Monday will see the debut of Radio Free Charleston 209, our ninth-anniversary show.  At the head of this post, you can see our fifth anniversary episode of Radio Free Charleston. When we first started doing Radio Free Charleston as a video web show, there was no guarantee that we would even make it to the end of our first year.  Now it’s the fourth anniversary of our fifth anniversary. Ain’t that special?

Mother Nang

Radio Free Charleston has not always observed our anniversary. The first anniversary of the show fell in the middle of a hiatus we took due to a family health crisis. I don’t think we really paid any attention until episode 75, which coincided with our third anniversary in 2009.

Stacee Lawson

I considered blowing off the anniversary show in 2011, simply ignoring it, because we had just produced eight episodes in two weeks for FestivALL, and were completely burned out. After producing three hours of content in two weeks, the idea of taking the month of July off looked mighty appealing. But this was our big number “five” and we had a golden opportunity plop into our lap.

The official birthday of Radio Free Charleston is the Fourth of July and in 2011, we had two big outdoor music festivals scheduled for the second and third of July. Jammin’ On The River was a day long music fest held at Haddad Riverfront Park. Tribute To The Troops was a day long hard rock/heavy metal festival held at the Schoenbaum Ampitheatre in Coonskin Park.

Pepper Fandango, video by Eamon Hardiman and Razor Sharp Studios

Since the first episode of Radio Free Charleston, I wondered how plausible it would be to do a one hour episode. The idea sort of defied all Internet logic. People go online because they have short attention spans and RFC, which usually runs fifteen to twenty minutes, already tries the patience of the wired generation.

Still, we put together a killer show, with great performances by Andy Park and the Kountry Katz,Holy Cow, Mother Nang, 600 Pounds of Sin, Remains Un Named, Disturbing The Peace,Stacee Lawson Band, Line Work, and HARRAH and a special duet by Jeff Ellis and Sasha Collette.

We also featured a music video that starred Pepper Fandango and was directed byEamon Hardiman. One of our short films was “Celebritol,” directed by Scott Elkins and starring Kitty Killton and Jack Dent, Jr. We also had the movie trailer for Diana Curry’s film,“Creature Of The Night.” A second short film and two pieces of animation come to us courtesy of RFC Big Shot, Frank Panucci.

This is all to set you up for the fact that our ninth anniversary show is nowhere near that ambitious. We will have fantastic new music videos by The Company Stores, Volt 9000 and Skull and Bird, plus we have live performances by Speedsuit and Tape Age. We’ve also got a trailer for an upcoming project by Ann Magnuson as well as animation and really neat suprises. So you definitely want to see that when it drops on Monday.

But this show was just a Herculean effort that I was not going to be able to duplicate this year. Read more about it HERE.