This week we jump back to February, 2011, for an episode of Radio Free Charleston that runs the gamut from musical theater to travelling troubadours to Heavy Metal.

“Not Kool Shirt,” featured music from Fox Elipsus and White Chapel District, plus a preview of a classic Scarpelli/Kehde show from The Contemporary Youth Arts Company.

“Norman Rockwell’s An American Love Story” was a then-new original work with words by Dan Kehde and music by the late Mark Scarpelli. This was Dan and Mark’s second musical based on the works of Rockwell, and we featured a solo performance by Sarah Schleiss, accompanied on piano by Mark Scarpelli. We’ll bring you another song from this show in this space next week.

Next up we had Fox Elipsus, a travelling musician who had a pretty interesting gig going that I still can’t really talk about here.  He networked his way around the country playing in spots like Taylor Books (where we recorded him) and he never had to pay for lodging…again for reasons I can’t really talk about here. He seems to have fallen off the face of the Earth a dozen or more years ago.

We also offered up a wild New Year’s Even performance of the song “Revolution” by White Chapel District. This was an incredibly fun shoot and one of the most high-energy performances we’ve had on RFC. You can find the full production notes for this show HERE.

The PopCulteer
January 17, 2025

Most folks who read PopCult know that I collect action figures. Just look at yesterday’s post if you don’t believe me. I’ve been a published “expert” on action figures since 1996, when I began writing the “Facts on Figures” column for Toy Trader Magazine.

A lesser-known fact is that, after I was at Toy Trader for about a year, I also began writing the “Die Cast News” column.

I’ve always loved collecting Die Cast cars. I still have a few that I’ve had almost sixty years.

As far back as I can remember (in the days before Hot Wheels, even), the two major brands of die cast were Matchbox and Corgi (There was Tootsie Toy, too, but those were primitive and cheap). Both Corgi and Matchbox were UK-based, but they had a presence at retail in America.

Matchbox was sold everywhere, and I had a bunch of ’em, but Corgi was more of a rarity, at least in the Charleston area, and when one turned up, it was a thing of wonder.

Joining the club gets you a reproduction of the 1966 catalog

Corgi’s cars were larger. Most were 1:43 scale, as opposed to Matchbox (and Hot Wheels) which were smaller at 1:64 scale. Corgi introduced innovations such as plastic windows and opening doors, trunks and hood. Some even steered and had other working features. From their introduction in 1956, Corgi was always at the forefront of the die-cast hobby.

Recently, Corgi, now a brand owned by Hornby Ltd started a collector’s club that sold reproductions of their classic cars, and last year they offered a car that caught my attention and caused me to join.

How could you NOT join a club to get this?

Of course, that car was the one true original Batmobile, the 1966 George Barris creation.

So I joined a few months early, just to make sure I got one. Anybody who knows me know that I like to show up anywhere early, and this gave me a chance to get a feel for the club.

My original plan was to join, buy a couple of cars so I could get the Batmobile, then leave.

The Corgi Model Club USA had other plans. They hooked me. They hooked me good.

The problem is that their cars are exquistely designed little works of art. The special features from their original issue are all replicated perfectly. They come in close replicas of the original packaging, and the authenticity and dedication to their craft is mind-blowing.

When you join the club, you choose a starter car (at a discounted price with a couple of nice bonuses), and then you get one car per month for thirty bucks, plus about eight bucks postage. It’s not cheap, but given the level of artistry involved, it’s worth every penny. You can find cars that are roughly the same size at most places that sell toys for less, but compared to these Corgi reissues, those are junk.

Your PopCulteer’s modest collection…so far

The cars are offered sequentially, but you have the option to switch out your car every month and jump around on the list of models they offer. If you don’t swap out your choice the following month, you get the next one on the list from the one you switched to.

You could join for a few months and cherry-pick just the cars you want, then leave the club, or you could just skip the few that don’t appeal to you and enjoy discovering some of the cool new models you never knew existed.

I got my Batmobile a couple of months ago, and considered leaving the club, even though I am enjoying the hell out of it. Then they released their list of upcoming models for the new year…and I’m in for at least another 12 months.

Coming in 2025

The club model for March is The Yellow Submarine. Two months later they’re doing Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. In August, they’re doing to offer the Batboat and trailer (famously sold in the 1960s as a two-pack with the Batmobile, which rumor has it, will be a non-club offering at some point), and then in November, they’re releasing the sliver version of James Bond’s Aston Martin D.B.S.

In the months between those, I’ll likely go back and pick up some of the more interesting models that I don’t have yet.

They had me at the rhinocerous. The working steering was a bonus.

I’ve already got the Safari Volkswagon with steering wheels and a rhinocerous, and the Wall’s Ice Cream van with figures. Plus I’ve got the Gold Bond car, and the Batmobile in Glossy and Matte finish.

Some of the models I have my eye on are the Loudspeaker truck, The Land Rover Breakdown truck and the Studebaker Golden Hawk.

The price may seem a little steep, but the quality and attention to detail makes it worth every penny. These are faithful reproductions of cars that, if you sought out the vintage versions, would cost you hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of dollars. Each car comes in reproduction packaging with a certificate of authenticity.

You can join the club HERE, for a discounted price on one of the three starter models. As a bonus you’ll get a nice tin to store your certificates of authenticity that come with each model, and they also throw in a reproduction of their 1966 catalog.

Here’s the updated sequential list of models…

And that is this week’s PopCulteer. Check back every day for fresh content and all our regular features, including our internet radio station, The AIR.

The PopCult Toybox

It’s been a while since your humble blogger took some time to pretend that he was working when he was really just playing with action figures.

With the Kentuckiana GI Joe Toy Expo WinterFest coming up next week (and I’ll tell you much more about that on Sunday), I thought it might be fun to grab a figure I’ve wanted to do something with, and combine it with some 1/6 scale stuff I just happened to have sitting around the office (since last July’s Kentuckiana, to be honest).

As my base figure, I chose something that, just a few years ago, would be considered blasphemy in GI Joe collector circles.  I’m using Barbie’s male companion, Ken.

But, Ken has changed lately.  Mattel created the “Barbie Looks” line a few years ago, and the dolls…uh, figures in that line have some unusual characteristics for the Barbie series. First of all, they are not smiling. They have neutral, some even hostile, expressions on their faces. I’m sure that the idea was that they are scowling like professional models do much of the time, but it’s a welcome change from the “Up With People” Stepford expressions that most Barbie and Ken dolls have.

The second major change is that these figures tend to be super-articulated, with double-ganged joints in the knees and elbows. The newer muscular Ken dolls in the series even have torso articulation and gripping hands.

You read that correctly. They have gripping hands. That and the fact that they have lifelike hair makes them prime candidates for membership in The Adventure Team!

Before I get into the actual kitbashing, let me stress that this is “quick and sloppy.” I did not put a lot of thought into this. Basically, I wanted to try out the very excellent camera in my new phone, and I wanted to do a fun photo essay for today’s post because I just finished a magazine article yesterday and wanted to do something a little less stressful today.

So let’s start out by showing you the key ingredients…

The Fodder

The dolls in this line work great as serious action figures. The females may need new hands, but the muscular males are fine as-is.

Here’s a better view of “Ken.”

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The weather outside is not quite as frightful as it was last week, so if you don’t mind heading out into a Winter Wonderland, here’s PopCult‘s weekly guide to things you can get into in and around Charleston, West Virginia.

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.

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.

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 burlesque.

The multitude of breweries and distilleries that have popped up in Charleston of late tend to bring in live musical acts as well.

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. 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.

For cutting-edge indepent 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…

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We are two weeks into 2025 and we have a new three hour show for you!  Tuesday is once again “New Show Day” on The AIR.  As such, we have a 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.

This week RFC brings you three hours of cool stuff, starting with the latest single by Matt Berry. It’s the title track of his new album, filled with early-70s-style California funkiness, and it’s due out next week.  After that we have new stuff from Todd Burge, Shining Glass, The Polkamaniacs, Franz Ferdinand, Ringo Starr, SPACE FREQ, and more,

I also dive into the archives for a lot of local tracks, plus some of my patented programming non-sequitors. It’s a fun show.

And speaking of diving into the archives, I actually had a longtime listener contact me and ask if I could play the 1973 Columia Records sampler, The Guitars That Destroyed The World.

I didn’t have the album. I really didn’t get into music heavily until the late 70s, but I remember seeing the ads for this in The National Lampoon. The Underground Comix art style used on the sleeve really caught my attention.

It turns out not to be too hard to track down. Columbia/SONY kept this in print, and it eventually made it out on CD.  It’s a pretty killer collection of guitar virtuosos who were signed to Columbia at the time. I don’t have links for these artists in the playlist below, but they aren’t too hard to track down using a Google machine. It was fun to reassemble this, and hear the compilation in full after more than half a century of wondering what was behind this cover.

It’s not a long album, so I filled up the rest of our third hour with the work of three of our local guitar gods.

The links in the playlist will take you to the pages for the artists in this week’s show except for the compilation recreation…

RFC V5 210

hour one
Matt Berry  “Wedding Photo Stranger”
Todd Burge “Snow”
Shining Glass “Drawing Fire”
The Polkamaniacs “Stealing From Work (Death Deluxe Remix)”
Eurythmics “Caveman Head”
SPACE FREQ “Submerge”
Dinosaur Burps “Perversions of Nature”
Franz Ferdinand “Hooked”
Red Audio “Robotomy”
DEVO “Monsterman”
Ultravox “All Stood Still”
Clownhole “Get A Grip”
David Synn “Poseidon”
Fabulous Head  “C U Move”
Tonto’s Expanding Headband “Timewhys”

hour two
Kate Fagan “Go Faster”
Ringo Starr “Rosetta”
Blue Million “No Man’s Land”
Deni Bonet  “Red Dog”
Raymond Scott “Powerhouse”
The Bible Beaters “Can’t Get To Heaven”
Ghoulbox “Rats In The Morgue”
Bad Keys of the Mountain “I’ll Get By”
Brian Diller“Sooner or Later”
Matt Deal “Our Front Porch”
Emmalea Deal & The Hot Mess “Kira”
The Boatmen “Heartbreak Hangover”
The Settlement “Bertha”
The Cure “Warsong”

hour three
Dr. Curmudgeon “My Deamon Math Metal Tune Just Ate Your Artsy-Folksy Americana Song…Sorry!”

The Guitars That Destroyed The World
Carlos Santana and Buddy Miles “Marbles”
Jhnny Winter and Rick Derringer “Rock And Roll Hoochie Koo”
Mahavishnu Orchestra with John McLaughlin “The Dance of Maya”
West, Bruce and Laing “Pleasure”
Blue Oyster Cult “Buck’s Boogie”
Mountain “Don’t Look Around”
Santana “Waves Within”
Edgar Winter’s White Trash “Keep Playin’ That Rock ‘N’ Roll”
Spirit “Dark Eyed Woman”

Byzantine  “Vile Maxim”
4 OHM MONO ‘The Death and Resurrection of a Salesman”

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 our subject is still the Chicago skyline, but unlike last week, it’s not even trying to be realistic. I wanted to do something with a more cartoony, subtly surrealistic aspect to it.

I did use a photo for reference, but instead of gridding it out, I roughed it out in pencil on illustration board, making judicious use of a new set of flexible curves I just got, so that I could distort the image before painting over it.

The exaggeration was to try to convey how small the buildings in question make you feel.  This is a view of the Chicago Skyline, looking North from our hotel in the River North district. It’s a big skyline, so there’s a lot you can do with it.

After doing the pencil rough, I painted over it mostly with acrylics, but I used some Winsor Newton inks on the sky. I tried to employ some Hopperesque shadow techniques without going for the stark realism of many of his paintings.

The plan is to eventually recreate this as a larger scale canvas, but when I do I’ll probably change the color of the skyscraper on the far left to something less realistic, but more of a contrast with the sky.  I like the artificial height (it’s not the tallest building here, but it looks it from this angle), but it gets lost in the sky.

To see it bigger try clicking HERE. Chances are, if you look at it on a computer screen, you’re probably seeing it larger than it was painted.

Over in radioland, Monday beginning at 2 PM on The AIR, we bring you a recent episode of Psychedelic Shack, and then at 3 PM an also 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 Lenny Bruce on an encore of a recent episode of The Comedy Vault.

Tonight at 9 PM for the Monday Marathon we bring you ten hours of covers of songs by The Fab Four on Beatles Blast (with one crossover episode of Psychedelic Shack thrown in near the end).

I love slot car racing. I have a pretty huge collection of American 1:64 scale slot cars and sets made by folks like Aurora, Round 2, Tyco and others.  However,  I have been fascinated of late with the 1:32 scale slot car sets made by Sclalextric, based in the UK and Carerra, based in Germany.  I have a couple of beautiful Scalextric cars (A 1966 Batmobile and a Blues Brothers Bluesmobile with loudspeaker), and I’ve been wondering if the two brands of this larger scale (essentially the same scale as the smaller Green Army Men), are compatible, and if so, which one is better?

The above video by Slatcarzers answers those questions. It’s a bit dry, but it’s packed with information and is extremely useful. If you enjoy this video, go subscribe to their YouTube channel. I know I did. You can lose hurs watching slot car videos, if you are so inclined.

This week we go back to January, 2011, and begin a run of episodes of Radio Free Charleston that may be a little bittersweet. This episode and the next two all prominently feature the music of Mark Scarpelli, the beloved, musican, composer and music educator who passed away early in 2022..

This week we have Mark’s Beatles tribute band, Rubber Soul, as they prepare for a performance of The White Album at The Alban Arts Center, which was a benefit for The Ronald McDonald House.

This edition of the show was a “fly on the wall” preview, showing rehearsals for that benefit show, recorded just days before this show premiered, which was just days before the concert itself.

Mark was always very generous in letting me come in and record his musical projects “in progress” so I could get them posted here in time to promote the actual events.

You’ll get to see three complete songs in this episode of RFC: “Back in the USSR,” with lead vocals by Chris Conard; “Dear Prudence,” sung by Michelle Melton; and “Yer Blues,” sung by Joey Collier. You’ll also see snippets of other White Album classics, with vocal turns by Rubber Soul’s leader, Mark Scarpelli and drummer, Brian Holstine.

Other featured instrumentalists seen in the show are Jamie Skeen on bass, Alasha Al-Qudwah on viola, Jeremy Severn on Trumpet and Kathy Coyle on woodwinds.

Because of the nature of how we filmed the band, the audio isn’t up to our usual standards. I felt it was a decent trade-off so that we could get it online quick enough to help promote what turned out to be a sold-out show.

The PopCulteer
January 10, 2025

It’s been a long week.

Weather, MG flare-ups, outside deadlines, and snow-clearing (which sucks so much I’m separating it from the sucky weather) have conspired to leave your humble blogger without a plan for this week’s PopCulteer.

Luckily, I can always pull a bunch of random images out of my ass and make a column out of them, so guess where we’re going today.

Our feature image is a sarcophagus that we saw in at The Art Institute of Chicago last month when we went to the City of Wind for Mel’s birthday. I thought it was sorta cool, but Mel was a bit freaked out by it, so we didn’t linger.  You’ll see a few more photos from that trip below, and also in the upper right, as I treat you to my self-portrait, taken at the Sephora on Michigan Avenue. I was in the husband-check section, proudly wearing my Mitch O’Connell “I’m a Monster Kid” shirt.

Let’s get to the random images so I can go to bed…

After yesterday’s post about finding old posts that I thought were lost at The Wayback Machine, I had a couple of folks ask if I could show what PopCult used to look like back in the day. Here’s a screen-grab from December, 2007. If you want to read the lead post, go HERE.

This is how you know you’re staying in a really fancy hotel.

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The story behind today’s post, which revives a post from the old “NewSounds” Blog at The Charleston Gazette, is a bit convoluted. So prepare yourself for a long-winded preface.

First of all, I want to send my condolences to the wife and family of Vic Burkhammer, a longtime news editor for The Charleston Gazette, and also an advocate for poetry, and someone who was very kind and supportive of my efforts in the early days of this blog, back when I could count on one hand the number of folks at the newspaper who understood what we were trying to do. Vic passed away on the last day of last year, and he will be missed.

A much better recollection of the life and work of Vic has been written by Douglas Imbrogno, and can be found at his WestVirginiaVille website.  Doug, as longtime readers know, is the Godfather of PopCult, who hired me to write this blog and even bestowed upon it the name you all know and love.  The sad event of Vic’s passing actually tipped over the first domino that resulted in this post.

Doug clued me in on the fact that, while researching his piece on Vic, he discovered that some of our earlier efforts at The GazzBlogs had been captured and preserved by The Wayback Machine at Archive.org. He found some prime examples of Vic’s poetry blog, and he discovered some vestiges of most of the other blogs.

This meant that I might possibly be able to retrieve some of the CD reviews I contributed to the NewSounds blog, which otherwise would probably have wound up in PopCult.  I’ve been whining about these reviews being lost thanks to the ineptitude of Charleston Newspapers and their sad attempts at archive management since at least 2012, and I’d previously restored and reposted one of them here when I found the finished version backed up on a random hard drive.

See, originally PopCult was part of a suite of blogs at The GazzBlogs.  It was a collection of blogs covering different topics. Some, like PopCult and Vic’s Mountain Word, were single-author blogs. Others, like NewSounds, had several different contributors. Aside from me, you might find CD reviews by Amy Robinson, Nick Harrah, Morgan Kelly, Bill Lynch, Michael Lipton and others.

If you had asked me, I would’ve said that I contributed five or six reviews to NewSounds. Once I dove into the Wayback Machine, I discovered that I’d actually written over 20, and those were just the ones that I was able to retrieve. There are two I know of that did not get archived there, so there might have been even more than that in total.  Most of these reviews also wound up in print in The Gazz section of The Charleston Gazette (and maybe one or two showed up in the Sunday paper). Now I have them back in my hands, and I’m damned near giddy over it.

The plan is to insert my reviews into the PopCult blog, time-stamped to match the day they were posted in NewSounds, which means that these will wind up in my archives as posts from 2005 to 2008. I don’t know how quickly I will get to this.  Back when I left The Gazette-Mail and took PopCult independent, I thought it would take me a year to fix broken links and restore graphics.  Over four years later I’m maybe one-fourth of the way through that process. When these do get restored, I’ll include links in a new post so you can hunt them down and read them if you get bored enough to do that.

But today we’re going to re-post one of the reviews of which I was most proud. I had built my freelance career largely writing about really cool, but admittedly juvenile stuff like toys,  non-sport trading cards, comic books, animation and quirky rock-and-roll.  One of the things I enjoyed about NewSounds was getting the chance to broaden my reach a bit, and cover musical genres that folks might not think typical of me.

So reviewing an opera, a true opera, even though it was written by a rock star, struck a few folks as a bit of a stretch. People knew I liked goofy stuff. They didn’t realize that I also liked classical music, jazz, foreign films, philosphical tomes…the kind of stuff that would be considered to be more in the wheelhouse of folks who work at NPR, or maybe Squidward.

After this review hit print and had time for the “clip service” to get a copy to the folks in New York, I had an email from one of the folks at The Gazette.  We didn’t have any contact info printed with the piece, so they wanted my permission to pass along my email address to a publicist at Sony Classical, the label that had released this record.

Of course I told them to do so, and in a few hours I had an amusingly brief email from Sony:  “While, as a policy, Mr. Waters does not comment on reviews of his work, he wanted us to let you know that he appreciated what you wrote, and thank you for getting it.”

Writing reviews is generally a thankless task, so that was like manna from heaven.

Here’s the review, as originally published in NewSounds on November 28, 2005, and in The Charleston Gazette three days later…

Well Beyond Pink Floyd: Roger Waters tackles opera in “Ca Ira”

The artist: Roger Waters
The CD: “Ca Ira (There Is Hope): An Opera In Three Acts” (Sony Classical)

Anyone who has listened to “The Trial,” the finale of Pink Floyd’s classic album “The Wall,” knows that Roger Waters is capable of writing classically styled music sung by characters with distinct voices. It should come as no surprise that he has taken his music in a more intellectually challenging direction. Ca Ira tells the story of the French Revolution, and unlike many contemporary composers who merely dip their toes into classical forms, Waters dives deep into Grand Opera, and surfaces with an impressive work that has much more in common with Verdi and Rossini than it does with Philip Glass or Andrew Lloyd Webber. This is a real opera. It’s sung in English, but it’s not a glorified Broadway musical.

Ca Ira has had an elephantine gestation. Begun in 1989 to commemorate the bicentennial of the French Revolution, this work has seen the death of Waters’ collaborators, Etienne and Nadine Roda-Gil. Etienne Roda-Gil is a respected French librettist, and with his wife Nadine, he conceived the opera. Nadine provided illustrations that endowed the project with a powerful visual hook. Sadly, Nadine passed away shortly after the work began, and it sat on the shelf until 1997, when Waters began working on an English version of the text. With Etienne’s blessing, Waters fleshed out elements of the story and made it more relevant to the current political climate.

The result is a work that stands separate musically from Waters’ long-form efforts with his former band, Pink Floyd. There are the occasional hints of Waters’ previous work, but for the most part, musically, this could have been written in the first half of the nineteenth century, when opera was at its peak as an art form. This is not a “rock opera” or an overblown musical. If you aren’t used to listening to opera, it may take a while to acclimate yourself to this work. This is not a collection of catchy pop tunes, but a powerful story told with serious music. It’s unlikely that you’ll come away from Ca Ira humming any of the songs.

Lyrically, this is pure Roger Waters. The villains are the same that he’s always written about, and it’s the “bleeding hearts and the artists” who are the real heroes and hope for the future. Even in his most dark and personal works, Waters has been an optimist at heart, and the title of this opera is proof. There is hope.

The vocals are handled by a world-class cast of opera stars. Bryn Terfel lends his distinctive bass-baritone to three roles, and anchors the cast. Internationally-acclaimed soprano, Ying Huang, is superb as his counter, also assaying multiple roles and breathing life into the spirit of liberty. Paul Groves and Ismael Lo are major supporting players. I could go out on a limb and attempt to dissect the technical aspects of their performances, but I’d really be out of my depth. Essentially, they all sound really good. That’s all you need to know.

Ca Ira casts the story of the French Revolution inside a circus ring, complete with a ringmaster, clowns and acrobats retelling the tale. This adds an element of theatricality that allows a further suspension of disbelief, while acting also as a metaphor for the political circus surrounding the revolution. I was reminded of Philip DeBroca’s 1966 film King Of Hearts, where a Scottish soldier during World War One wanders into a French village entirely populated by inmates of an insane asylum. King Of Hearts employs that dramatic device to both distance the audience from the action, and then draw them into it more deeply. I felt the same way with Ca Ira.

With 38 tracks spread across two CDs, it’s hard to single out individual songs for praise. The music works in service to the story, and as such, there isn’t any single standout song. The work is so cohesive that you really have to judge it as a whole. Clocking in at nearly one hour and fifty minutes, that may seem like quite a commitment, but it’s very rewarding. The music alternates between calm exposition and stirring action, punctuated by bird sounds and cannon shots. There are come contemporary musical touches, but they’re not overbearing.

While the music is grounded in the forms as set forth by the greats of 150 years ago, there are hints of some early-twentieth century styles evident, and there are some melodies clearly consistent with Waters’ previous works. He didn’t completely subjugate his compositional voice here. He merely immersed himself in a different musical form than he’s used in the past. I’d even say he mastered that form.

I don’t think anyone is expecting this album to break out and sell millions of copies. It’s a little too deep and out of the norm for that. Fans of Pink Floyd may find it too challenging, and fans of opera may dismiss it without giving it a fair chance. This is really an exciting and rewarding work that tells a powerful and important story with wonderful music.

There are two versions of Ca Ira available. You can buy a regular two-CD set, or a deluxe SACD version that comes with a bonus 60-page booklet and a DVD with a documentary about the making of the album. The documentary is fascinating, but unless you have an SACD-ready player, you may not want to spend the extra cash. I’m hoping that a companion book of Nadine Roga-Gil’s illustrations will be published.

Now, if we could only convince Waters that the Clay Center would be a fine venue to hold a public performance of Ca Ira.

— By Rudy Panucci

UPDATE: Ca Ira is still in print from Sony Classical. You can order the SACD version from Amazon, or find it on all the major streaming services. No companion book was ever published.