We have a very special video episode of Radio Free Charleston premiering today. That’s it floating above this text.

Last summer, the Charleston music scene lost a true pioneer. Lynne Sandy passed away after being in frail health for many years, but her legacy lives on. From her start as a folksinger to her time in Stubby Dill and her legendary stint as the frontwoman for Charleston’s original punk/new wave band, The Defectors, Lynne left a mark on the music scene that cannot be denied.

In the coming months I’ll be working on a documentary about Lynne. We’ll be talking to her musical cohorts and folks who knew her later in life through her activism and other pursuits. The foundation of that documentary will be a video of a performance by The Defectors, at the Criel Mound in South Charleston, on June 16, 1983.

The video was shot by Dana Grooms, and we are in the process of restoring the audio and video for the upcoming documentary.

This episode of Radio Free Charleston brings you a preview. We have three of the songs from that performance, along with a music video created using footage from this show with a studio demo of one of their original songs. Next week I’ll be sharing a more elaborately…”defective”…version of that video.

In this show you will see The Defectors perform the songs “16,” “Homosapien” and “To Hell with Poverty.” The line up here is: Lynne Sandy on vocals and keyboards; John “Sham Voodoo” Estep on Guitar and vocals; The Maestro, Chuck Biel on bass; and David Fields on drums.

When the footage came to light, it was a bit of a no-brainer to include some of it in this year’s video RFC as a tribute to Lynne. I want to thank my friend, Sham Voodoo, AKA, John Estep, for hooking me up with this footage, and Dana Grooms for shooting it way back when. We will be working on further restoration and including interviews in the upcoming documentary.

I will tell you more about that project in the New Year. For the folks keeping track of such things, this show, episode 221 of Radio Free Charleston Volume Two (the video series) is “RFC Jacket (for Lynne)” Host segments were shot at the Criel Mound in South Charleston, mostly around where the stage used to be when this concert was recorded.

It was a bit disorienting because sometime between 1983 and now, Cubert Smith’s sculpture, Burial Attendants, was relocated from the Southwest corner of Staunton Park (which includes the Mound) to the Northeast corner. The stage was expanded and moved and most of the businesses you see in the background are no longer operating. It took some research and memory-jogging to remember where everything was.

Also disorienting was the background noise from MacCorkle Avenue and Seventh Avenue while we were shooting our host segments. If it seems like there are way more jump cuts than usual in this episode, it’s only because there are way more jump cuts than usual in this episode.

After the three songs from the show, we bring you a music video I created for the Defectors’ song “Hesitation.” The performance on the copy of the video I have is bedevilled by digital glitches, drop outs and time skips, but I also have the studio demo of the song, so I leaned into the defects, and made a purposefully glitchy video for the song. I made two versions of the video, and you’ll see the more conservative one in this show. The “super defective” version will debut later this week. It was too distracting to roll the credits over it.

This is all to pay tribute to Lynne Sandy. As a bonus, tune in to this week’s internet radio episode of Radio Free Charleston for an audio-only tune from the Mound show. As another bonus, check out the photos below, taken by Bob Rosier just a few weeks after this show…