Okay, it’s time for a little “Inside PopCult” info.

Some technical issues have arisen with the media uploads for PopCult, and I need to spend a day taking care of them. This might mean the blog is offline for short periods today, but it mostly means I need to spend a lot of time doing tedious file-management tasks. Nineteen years of a graphics-heavy blog makes for some serious challenges, and I’ve put off doing some basic things since I ported this blog out from under the auspices of The Charleston Gazette-Mail about four years ago. This was not how I wanted to spend my first day back after my vacation.

So…while I promised you “fresh content every day,” today’s content is this post that explains why there isn’t a new post for you.

Just to make it up to you, here’s a picture of a horse…

Somehow Tuesday has happened once again on The AIR.  As such, we have a sort of new episode of  Radio Free Charleston 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.

Like last week, this week’s show features two hours of vintage RFC, dredged up and resurrected for you listening pleasure.

This week our all-new first hour opens with a new single from Matt Berry (with Kitty Liv), which is a teaser for his next album. The rest of our first hour is a mix of old and new, local and independent music.

In our second and third hours, we transport you back to the second half of an all-local showcase edition of Radio Free Charleston Volume 1, from January, 1990.  This was originally presented as an episode of RFC International in 2016,but it hasn’t been heard in over seven years.  Here’s what I wrote about it then…

It was early in January, 1990, right after RFC had been the subject of a profile in the Charleston Gazette written by Michael Lipton that I decided to devote all four hours of the show that was then broadcast on 96.1 FM, to local artists.

In part one, on RFC (heard here last week), you heard blocks of music from Brian Diller and The Ride, Three Bodies, Zone 3, The Bounty and more, plus we had a mini-history of Go Van Gogh as of 1990. RFC International brings you music from World Without Fear, Blue Million, Delta Hum The Swivels and more, plus we play side one of the first Stark Raven album.

Setting the scene, the last song we played last time was Larry Groce doing a cover of Bob Marley’s “No Woman, No Cry.” We’re going to pick up where we left off with Larry doing a Warren Zevon tune.

It is cool to bring back some of these blasts from the past, even if I am mainly doing it so I can forget about blogging and radio-ing while I’m on vacation.

The links in the first hour of the playlist will take you to the pages for the local and independent artists where possible…

RFC V5 196

hour one
Matt Berry with Kitty Liv “I Gotta Limit”
The Defectors “Easy Target”
David Synn “Ryden’s Madness”
The Settlement “Linger (live)”
Carey Ott featuring The Freaks of Nashville “No Front”
The Aquabats “The Ballad of Shapeshifting Pilgrim Boy”
The Dread Crew of Oddwood” Giant Demon Crab”
HARRAH “Pay The Piper”
Byzantine“Ancestry Of The Antichrist”
J Marinelli “Saturn of Clarksburg”

hour two
Larry Groce “Accidentally Like A Martyr”
Blue Million “Everything Inside Out”
Blue Million “I’ll Keep You Warm”
David Lanham Band “Rock With You”
David Lanham Band “Small Town Blues”
World Without Fear “Nothing”
World Without Fear “Please Don’t Love Me”
Delta Hum “Three Ring Binder”
Mad Scientist Club “Live Song”
Mad Scientist Club “Thunder and Lightning”
Mad Scientist Club “Doctor Owsley”
Still Portrait/Mark Scarpelli “Music that I don’t remember the titles to”

hour three
Stark Raven “Riding On A Wave”
“I Know You”
“Be With Me”
“Feel Only Love”
“He Loves To Limbo”
The Swivels “No Vaccination”
The Swivels “Mobile Man”
Tim Truman “Ten Dollar Dog”
Tim Truman “House Come Falling Down”
The Mystery Band “Mystery Songs”
Diamonds and Gold “No More Loving You”
Area 38 “Endgame”
The Amazing Delores “Rats In My Ceiling”
The Pudgy Young Upstarts “Uncontrollable Urge”

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. Ignore the date on the video. It’s messed up.

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 very small acrylic painting doodle based on a screwed up self portait photo I tried to take over the summer in a hotel.

I forgot to turn off the flash. BTW, I’m wearing a shirt based on the carpet pattern from the hotel in The Shining. The photo cracked me up and I decided to try to recreate it in paint in a small size. The whole process took less than half an hour, and much of that was mixing the colors.

It is, as is one of my life’s philosophies, quick and sloppy.

To see it bigger try clicking HERE.

Over in radioland, Monday at 2 PM on The AIR, we bring you encores of a classic episode of Psychedelic Shack, and then at 3 PM a recent 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 an hour of songs from Dr. Demento on a classic episode of The Comedy Vault.

Tonight at 9 PM for the Monday Marathon we devote ten hours to the second five episodes of Prognosis. We will be alternating between Prognosis and Sydney’s Big Electric Cat for the next several weeks, because we’re going to be pulling the early episodes of those shows from the server soon to make room for newer programs. After they’ve been offline for a year or so, we’ll bring them back into rotation but for now, you can hear them Monday evening into Tuesday morning, and then those episode will go on hiatus.

Okay, I’m slacking off a bit by recylcing an old PopCult post this week, but I’m on vacation, and I have GI Joe on the brain because part of that vacation is me going, as a civilian, to JoeLanta, the annual GI Joe based toy show in Atlanta.

The original version of this post was bedeviled by bad links and missing graphics, so I’m just re-writing it and updating it for your renewed enjoyment. Remember that this was mostly written ten years ago. Hasbro had just pretty much ignored GI Joe’s 50th anniversary, and they were fairly well enmeshed in the “throw anything at the wall and see what sticks” mentality with the property.  It wasn’t until way more recently,  with the very successfull GI Joe: Classified line, that anything stuck.

This is the story of a reboot that didn’t stick, but really should have. What you see above is the “free” video that came with one of Hasbro’s Sgt. Savage GI Joe figures.

The Commando Sgt Savage, who came with the video you see above, and apparently no underwear

When you think of “GI Joe,” the first thing that pops into your mind is not “Sgt.Savage and his Screaming Eagles.” He’s the Joe that never really got his due.

One of the quirks of the hobby of collecting GI Joe is that there’s more than one hobby there. You have the collectors of the original 1964 12″ tall action figure, and you have collectors of the 1982 reboot, which shrunk America’s movable fighting man to 3 3/4″ and gave him more individual identities. Nowadays all the excitement and enthusiasm is for the six-inch, GI Joe: Classified line.

The original GI Joe from 1964

There are actually way more divisions than that, but we’ll take the basic route here. The two big lines each had a healthy twelve-year run, and during that run spent time as the top-selling toy in the country.

The collectors of each line have been so numerous and enthusiastic that, at times, they have convinced Hasbro to revive their beloved childhood toy so that a new generation can enjoy their favorite plaything. Continue reading

RFC 102 "FestivAll 2010 Pt. One" from Rudy Panucci on Vimeo.

I hope you enjoy FestivALL, because for the next several weeks you’re going to see a string of episodes of Radio Free Charleston that I somehow managed to crank out on a more than  twice-weekly basis starting in June, 2010.

In this episode you will hear music by Smoke and Mirrors, The Spurgie Hankins Band, The Nanker Phelge, The Kanawha Kordsmen and The Bob Thompson Unit, and you’ll see and hear FestivAll events like the Buswater art exhibit, The Art Parade, The shows at LiveMix Studio, music from Haddad Riverfront Park and The East End Main Street Streetworks Art Auction.

These shows are meant to be self-explanatory, so the production notes were kept to a minimum. I think we wound up with six or seven parts of our FestivALL 2010 coverage…all of it pretty amazing.

The PopCulteer
September 27, 2024

The clarion call to dance has gone out, so  Mel Larch returns with a brand-new MIRRORBALL! You can hear this and more cool music 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.

Friday at 2 PM on The AIR, Mel Larch devotes her hour of Disco to a delightful and funky random assortment of classic dance tracks from the golden age of Disco. Just like last time, the focus this week is on extended mixes of some of the grooviest tunes ever created.  The show starts off with Quincy Jones and comes to an electrifying end with 5000 Volts.

It’s yet another tasty collection of Disco treats in the grand MIRRORBALL tradition. Check out the playlist…

MIRRORBALL 106

Quincy Jones “Ai No Corrida”
Boney M “Sunny”
Chic “Everybody Dance”
Jackie Moore “This Time Baby”
Yarborough & Peoples “Don’t Stop The Music”
The Crusaders featuring Randy Crawford “Street Life”
Tavares “More Than A Woman”
5000 Volts featuring Tina Charles “I’m On Fire”

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 pays tribute to one of my favorite bands, Oingo Boingo. Truth be told, Sydney called on me to recommend a few tunes for this playlist.

Before Danny Elfman was an Oscar and Bafta nominated and Emmy Winning soundtrack composer, he helped mutate the theatrical troupe, The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo, into the trailblazing New Wave band, Oingo Boingo, and before his career as a film composer became his main creative outlet, his band was one of the definitive examples of West Coast New Wave Music.

You will hear the New Wave era hits, misses and deep album cuts from Oingo Boingo, and some tracks from Danny Elfman’s “So-Lo” album, in this fast-moving and mind-blowing mixtape special. I even tipped off Sydney to a few pre-fame rarities by the band.

Check out this killer playlist…

Big Electric Cat 120

Oingo Boingo
“Violent Love”
“Forbidden Zone”
“Ain’t This The Life”
“You Got Your Baby Back”
“Ballad of The Caveman”
“Only A Lad”
“Little Girls”
“On The Outside”
“Controller”
“Private Life”
“Nothing To Fear”
“Grey Matter”
“Who Do You Want To Be”
“No Spill Blood”
“Nothing Bad Ever Happens To Me”
“Good For Your Soul”

Elfman on stage with Oingo Boingo, circa 1985

Danny Elfman
“Gratitude”
“It Only Makes Me Laugh”
“Everybody Needs”

Oingo Boingo
“Just Another Day”
“Dead Man’s Party”
“No One Lives Forever”
“Stay”
“Weird Science”
“Not My Slave”
“Cinderella Undercover”
“Wild Sex (In The Working Class)”
“California Girls”
“Goodbye, 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 it for this week’s PopCulteer, check back for all our regular feature, with fresh content, every day, even when I’m on the road doing vacationing.

Today we bring you an art film by Douglas Imbrogno, courtesy of his Substack, TheStoryIsTheThing.

This is Doug’s artistic rumination on the communication and cell towers he’s encountered while wandering through the woods.  To see the video above a little larger and read Doug’s intriguing notes on how and why he created this video, go to his site and read the whole story, and while you’re at it, subscribe so you can keep up with his regular posts.

Doug tells me that this video may well be a harbinger for more elaborate things to come.  Let’s keep our fingers crossed, and the phone lines open.

And yes, this is the same Douglas Imbrogno who hired me to write PopCult (and gave the blog its name) so many years ago.

STUFF TO DO will return to PopCult next week. Your humble blogger is on vacation somewhere down South this week.

It’s the last week of September, and Wednesday afternoon on The AIR , we bring you a fresh new episode of Beatles Blast filled with…interesting…covers of Beatles tunes.  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 takes an hour to thrill you with another mixtape collection of a variety of artists offering their unique takes on songs written by John, Paul or George.  You’re going to get the music of the Fab Four filtered through the lens of EDM, Supermodels, hard rock, Jazz guitar and more, as we push the boundaries just a bit with these covers of Beatles and solo Beatle songs.

Check out the playlist…

Beatles Blast 115

The Man With The Oranges “Here Comes The Sun”
Zoot “Eleanor Rigby”
Steve Cropper “With A Little Help From My Friends”
Bonnie Tyler “In My Life”
Twiggy “Isolation”
Pat Matheny “Here, There and Everywhere”
La Scaltra “Dear Prudence”
Radio Stars “Norwegian Wood”
Lulu “Day Tripper”
Simply Red “My Love”
Matthew Sweet & Susanna Hoffs “Beware of Darkness”
Gary Clark Jr. Junkie XL “Come Together”
Joel Paterson “Because”
Leo Sayer “Hey Jude”
Jonathan Pushkar “I Call Your Name”

Beatles Blast can be heard every Wednesday at 2 PM, with replays Thursday at 11 PM, Friday at 1 PM,  and Saturday afternoon.

At 3 PM (EDT) on Curtain Call, Mel Larch serves up  a couple of recent encore episodes, just to keep you on your twinkle-toes.

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 marathon of classic episodes can be heard Sunday morning 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 classic episode that presents a collection of novelty gems from Dr. Demento.

Tuesday means a new, and this week partly old, RFC on The AIR.  We do have a new episode of  Radio Free Charleston for you, but it’s haunted by the ghosts of RFC past.. 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 and next week’s show take the art of wallowing in nostalgia to new heights.  However, both shows feature all-new first hours.  This week we open with our old friend, Brian Diller, covering a Buddy Holly Classic. We also have new music from the amazing Leah Shoshanah,  new tracks from Frankly P, Depeche Mode, Kate Pierson, David Synn and Nick Lowe, and lots of other cool stuff.

Our second and third hours re-present an episode of Radio Free Charleston Volume 4 from 2016. This is a throwback-within-a-throwback because that week on the show I dug up an episode of Radio Free Charleston Volume 1 from January 1990. Let me repeat what I said then…

This week Radio Free Charleston and Radio Free Charleston International team up to transport you back more than 26 years to our four-hour local extravaganza. It was early in January, 1990, right after RFC had been the subject of a profile in the Charleston Gazette written by Michael Lipton that I decided to devote all four hours of the show that was then broadcast on 96.1 FM, to local artists. Truth be told, the show actually ran almost five hours. Station management wasn’t listening to my show (nobody at the station ever did) so I could run long and have the DJ that followed me make up the time.

You will hear me cracking jokes and making remarks about the piece Micheal wrote. A lot of folks thought that I was genuinely angry, when in fact I was thrilled with the press and was just milking it for laughs. So please, do not think that I was really upset with Michael Lipton. He’s always been great to me and I’ve always respected him. I was just only joking, really!

On RFC and RFC International this week, with a minimum amount of interruptions, we’re going to recreate that episode. I will leave in some commercials, and I might change the running order or leave out a few songs, but otherwise this is what the people heard between 2 AM and 6 AM on January 7, 1990. These recordings are taken from an off-air recording of the original broadcast, so there may be some loss of sound quality.

This is a remastered recording of the Radio Free Charleston local extravaganza that was originally broadcast January 7, 1990. Please realize that all the advertisements, phone numbers, addresses and topical references have all expired. I left a few of them simply to amuse and entertain you.

This week’s show is just part one of our twenty-six-year-old rerun. Come back Thursday at midnight for part two on Radio Free Charleston International!

Okay, truth be told, my main reason for reviving these shows this week and next is that Mel and I are heading out on a week-long trip, and I thought it would’ve been too much to ask our house-sitter to host our radio shows, so this made it much easier to prepare this week’s and next week’s RFCs in advance.  Since neither of these shows have been heard in their entirety for over seven years, I figured it was a good time to bring them back to light, now that RFC has more than 35 years of history behind us.

The links in the first hour of the playlist will take you to the pages for the local and independent artists where possible…

RFC V5 195

hour one
Brian Diller “Crying, Waiting, Hoping”
Leah Shoshanah “Leather Soul”
The Company Stores “So Good”
Fabulous Head “Fix It”
Kate Pierson “Take Me Back To The Party”
Depeche Mode “Heroes (live)”
David Synn “The Forgotten Sentinel”
Frankly P “Burn Down The Garage”
Overvue “Hiding In Your Mind”
Chermya Rechka “Pity”
Frenchy & The Punk “Skip Boom”
Nick Lowe and Los Straitjackets “Jet Pack Boomerang”
Mediogres “In The Waste”
Clownhole “Aqua”

hour two
Stark Raven “Into The Fire”
They Might Be Giants “Birdhouse of your Soul”
(This is considered local enough because they’ve been on Mountain Stage)
Brian Diller “Mr. Auctioneer”
Brian Diller and the Ride “Waking Up”
Brian Diller and the Ride “Shoe Fits”
Three Bodies “The Drive”
Three Bodies “My Friend”
Three Bodies “Title Still Unknown”
The Bounty “Mary’s Door”
The Bounty “Buffalos”
The Bounty “Pandora’s Box”
The Bounty “325”
Zone 3 “Willy The Wimp”
Zone 3 “Motorcycle Girl”

hour three
Lost Luggage “Whatever You Want”
Lost Luggage “Lost Luggage”

A special set featuring Go Van Gogh with members of The Tunesmiths and True Rumor

True Rumor “River Beyond”
The Meadowblasters “Da Da Da Da Da I Love You”
The Meadowblasters “She Doesn’t Want My Love”
Go Van Gogh “Planet Freedom”
Go Van Gogh “I Don’t Like Trains”
The Tunesmiths “Ballet Dancer”
The Tunesmiths “For Your Love”
Go Van Gogh “Shut Up, I Love You”

The Charleston Playhouse Quartet “Radio Free Charleston Theme”
Atomic Cafe “The Trax”
Larry Groce “No Woman, No Cry”

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 decided to go back and created a small painting based on one of my digitally-assaulted photographs from many years ago in this feature. Orignally this was part of my “Stark Charleston” series of high-contrast, black and white photos of our fair city.

Fourteen years later I decided to reverse-engineer it, add the color back and paint it in acrylic on cheap canvas board.

I think it came out okay. It was basically an excercise to keep the fingers from atrophying.

To see it bigger try clicking HERE.

Over in radioland, Monday afternoon on The AIR, we bring you 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.

At 2 PM Nigel Pye delivers his usual mix of psychelic music, including vintage nuggets and new trippy tunes. Here’s today’s playlist…

Psychedelic Shack 93

Goat Generator “Black Magic”
5 Gentlemen [France] “Dis-Nous Dylan”
Asida “Armada”
John Wooley & Just Born “Look And You Will Find”
Crystal Garden “Peach Fuzz Forest”
Cave Dwellers “Meditation”
Soultons “Ran Down Soul”
The Bruthers “Bad Way To Go”
Magic Mushrooms “I’m Gone”
The Ides of March “I’ll Keep Searching”
The Traits “High On A Cloud”
Merry Dragons “Universal Vagrant”
Sound Barrier “My Baby’s Gone”
The Lea Riders Group “Dom Kaller Oss Mods”
The Jefferson Handkerchief “I’m Allergic To Flowers”

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.

At 3 PM, Herman Linte devotes his two hours to newly-released Prog Rock,  with new tracks from Jon Anderson, David Gilmour and more, plus newly-released live cuts from Jethro Tull, King Crimson and others.  Here’s the playlist…

Prognosis 120

Jon Anderson “Once Around A Dream”
David Gilmour with Richard Wright “Luck and Strange Barn Jam”
Gavin Harrison, Antoine Fafard “Spontaneous Plan”
Nightwish “An Ocean of Strange Islands”
Big Big Train “East Coast Racer (live in London)”
Tony Levin Band “Give The Cello Some”
King Crimson “The Sheltering Sky (live)”
Jethro Tull “Thick As A Brick (live)”
YES “Gates of Delirium (live)”
Pallas “Ratracing (live)”

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 songs from the very funny, very nasty Rusty Warren on a classic episode of The Comedy Vault.

Tonight at 9 PM for the Monday Marathon we devote ten hours to the first five episodes of Sydney’s Big Electric Cat. We will be alternating between Prognosis and Sydney’s Big Electric Cat for the next several weeks, because we’re going to be pulling the early episodes of those shows from the server soon to make room for newer programs. After they’ve been offline for a year or so, we’ll bring them back into rotation but for now, you can hear them Monday evening into Tuesday morning, and then those episode will go on hiatus.