We have a cool new episode of RFC to help you deal with the hot weather Tuesday on The AIR.   Radio Free Charleston, is one-third new/two-third classic RFCI this week.  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 tons of replays throughout the week.

Our first hour is all-instrumental music, and it opens with two great new wordless tunes from friends of mine named “Chuck.”

Our first Chuck is Chuck Van Hoorhis, AKA Sgt. Van. He’s a fellow GI Joe collector who has made some really cool and innovative replacement boxes, but he’s also a great musician and composer. And there’s a video for his latest song, which opens the show, and you can see it here…

The second song in the show is the latest musical project from The Maestro, Chuck Biel, and it also has an accompanying music video, which I am dropping right here…

Since I had two great instrumental tunes to open the show, I decided to make the whole first hour word-free (except for my incessant babbling) so we had a cool theme. You’ll hear wordless music from Guitarmy of One, Jim Lange, David Synn, John Lennon and more.

For our second and third hours, by popular demand (really), I brought the first episode of Radio Free Charleston International out of mothballs for a new airing. This is the free-format show that found itself folded back into Volume 5 of RFC at the beginning of 2020. People wanted to hear it again for some reason, and with me fighting deadlines, it made life easier all the way around.

Links in the artist’s names in the first hour of our playlist below will take you to a website where you can find our more about them and maybe buy their music. Check out the playlist…

RFC V5 185

hour one
Sgt. Van and The Highway Dogs “Bill’s Van (Radio Free Mix)”
Chuck Biel “TAMILDAA”
Basilic Swing “The Man of Mystery”
Jim Lange “Shiva’s Dance”
Guitarmy of One “Jack Lord of the Sea”
Daniel Glass and Rich Tozzoli “The Devil’s Wave”
John Lennon “Out The Blue”
David Synn “Jazz Hands”
Chicago Blues Lifters “Ari’s Riff”
Well Tempered Madness“FOMO”
Steve Marriott “They Call It Love”
Frank Panucci “Waste Snot”
The Residents “Dance With The Devil”
Spencer Elliott “There’s Something In The Airlock”
YES “Mood For Another Day”

hour two
The Beatles and Led Zepplin “Helter Skelter”
The Beetlevanias “Smells Like Teen Spirit”
The Rutles “Shangra La”
Chemical Beats “Welcome To The Black Parade”
Todd Rundgren “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”
The Beatnix “Stairway To Heaven”
Be Bop Deluxe “Surreal Estate”
Kerry Livgren “Mask of the Great Deceiver”
The Buggles “Vermillion Sands”
Nightwish “The Heart Asks Pleasure First”

hour three
Ian Dury and the Blockheads “Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll”
Madness “One Step Beyond”
Lene Lovich “Lucky Number”
DEVO “Jocko Homo”
ELP “Benny The Bouncer
Franz Ferdinand/Sparks “Dictator’s Son”
David Bowie “Blackstar”
Transvision Vamp “Velveteen”
Jellyfish “Brighter Day”
Split Enz “Bullet Brain and Cactus Head”
Hazel O’Connor “Writing on the Wall”
Kate Bush “Suspended in Gaffa”

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,  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.

We are back to acrylic painting this week, after a weeks-long diversion due to MG.  Because of the oppressive heat and my severe dislike of it I chose to do a “wish” painting. I painted a winter scene…one that attempts to mix nature with industry, and offers up enough snow to make me forget for a while that it’s hot enough to melt titanium outside.

This was done with acrylic paint on thick illustration board using cheap brushes (and some dental brushpicks for the fine details on the transmission towers). It’s a bit of imaginary realism, whatever that means.

I was happy enough with it to use it here, so I hope it helps cool you down too.

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 excrutiating cleverness from Noel Coward on a recent episode of The Comedy Vault.

Tonight at 9 PM for the Monday Marathon We bring you ten hours of Sydney’s Big Electric Cat featuring Sydney Fileen’s shows dedicated to specific years from 1978 to 1982.

It’s time to plug a great toy show that’s within easy driving distance of Charleston,  and your PopCulteer and his wife will be there. It’s a week earlier than usual this year, so head’s up folks!

The Eleventh Annual Kentuckiana GI Joe Toy Expo happens next weekend in Louisville, Kentucky. It’s Saturday (with a Friday preview night) and it happens at the Paroquet Springs Conference Centre, at 395 Paroquet Springs Drive, in Shepherdsville, KY, just like last year.  It’s not far at all from the South Louisville Antique Toy Mall, so most toy collectors ought to have an easy time finding it.  This is a great show. I’ve been to several in the past, and above and below you’ll see videos I made to document the visits. Up top it’s our clip from last year. Below you’ll see several videos from the years preceding.

There will be dozens of dealers with great vintage GI Joes, plus GI Joe from the Real American Hero era and brand-new custom uniform sets and figures for 12″ and 3 3/4″ GI Joes. Plus there will be tons of other action figures and toys for sale. You might find MEGO, Big Jim, Super Joe, Johnny West, Major Matt Mason and many other great toys from the past.

Collectors can expect new convention sets from several cutomizers and independent toymakers . This is some terriic stuff that is keeping the 1/6 scale hobby alive. The unofficial theme this year is GI Joe’s 60th anniversary, and several cool limited edition sets will be available at the show.

Visit the Kentuckiana GI Joe Toy Expo Facebook event page for more information. It should be a great time, and your PopCulteer will be there, so come up and say “howdy” or something.

This week we go back to the first Radio Free Charleston of 2010. “Bettie Page Shirt” features music from Highway Jones, Ryan Hardiman, and Blue Million. There’s also animation by Frank Panucci, a Plant Ro-Duction Mini-Movie, and a cameo by now-retired professional wrestler Daizee Haze.

Host segments were shot at a pre-ghost-mall Charleston Town Center, and musical performances were recorded at The Boulevard Tavern, Trinity Lutheran Church and Bruno’s, one of which is still in existence (it’s the church).

For the full production notes, go HERE.

The PopCulteer
July 12, 2024

As I briefly mentioned Wednesday, this weekend I am headed back up to the The Kruger Street Toy & Train Museum for a special toy show/memorial for Roberto Ligotti, a beloved member of the MEGO collecting community known to his friends as ‘Berto. This event is not private, but having come together in mere weeks following ‘Berto’s passing, it’s not expected to be heavily attended. However it is open to all MEGO collectors who would love to pay tribute to our fallen friend. You can buy a ticket in advance or at the door.  Admission also gains you entry to the wonderful Kruger Street Toy & Train Museum, which hosted MEGO Meet for its first ten years.

Because of this quick trip and some outside deadlines, today’s PopCulteer is a simple photo essay…one that I’ve been keeping up my sleeve for four weeks now.

Four weekends ago, when Mel and I drove up to Wheeling for the annual Marx Toy & Train Show, we made a side trip to the FiestaWare Factory Store in Newell, WV. It was not our first trip. This is sort of like visiting Mecca for Mel, only with much more colorful plates.  Since I’m going to try to write this blog four days in advance to accomodate the trip and the magazine article I’m working on, you will get to take in the bright, shiny and color images from our latest trip to Newell.

Enjoy…

I just realized that I’m going to have to come up with captions for almost twenty photos of brightly colored dinnerware. Forgive me if I go a bit off the rails.

Here are the bowls alongside one wall. Note how they are arranged by color.

On the opposite wall, across the store, we find plates, rammakin-thingys and assorted crockery.

A trick of perspective: These covered baking dishes are not actually bigger than the tiny people in the background.

Continue reading

I’ve been telling you about comic books written by Anthony Stokes for almost two years now, and he has a new Kickstarter campaign that ends in just one week.  This is a special one because it’s a spin-off of the first project of his that I discovered, which was a mini-series called Decay.

Decay is quality storytelling, with a fresh take on horror that is so compelling that the idea of new chapters of the story are a huge treat for me. Decay is a supernatural revenge tale about a young man who is gunned down by drug dealers, but then revived by his grieving sister…who happens to be a Voodoo priestess.  As I’ve said before in this blog, Stokes is a very gifted storyteller and in Decay he’s woven familar elements into something really new and exciting.

After the five issues of Decay, Stokes is going back for more in the Decay universe. His new series, Prescription Paradise, comes at this situation from a different angle.

This time around, a small-time drug dealer gets set up with a bad batch of drugs. He overdoses and then gets brought back to life to life by his cousin using a voodoo ritual. Once revived he works his way up the supply chain to get revenge on the supplier who set him up.

This is a different take on the original story, which featured a young victim who was more of an innocent bystander. In Prescription Paradise our undead protaganist knows who his target for revenge is, and how best to exact it.

From the Kickstarter page…

Prescription Paradise #1 is a 52-page square bound graphic novel that is a gritty anti-drug crime story. I concieved the idea as a response to the opioid epidemic and I hope it provides some much needed catharsis to those who have been affected by it. It features beautiful illustrations by Marco Perguini and letters by Es Kay.

This campaign ends in a week, and it’s already two-thirds funded. In addition to digital and print versions of Prescription Paradise, you can add digital or physical copies of any of Anthony’s previous works, including Decay, which is available as individual issues or a trade paperback (which includes a bonus short story).  The time to click through to the Kickstarter is now, because time is running out.

Anthony always delivers, not only in terms of quality, but also very promptly with his rewards. I’m sure that Prescription Paradise will be no exception in either regard.

In case you haven’t noticed yet, it’s really hot outside. It’s positively tropical…in a humid hellscape way, not in an island paradise way.

I’m not going off on an “I told you so” rant about climate change here. I’m just reminding you that we are still in the midst of a particularly hideous heatwave. I have a chronic illness which is excacerbated by high temperatures, so don’t expect to see me at any event that happens outside. I implore everyone to stay hydrated and stay safe because there is still a lot of  STUFF TO DO this week.

Again, remember, if you are attending an outdoor event, stay hydrated and please don’t smoke or vape around any humans who might find the associated stank to be offensive.  Let me tell you about plenty of STUFF TO DO in Charleston and all over the Mountain State and beyond as we struggle to survive this summer.

As I have been copying and pasting of late, this a good time to remind you 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. I won’t be offended if you volunteer to do the work I was too lazy to finish.

It’s CharCon time as West Virginia’s longest-running Gaming Convention is coming to back to the Clay Center this weekend. There are games of many types available to enjoy so you can get your gaming fix, visit the vendors, check out the guest artists, participate in the cosplay, or just walk around and gawk.

I have to be honest, despite a lifetime of being immersed in what some folks call “geek culture,” I never really got into gaming. But if that’s your scene, you need to go here. Details are at their Facebook Event page.

This weekend in Barboursville, it’s the fourth annual BillyCon at Billy Bob’s Wonderland/Pizza/Fun City Arcade and Prarie Emporium.  Fans of Showbiz Pizza, Billy Bob’s, and The Rock Afire Explosion Band can indulge in 3 days of fun and food. This year will feature new merchandise at The New Billy Bob’s Wonderland. Details are HERE.

With your humble radio host buried under deadlines this week, we once again have to dig into the archives today on The AIR.  We have a new episode of  Radio Free Charleston, but it’s a collection of “oldies” in the first hour, followed by a ten-year-old edition of RFC Volume 3 from 2014 in our second and third hours.  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 tons of replays throughout the week.

I didn’t have nearly as much time as usual to record this episode of RFC, so I did one new hour,  filled with tracks ranging from 10 to 35 years old, and then pulled out the fifth episode of the old Voices of Appalachia version of the show from 2014.

We open our first hour with Government Cheese, a Louisville band that appeared on the original broadcast incarnation of Radio Free Charleston back in 1989. Then I just played what I could get my hands on in an old music folder, and happily managed to locate a Three Bodies song that I’d misplaced years ago.  The rest of the first hour includes lots of music that you won’t be able to hear anywhere else, harvested from the vast RFC archives.

Basically, this is a fond look back at the Charleston music scene (with a few visiting bands included) from the last 35 years or so. Because of my deadlines and the fact that many of these artists don’t have websites, there are no links this week.

Check out the playlist.

RFC V5 184

hour one
Government Cheese “Camping On Acid”
Qiet “The Indie Song”
Snakebox “Dead Planet”
Go Van Gogh “Planet of Psychotic Women”
Decomposing In Paris “He Loves Me”
Some Forgotten Color “High Chair”
Three Bodies “Three Bodies”
Stark Raven “Irrational People”
WATT 4 “Bad Situation”
Super Heavy Duty “Here I Be”
Crystal Bright & The Silver Hands “Especially Your Mother”
From The Future “Cool Taco”
Beckner, Price & Panucci “Got Drunk, Got Married, Got Screwed”

hour two
Slate Dump “Co-Dependent Shuffle”
Mark Beckner “Ain’t It Hard”
Kenneth Brian Band with Lillie Mae Rische “Last Call”
Southern Culture On The Skids “King of the Mountain”
The Renfields “Transylvania Fight Song”
Donny Iris “Songs of Summer”
Scooter Scudieri “Round and Round”
Todd Burge “My Kind of Town”
Blue Million “Down To A Groove”
Stephanie Deskins “Godless”
Spurgie Hankins Band “Seagull”
Strawfyssh “Choppin’ Broccoli”
Kevin Duffer “Harder Days”

Hour Three–the songs of Slate Dump
J. Marinelli “The Ballad of Pop Bottle Pete”
Sam Taylor “Behind The Ears”
Sleepy Eyes Nelson “The Tragic Tale of Kazimir Kiskis”
Tongue Tied Twin “Safety Rope”
The Stalnaker Brothers “The Last Buck Dance”
Tucker Riggleman “Your Man”
Tyler Timebomb “Leave The Light On”
Nick Ledford “Bedbug Epidemic”
Walt Phelan “Shoulder pt. one”
The Discovery Flannel “Dubber’s Theme”
Esmerelda Strange “Love Bug”
Mussy Cloves “Disillusionment”
Johnny Lowebrow “Burl Ives Must Suffer”
SlamDance “Requiem for a Canary”
Badger Fight “I’m a Creeper”
Black River Bluesman and Bad Mood Hudson, “I’m a Creeper”
Sleepy Eyes Nelson “Ballad of Pop Bottle Pete”

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,  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 recent episodes of The Swing Shift, because I couldn’t record a new one of these on Monday, either.

 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.

Once again this week I’m back to using the trusty Blackwing Palomino pencil, only this time it started out as a phone doodle.

While I was on the phone, stuck in “hold purgatory,” I grabbed my clipboard and just started doodling what became a girl’s face. I did a little post-call finishing, but it’s just a doodled portrait of an imaginary young lady.

This is pencil on regular copy paper. I was using the plastic clipboard to hold it, and with my MG-afflicted fingers, this once again changed the amount of pressure I could apply. So it’s not really my normal style. This is smaller than last week’s drawing, but I had a bit more control this week, and didn’t have to do much with it post-scanning.  As with much of my physical art of late, this is just me trying to get my fingers working again.

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 stand up from Gabriel Inglesias on a new episode of The Comedy Vault.

Tonight at 9 PM for the Monday Marathon We bring you ten hours of Mel Larch’s Curtain Call. In fact, we bring you every episode so far from 2024. So you can catch up.

Normally I would drop a vintage episode of Radio Free Charleston‘s video show into the weekly “RFC Flashback” post on Saturdays here in PopCult, but this is a very special episode, and it’s well outside the chronological presentation of our video shows that’s been happening in that feature since January of last year.

What you see above is one of the lost episodes of the show. There were four of them, but now there are only three. This was actually the oldest of them. The video you see above has been out of circulation for almost a dozen years. I tried a new tack in searching my labrynth of hard drives on the Fourth of July, and found a copy of the show encoded as a .VOB file from where I’d burned it to DVD in 2007. This made me positively giddy and I dropped everything and immediately remastered it so I could upload it in time for today’s PopCult post. I’m even writing this while the new file is rendering.

Making this even more fitting, July 4, 2006 was the official premiere date of the first video episode of Radio Free Charleston.  I hadn’t planned to do anything to mark the 18th anniversary of my show’s return from the dead, but then this fell into my lap organically, so here you go.

From June, 2007, comes episode 21 of Radio Free Charleston, featuring Under The Radar, The Ghosts Of Now, a short film by Sean Richardson and Alon Kutchinsky, plus vintage beer animation. This episodes is called “Yellow Submarine Shirt,” and except for a brief period when it was hosted by MySpace in 2012 this is the first time it’s been seen in PopCult since early 2009.

Under The Radar returned with a song written by Charleston’s rock n roll recluse, John Wallace.  “Dog Day Dallas Doo Dah Demons” is a musical ode to JFK conspiracy theories. The Ghosts Of Now made their second appearance on RFC with “Patton’s Blues.” I am a huge fan of Sean and Alon’s controversial short film (read the comments under the original production notes) and I’m thrilled to have it back online as part of the show.

The production notes for this episode can be found HERE, and they include a mention of the show possibly going weekly, which we did indeed manage to do a few times over the last eighteen years. As you may know, Radio Free Charleston is currently running as an annual show as a video program, but you can still tune in to our radio show every Tuesday for three hours of great local and independent music and free-format radio on  The AIR.

Now I’m going to see if I can get this lucky looking for the other three missing episodes of the show!