’s still scheduled to happen this year, but it’s been shrunk down to a single weekend, and moved to the end May/early June. I guess the more cerebral art-oriented bent of FestiVal got overwhelmed by the beer-centric bent of The newly-revived Sternwheel Regatta.

Still, I’m very proud of what I was able to pull off back in the day, and we’re going to bring you the 2011 FestivAll episodes of Radio Free Charleston for the next couple of months, as a sort of countdown to this year’s big ole mess of a city becoming a work of art. In the middle of this run of RFC Flashbacks, FestivALL 2025 will take place.

On this episode our featured performers were The Boatmen (seen at the top of this post), recorded at Live On The Levee, the Charleston Light Opera Guild, recorded at the Charleston Civic Center Little Theater, and two great performances from the Songwriter Invitational at the late, lamented Capitol Roasters by Todd Burge (seen at left, and hey, that’s my car in the background!) and Andy Park.  You can find he original production notes HERE.

The PopCulteer
MAY 2, 2025

STUFF TO DO has been bumped to Friday this week by posts about the cool new shows premiering this week on The AIR (Reminder, tune in to the brand-new fifth anniversary episode of MIRRORBALL today at 2 PM EDT). So we’re going to give you a few very brief news items, then run down some weekend stuff.

Bandcamp Friday

Okay, this time for real, it’s Bandcamp Friday.

That’s the day when my favored streaming service, Bandcamp, foregoes their usual cut of the money and lets the artists keep all the money spent on their music and merch. However today they make an exception.

The artists get a much bigger cut of the proceeds. You know what to do to support the local scene and independent artists.

The Future of Comic Books

In short, things don’t look great. The once-dominant distributor, Diamond Comics, might have emerged from bankruptcy by being sold this week, but it’s really confusing, and the whole thing could wind up in court.

Let me be precise…the whole thing WILL wind up in court. I have not covered this in-depth because it’s a morass of legalese and financial chicanery, but you can find some great reporting about it at Comics Beat and at Bleeding Cool.

In short, Diamond filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy with the intention of reorganizing and selling itself to Universal, a Canadian comics distributor. Then a  US-based game distributor submitted a higher bid, which was accepted, then rejected, then reinstated, then withdrawn when the proposed higher bidder discovered that Diamond had misrepresented the stability of their biggest vendor contract.

Complicating matters is that Diamond’s game distribution unit is called “Alliance Games, ” while the US-based distributor is “Alliance Entertainment.” The two companies are not related.

After Alliance Entertainment was declared the winning bidder by the court, Universal, the Canadian distributor teamed up with the parent company of NECA Toys to make a late counter-bid. Around the same time Alliance Entertinment found out that Diamond had fudged the truth a bit in terms of their contract to sell products made by Wizards of the Coast (Magic the Gathering and more). This made the overall company worth about twelve million dollars less, since Wizards makes the top-selling games in the industry, by far, and their deal with Diamond expired Wednesday.

And while all this was going on, Diamond and their bankruptcy Sherpas somehow failed to file three consecutive monthly reports required by the court, so the Trustee began proceedings to convert the case into a Chapter 7 liquidation. This week’s announced sale seems designed to circumvent that, but it’s almost certain that Alliance Entertainment will sue, if only to claw back the 8.5 million dollar deposit that they already paid, which Diamond has not seemed to be in any rush to return.

This could all collapse, leaving the comic book industry in a bit of a shambles, just in time for Free Comic Book Day tomorrow.

By the way, Diamond owns Free Comic Book Day, Diamond Comic Distributors, Alliance Games, Diamond Previews, Comic Shop Locater.com and several other major comic book entities.

And that’s not even taking the tariffs into consideration.

Taking The Tariffs into Consideration 

Today is the day that the small-packet customs exemption is supposed to die at the hands of our insane man-baby president. Today it’s ended for products made in China, but it’s inevitable that he will remove this exemption for other countries.

In the short term, this could kill Temu, but it could also seriously impair The Corgi Model Club, and it will likely double or triple the cost of British music magazines like MOJO, PROG and Uncut. It will also make it nearly impossible for you to buy or sell anything from or to another country on eBay, Mercari or Etsy.

In the long term, it could make the toy stores at Christmas look like the toilet paper departments did back during Trump’s mishandling of COVID.

That’s right….it turns out the Grinch is Orange.

Rather than meeting the unreasonable goal of moving manufacturing back to the United States, these tariffs will result in the closure of tens of thousands of small American businesses. They will devastate several industries–electronics, automobiles, toys, comics, textiles, jewelry–I could go on, but it’s pretty depressing.

Comic Books could quadruple in price. Action Figures and Fashion Dolls will cost a minimum of thirty or forty dollars each. Hot Wheels could top five bucks each.

It’s just one of the many ways that this administration will work tirelessly to destroy everything good in this country for the sake of making the richest people in the world even wealthier. Be prepared for higher inflation than we had the last time Trump destroyed the global economy.

They sell this “helping American businesses,” but the truth is it will only mean higher prices and fiscal pain for US consumers, who will simply have to pay more for things they want, or go without. This administration clearly does not care about consumers. Look at the way they’re getting rid of the agencies that monitor product safety.

The average person is the collateral damage in this idiotic trade war.

Awards Shows

I’ve long been of the opinion that award shows are garbage. For one thing, I don’t like the idea of artistic creations being entered into some kind of nonsense competition with each other. For another, most of these award shows are merely contrived marketing schemes, where the powers that be conspire with the highest bidders to give the awards not to the most deserving creative endeavors, but to whichever ones they think will make the most extra money if it has an award to tout.

Oh, and the Tony Nominations were announced yesterday.

The Guffman Sports Complex

Yesterday it was announced that Charleston’s Sports Complex project (formerly the Aquatic Center) has been put on hold. The blame is being placed at the feet of Congress, who have paused a seven-million-dollar grant to help fund the 70 million dollar project. I’m sure that’s it and that it has nothing to do with the entire project being crafted behind closed doors with zero transparency and then foisted on the public with no warning and incomplete planning. But at least they managed to turn a vacant building into a vacant lot in the process.

STUFF TO DO

We’re sorta cramped for space this week, there’s a lot of early Cinco de Mayo stuff that I dont have room for, so let’s just begin our boilerplate spiel about events in and around Charleston…

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 , Spoutible, Instagram 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. I hear that last week’s jam was epic.

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.

Clendenin Browing Co is a microbrewery with 4 themed lodging rooms in a 1920s bank building on Main St Clendenin, WV. They’ve been host a lot of musical acts lately.

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 many Tuesday evenings. 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. This Saturday at 7 PM it’s Bluegrass galore with Bronco Juntion, bodine Johnson and Noah Collins & the Raccoon Wranglers.

You can also visit Coal River Coffee in Saint Albans for live music in an alcohol-free environment. This Friday at 7 PM  Coal River Coffee features Minor SwingI 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

Time flies when you’re having fun! It’s a big day for fans of Disco Music today on The AIR.

Five years ago today, Mel Larch’s showcase of Disco Music, MIRRORBALL, made its debut on The AIR (PopCult’s sister internet radio station), and our listeners have been dancing like crazy ever since.

It’s been an amazing journey getting here with what we thought was just a throwaway music special that nobody would listen to. We were wrong, and here we are celebrating with thousands of listeners and a worldwide audience. It was during the late summer of 2019 when Mr. and Mrs. PopCulteer were careening through Eastern Pennsylvania eating chocolate and listening to The Rialto Report podcast about Andrea True, that my lovely wife, Mel, remarked on how much she loved classic Disco music, and we began to talk about doing a Disco show for The AIR. The show didn’t happen until the pandemic shut everything down and gave us more free time, and the first MIRRORBALL debuted as an AIR Music Special on May 1, 2020.

We decided to do another one two weeks later, and the reception was so striking that we just didn’t stop.

To mark the occasion of this anniverary, The AIR will run a 24-hour marathon of Mel’s hand-picked favorite episodes beginning Thursday at 2 PM.  Then, when it concludes, Friday at 2 PM we will serve up a Brand-new episode of the show, and as a special treat, this new episode is comprised entirely of Disco club hits that have never previously been featured on the show.

My Melanie

When we launched, Mel was concerned that we’d run out of classic Disco-era music, but the truth is, after digging in the club vaults for five years, there is no end to the countless grooves that we can bring you. For a show that was inspired by a podcast about vintage porn and was never intended to be an ongoing series, to be still going strong after five years is quite an achievement.

You will still be able to tune in to The AIR for new episodes of MIRRORBALL, Fridays at 2 PM for the foreseeable future.

So prepare to shake your groove thing, turn the beat around and fly your freak flag high as The AIR brings you 25 hours of Disco, beginning Thursday afternoon.

And then, Friday at 2 PM, tune in the newest edition of MIRRORBALL. Just check out this playlist…

MIRRORBALL 115

Good Life Ltd. “I Got It”
Alice Steet Gang “Bahia (Also Sprach Zarathustra)”
Crosstown Traffic “Party People”
Ike Noble “Dance, Dance, Dance to the Music (Y’all)”
Panach “Sweet Jazz Music”
Universal Robot Band “Disco Boogie Woman”
Stringfield Family “The Sound of Disco Rock”
Sandpebbels of Barbados “Suntan”
Legal Defenses “The Disco Stomp”
Volstarr “Dancin'”

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. Soon that mini-marathon will be moving to a new night, but for now, it’s a Saturday night experience.

On Wednesday The AIR brings you great new episodes of Curtain Call and Beatles Blast  and The Comedy Valut that are seasonally appropriate and downright cute.  You can tune in at the website, or just stay right here and  listen to the convenient embedded radio player lurking elsewhere on this page.

At 2 PM (EDT) Beatles Blast is inspired by this week’s “Fruit Salad” 100th episode of Nigel Pye’s Psychedelic Shack, and is something I’ve been threatening to do for some time.

It’s an entire hour-long mixtape devoted to one song, “Strawberry Fields Forever.” You will hear multiple takes of the song by The Beatles, as well as covers by Greg Hawkes, Andy Timmons, Peter Gabriel and even one Paul McCartney. You’ll here the song transformed into Jazz, Bluegrass, Salsa and arena rock, and by the end of the show, you will have the tune stuck in your head for days.

Beatles Blast can be heard every Wednesday at 2 PM, with replays Saturday afternoon.

At 3 PM (EDT) on Curtain Call, Mel Larch presents a mixtape collection of new musicals that have opened this year on Broadway, off-Broadway and in London’s West End. This has become an annual tradition on Curtain Call as Mel awaits the Tony Award nominations that will be the basis for her next episode.

Some of these shows are certain to be nominated. Others, not so much.  This show will let you sample the latest from the world of Musical Theatre. Just check out the playlist…

Curtain call 155

New Shows 2025

“Let’s Do Lunch” from Sunset Boulevard
“Making A Man” from Operation Mincemeat
“The Call” from Floyd Collins
“You’ll Never Get Away From Me” from Gypsy
“Daydream” from Real Women Have Curves
“Why Look Around The Corner” from BOOP! The Musical
“For The Gaze” from Death Becomes Her
“The Assassin and the Martyr” from Legends of Arahma
“I’m A Disney Whore” from Waiting In The Wings The Musical
“Where’s My Superhero” from Your Lie In April
“Don’t Forget Me” from Smash
“Just In Time” from Just In Time

Curtain Call can be heard on The AIR Wednesday at 3 PM, with replays Thursday at 8 AM,  Saturday at 8 PM, Monday at 9 AM and Tuesday at 1 PM. A marathon of classic episodes can be heard Sunday morning and afternoon starting at 9 AM, 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,  The Comedy Vault brings you a brand-new episode featuring the third of multiple installments of Viv Stanshall’s “Rawlinson’s End.”

In case you missed the news yesterday, this week all of The AIR Musical Specialty programs will be brand-new. That means that…Tuesday is once again “New Show Day” on The AIR.  As such, we have new episodes of  Radio Free Charleston and The Swing Shift for you. 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.

The first hour of this week’s RFC is loaded with local, independent and whatever else music I feel like playing, and it’s filled with gems.

We open with a new track from Corduroy Brown, and it’s a Britney Spears cover, because…why not?  It’s part of an EP he recorded at WDVX and released via Bandcamp.

Speaking of Bandcamp, I mention repeatedly in this week’s show that Bandcamp Friday happens this week. finally I got it right! The next Bandcamp Friday is just days away on May 2.  Follow those links below and give money to these people.

Our first hour is filled with lots of new music from Dice Johnson, Kerosine Stars, Billy Idol, Nellie McKay and more.

Our second and third hours of the show revive a ten-year-old episode of Radio Free Charleston Volume Three, from back when The AIR was Voices of Appalachia/New Appalachian Radio, and I did RFC as a two-hour, all-local show.  In this episode, I resorted to a gimmick to make programming the show easier. Here’s what I wrote…

After our first set of random cool new music, the rest of the show will consist of four-song blocks from some great local artists.

Some of you may remember that back in the olden days of Rock 105, they’d play ROCK BLOCKS with two-to-four songs in a row by the same artist. I have a little bit of fun with that idea this week. I have fun with the reverb, too.

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

RFC V5 223

hour one
Corduroy Brown “Hit Me Baby (One More Time)”
Kerosene Stars “Kerosine”
Billy Idol w/Avril Lavigne “77”
The Settlement “Snake Farm”
Alice Cooper “Black Mamba”
Ghoulbox “Necrokiss”
Sinz of Eden “Angels Turn Away”
Dice Johnson “Caravan”
Matt Berry “Silver Rings”
Nellie McKay “Initiation”
Massing “Frozen Blood”
Adrian Belew “Elephant Talk (Live)”

hour two
Byzantine “Agonies”
Talented “Put Ya Gloves On”
Crystal Bright and the Silver Hands “Firest of Dreams”
QiET “Cosby Sweater”

The Company Stores
“Street Corner Blues”
“Dear Universe”
“Pocket Change”
“Lips”

Highway Jones
“I Get Numb”
“Cigarettes and Liquor Stores”
“Beautiful and Grace”
“Gimme Back My Radio”

Total Meltdown
“Silverine”
“Bad Bad Leroy Brown”
“Country Roads”
“Wake Me Up When September Ends”

hour three
Andy Park and the True Lovers
“I Got Some Swag”
“Drones”
“Black Chicken”
“A Little Attention”

Zeroking
“Dead Rock Star”
“Love Is Dead”
“Girls of California”
“Showtime Revolution”

Hillbilly Deathride
“I Am”
“Necessities”
“Bilderburger”
Weaponized”

Tape Age
“Tell me Why”
“You Need Me To Need You”

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 offer up a new episode of The Swing Shift that collects a bunch of brand-new and old-classic Swing tunes, with a more mellow bent, but don’t get too relaxed, some hyper-swinging moments will take you by surprise.

I’m also really happy to open this show with a track by Dice Johnson, who just released his debut album days ago (and who you also hear on RFC this week). Dice is a Marshall student, a great vibe player and arranger and he grew up less than two blocks from me. It’s a kick to have him open up The Swing Shift this week.

Check out the playlist…

The Swing Shift 170

Dice Johnson “Spachik”
Sean Nelson & New London Big Band “Reply All”
Doc Severinsen “They Can’t Take That Away From Me”
David Carroll “Witchcraft”
Vince Guaraldi Trio “Fly Me To The Moon”
The Tommy Dorsey Orchestra “The Sunny Side of the Street”
Marilyn Monroe “My Heart Belongs to Daddy”
Duke Ellington “Take The A Train”
Lester Young “Lester’s Be-Bop”
Clark Terry “Gravy Waltz”
Stephane Grapelli “It Don’t Mean A Thing”

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

Monday in radioland we have a milestone episode to celebrate.  Beginning at 2 PM on The AIR, we bring new episodes of Nigel Pye’s Psychedelic Shack, and 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.

Nigel Pye has managed to hit episode 100 with Psychedelic Shack. This is one of the shows produced by our friends at Haversham Recording Institute in London, and while all three of our British shows started in the same week, Psychedelic Shack had a bit of a rocky launch, and was MIA for a couple of years while we found room for it on the schedule.

When we officially re-branded Voice of Appalachia as The AIR back in July, 2016, we had one day (Thursday) where, instead of just offering one music specialty show, we brought you four half-hour programs as part of a two-hour block. Of those four shows, Psychedelic Shack and Beatles Blast are still on the schedule.  The two other shows, The Punk Club and Ska Madness, were also produced by Haversham.  Ska Madness made the transition to a one-hour show, but was discontinued when its host, Dexter Checkers, developed health problems. The Punk Club stalled after four half-hour episodes when the host mysteriously disappeared.

Beatles Blast, of course, is hosted by yours truly. Psychedelic Shack returned to the schedule full-time as a one-hour show in 2018. In addition to hosting Psychedelic Shack, Nigel Pye is also the chief engineer for Haversham, and produces all of their shows.

Nigel was also reluctant to do anything special to mark his 100th episode, but we twisted his arm, and he came up with a fun theme for the show…fruit salad. An unusual number of Psychedelic Rock songs mention fruit, so Herman collected a bunch of them into one show.

Check out the playlist…

Psychedelic Shack 100 (2 PM EDT)

Ben Harper “Strawberry Fields Forever”
XTC “Fruit Nut”
One Step Beyond “Scene of the Lemon Queen”
The Monkees “Apples, Peaches, Bananas and Pears”
The Attack “Lady Orange Peel”
The Searchers “Cherry Stone”
The Nice “The Diamond Hard Blue Apples of the Moon”
Andy Partridge “Cherry In Your Tree”
Donovan “Mellow Yellow”
The Elopers “Music To Smoke Bananas By”
The Move “Cherry Blossom Clinic”
Dave Gahan “Bitter Apple”
Syd Barrett “Apples and Oranges”
Legay “The Fantastic Story of The Steam Driven Banana”
Prince & The Revolution “Raspberry Beret”
Negative Space “Forbidden Fruit”

At 3 PM, Herman Linte put together a mixtape show featuring Brand New progressive rock. All the tunes you’ll hear were released in early 2025 (except for one ringer from late 2024). This show proves that Prog is not dead.

Which we pretty much knew anyway.

Check out the playlist…

Prognosis 127 (3 PM EDT)

New Prog For 2025 Mixtape

The Mars Volta “Lucro sucio”
Steven Wilson “The Overview”
Jethro Tull “Drink From The Same Well”
Patrick Leonard “Mary Saw Angels”
Bryan Ferry/Amelia Barrett “The Florist”
The Residents “Empty”
Colosseum “English Garden Suite”
Firephoenix “Torn Between The Good and the Bad”
James Whitely “Haunted”
Avamanyar “Cry Forevermore”
Hawkwind “Changes (Burning Suns and Frozen Waste)”
Glass Hammer “Terminal Lucidity”
Copperwell “By The Water”

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 an hour of brilliant stand-up from Lenny Bruce on a recent episode of The Comedy Vault.

Tonight at 9 PM for the Monday Marathon we bring you ten hours of Psychedelic Shack, that were hand-picked by Nigel Pye as his favorite episodes.

This week we bring you another smallish acrylic painting on illustration board.

It’s inspired a little bit by an old digital design I did years ago, but didn’t actually use here in Monday Morning Art.

It started out looking a bit like a war mask, but after I settled on that name, I kept painting, and it wound up looking a bit more like a Mardi Gras mask at Carnival. This was basically an exercise in limbering up my fingers because I haven’t spent enough time painting over the last few weeks.

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

For an update on today’s new radio shows on The AIR, check back before noon. One of our shows is hitting a milestone, and it gets its own post this week.