This week we go back to June, 2007 for another early episode of Radio Free Charleston that hasn’t been online for over six years. This is another show that had unfortunately been archived at MySpace, before that service self-destructed and deleted all their videos.

This was an edition of the show that was produced while I was under a great deal of stress. I had recorded the famed reunion of Feast of Stephen the previous month, and mixing the audio and editing video from five cameras was taking longer than anticipated. Much of this was due to the fact that I had begun overseeing the care of my elderly aunt and uncle, and my aunt, Stella Warden, had been diagnosed with quickly-progressing lung cancer right in the middle of production of the FOS reunion special

So I decided that the best way to deal with things was to rush out a stopgap episode of RFC, just in case something forced me to delay the Feast of Stephen special, which was already way behind schedule at this point.

Which was a good move, since what happened was that my aunt’s cancer progressed quickly and took her life about a month after this show premiered. The FOS reunion eventually became episode 23 of RFC, after a gap of over a month between shows.

Which is not meant to demean this episode of the show. It’s a pretty great show. I had discovered Captain Crash and the Beauty Queen at a new talent showcase at the Labelle Theater (along with InFormation, Jordan Searls and Joe Slack) and rushed them into LiveMix Studio so fast that they hadn’t quite settled on their name yet. In this show they were called “Aurora.” Voices of Anatole were one of the top metal acts in the region, and I was offered the chance to include a music video for them by Screaming Butterfly Entertainment, which is helmed by Holly Mollohan, who has gone on to produce many great award-winning films and music videos for the likes of Byzantine and other bands.

This episode also features No Running, one of Frank Panucci’s most beloved contributions to RFC. We open the show with The No Pants Players Eat A Watermelon, which is either disgusting or erotic, depending on your point of view.

Host segments were shot on the banks of the Kanawha River in Dunbar, just a few blocks from my house, during a rare break of a couple of hours from providing end-of-life care to my aunt. Considering what all was happening at the time, this turned out to be a pretty incredible episode of the show. I was still learning my craft as a guerilla TV producer and host, but I think it came out pretty well, and it’s nice to have it back online.