From February 2007, This is an edited version of Radio Free Charleston’s 14th video episode, “Spider-man Shirt.” We still cannot find the original version of this show. If we did, we would restore the “Pentagram Flowerbox” cartoon, but we still wouldn’t present the show in an unedited form. I’ll tell you more about that in a moment.

As it is, this show includes a terrific vintage music video for Go Van Gogh’s “Shut Up, I Love You,” the most-requested song on the radio incarnation of RFC and Joe Justice’s hilarious short film, “Marvel Jackass,” which is even funnier now, since the Marvel Cinematic Universe didn’t exist when this show was first done.

There’s also a LAX cartoon by Frank Panucci, which took the place of Pentagram Flowerbox. “Pentagram Flowebox,” the story of Satan living in a trailer park, debuted in our third episode, and was included in many installments of our show until episode 20. This series was created by a former Charleston-area musician, and was brought to me by RFC Big Shot Brian Young. The former Charleston-area musician shall remain nameless by his own request. He prefers to be known as “Third Mind Incarnation.”

Our differences were a classic case of bad communication. Neither of us made enough effort to contact each other, and therefore, when we each grew increasingly unhappy with the way the series was progressing on RFC, we had no way to foresee or resolve the issues. I wanted shorter, punchier pieces for the show. The series’ creator wanted to do longer, less traditionally-structured pieces. I thought I had his blessing to edit his material to fit our format, but it turns out that he was not at all happy. Rather than deal with it privately he chose to inform me of his unhappiness with a series of nasty comments that went up unmoderated in the Gazz version of PopCult. Harsh words were exchanged, and we dropped Pentagram Flowerbox from Radio Free Charleston. Better to part ways than to kill each other.

Since “Third Mind” was so unhappy with our editing of his work, I didn’t feel right leaving it in the show when we put them up in the MySpace archives. I felt that it was better to respect his artistic vision. In some shows on MySpace Pentagram Flowerbox was replaced by “The Mascot,” classic 1930s puppet animation by Wladislaw Starewicz.

Since that time, however, the Third Mind Incarnation has shuffled off this plane of existence, and on the way out, asked us to restore his cartoon to the show. When the demise of MySpace made it necessary to re-upload all the old shows to YouTube, we figured we’d restore them while we were at it. As much as possible, the episodes of RFC that you see are as they were originally. Except for this one. This is the butchered episode of RFC, and is responsible for two-thirds of the garbage drama I’ve had to deal with producing the video show.

You see, there is one other big gaping hole in the show in this episode. One entire song has been excised. The song is “I Hate Your God,” and the fact that I had to remove a video that Melanie and I worked so hard on is quite a bummer. However, serious questions over the authorship of the song came to light and have never been sorted out.

I’m going to dance around some of the details here in the interest of fairness and also because I don’t really want to relive drama from over fifteen years ago. I have this forum, the other party does not. I’d be surprised if he’s even still alive, to be honest.

Melanie Larch and I directed the video for “I Hate Your God” for a Huntington band that turned out to be just one guy. The video was considered a creative high point in the first year of the show, and we hit it off right away with the musician. So much so, that over a year later, he spent a month as my houseguest.

By the end of that month, our friendship had soured. I gave him a ride back to his mom’s apartment in Huntington, and essentially wrote off ever seeing any reimbursement from him for over a thousand dollars worth of stolen and broken items.

A couple of weeks later I received a very disturbing email. It was from a former bandmate of my now ex-friend, claiming that he’d actually written “I Hate Your God.” I forwarded the email to the person in question, and got no response. A follow-up also went unanswered. Then he posted a message on his MySpace page saying that he would “…be in the news soon. None of it’s true, but I don’t care. It’ll make me famous.”

My personal experience with this person was all I needed to know that the charge of plagarism was more than credible. The fact that he never managed to write another entire song by himself sort of clinched it for me. Rather than “make him famous,” I pulled the video off of YouTube and had all still images from it removed from MySpace. Fifteen years later there isn’t a trace of it left on the internet. I have considered re-using the video, but replacing the music with a banjo tune.

When this drama hit the fan, I chopped out all references to the group and eliminated the video. That’s why the host segments here seem so choppy.