Rudy Panucci On Pop Culture

RFC Hits 100 Episodes (Again) and The Swing Shift Salutes Duke Ellington

It’s a special day on The AIR  as we premere a new episode of The Swing Shift, plus we have a landmark new Radio Free Charleston too. 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 elsewhere on this page.

Today we had to figure out what to do to celebrate Radio Free Charleston Volume Five #100, which you can hear at 10 AM and 10 PM Tuesday.  I decided to make the whole three-hour show almost all local, and present double-shots of music from all over the RFC Archives of the last 30-plus years.

To be honest, this isn’t quite the milestone that it seems to be. This is the third time Radio Free Charleston has hit episode 100. Heck, our video show (Volume Two) passed 200, and is still running. This is the 100th three-hour episode of the show, which reformatted this way back at the beginning of 2020.

In case you’re wondering, Volume One was the first, broadcast radio, incarnation of RFC, which ran from Labor Day 1989 to May, 1990. Volume Two is the video show, which began in 2006, and is still running as an annual special. Volume Three had about 45 episodes on the internet radio station, Voices of Appalachia, from 2014 to 2015. Voices of Appalachia re-branded as OnTheAIRadio, and then simply “The AIR” in 2016, and that’s when I started the numbering over as Volume 4, which was a solid hour of local music.  I also launched RFC International at that time, which allowed me to return to my free-format radio roots, much like the original broadcast version of the program.

Then in 2020 I decided to combine RFC and RFC International, and make it even more like the original version of the show. One of the joys of the first incarnation of the show was that I could play local musicians side-by-side with their musical heroes. I missed that, and also wanted a little more freedom to make radio anarchy like I did in my youth.

So basically, while this is #100 of Volume Five, if you count The RFC MINI SHOW and RFC International in the mix, I’m probably closing in on 600 radio and video programs under the RFC banner.

For this show, I decided to go all-local, which is something else that I did a few times back in 1989 and 90.

We open the show with a couple of songs from Three Bodies that I co-produced with Spencer Elliott about 31 years ago (and won’t shut up about). We contine with a mix of vintage music from 1987 to 2020, and several new tunes that haven’t been heard on RFC before.  Even the one indie artist we bring you from North Carolina has West Virginia’s William Matheny contributing.

I had so much fun putting this show together, and was a tad frustrated at having to leave out so much good stuff, that our next episode (which may be in two weeks) will follow this format with a totally different line-up of West Virginia musicians.

Check out the playlist below to see all the goodies we have in store (live links will take you to the artist’s pages where possible)…

RFC V5 100

hour one
Three Bodies “The Trax” “Shingles and Tar”
Brian Diller & The Ride “Don’t Stop At Anything”
Brian Diller “Days Like These”
The Paranoid Style “The Worst of My Love” “Ten Floors of Basement”
Three’s Company Blues “Steppin’ Out” “Bringing Back The Thrill”
Corduroy Brown “I Know Better” “”Who Am I For Now”
Strawfyssh “Netted Fish” “Graveyard Shift”
Hasil Adkins “Big Red Satellite” “She Said”
J Marinelli“Saturn of Clarksburg” “Kevlar Weather”
Unmanned “Baloney” “Wayward Girls”

hour two
Go Van Gogh “Shut Up, I Love You” “I Can’t Sleep At Night”
Joseph Hale “Time” “Church of Paranoia”
Emmalea Deal “Queen” “The Light”
Stark Raven “More To Life Than This” “Whiter Shade of Pale”
Mark Beckner “Odessa” “With The Scientific Curiosity of Ghouls”
Battleship Battleship “Ad Hominem” “Entropy”
Lady D “Karma Is A Bitch” “Disturbing My Peace”

hour three
Mother Nang “Knee Deep In Wine” “Buy The Farm”
Bane Star “Finality” “You Should Have Seen Her”
Ann Magnuson “The Picture On My Dentist’s Wall” “Disassociation”
John Radcliff “Company Song” “The Enemy”
Todd Burge “Rapid Fire” “Might Be The End”
Hello June “Candy Rain” “Wish I Could Fly”
The Big Bad “Set Sail The Sinking Ship” “Frighteners”

You can hear this episode of Radio Free Charleston Tuesday at 10 AM and 10 PM on The AIR, with replays 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 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.

 

Then at 1 PM we have two hours of  MIRRORBALL.

At 3 PM a new hour of The Swing Shift arrives  with a special mixtape show that I can’t give you a playlist for because that show hasn’t been recorded yet as I write this.

I can tell you that it’s nearly a solid hour of the legendary Duke Ellington collaborating with a wide assortment of legends like Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Rosemary Clooney and even Mahalia Jackson. It’s a sophisticated slice of Swing to help you feel smooth and sophisticated and all that kinda junk.

And of course it ends with Lady Ella singing our tag line, “It Don’t Mean A Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing).

You can hear The Swing Shift Tuesday at 3 PM, with replays Wednesday at 8 AM and 6 PM, Thursday at 2 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.

2 Comments

  1. Sarah Rudy

    Love it!

  2. The Weg

    Very Nice! 😁

Leave a Reply to Sarah RudyCancel reply

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