This week we head to May , 2009 for the sixty-ninth episode of Radio Free Charleston.

May 2009 was “Mark Beckner Month” on Radio Free Charleston. Mark is a long-time friend and was a fixture on the original radio incarnation of RFC as a member of both Go Van Gogh and The Tunesmiths. After stints in bands like Hitchcock Circus and The Nanker Phelge amd relocating back to the Charleston area, Mark is now the leader of Nixon Black, and can be heard often on the new internet radio incarnation of RFC.

However, in May 2009, he was preparing to play his first real show in Charleston in years, since he’d moved to Nashville back in the 1990s. It turned out to be quite the homecoming, since unbeknowest to me, he was returning to town for good.

I had a wealth of archival material and new video featuring Mark, so I decided that, as a way to plug his “return” show with his band, Hitchcock Circus, I would devote an entire month of shows to Mister Mark Beckner.

We kicked it off by digging deep into the vaults to present Go Van Gogh: The Sad Truth, a mockumentary starring the band, which I had totally forgotten about, directed by Timothy Rock, the bassist for GVG. Stephen Beckner showed it during a movie night at his house, and I started wondering why it seemed familiar. Then it got to the scene where I’m crouched over a toilet blaming the band for the RFC radio show getting cancelled, and it all came back.

It turns out I was the cameraman and was the offscreen interviewer in addition to my cameo as myself. I have this bad habit of forgetting really cool things that I’ve done.

I was able to get a copy of the film from Stephen, and trimmed it a bit for time so I could present it as an episode of RFC. This is a rare episode of the show which was not named after a T Shirt for the simple reason, it does not include a “host segment,” instead empoloying a simple voice-over.  This is also one of the few RFCs that doesn’t have the opening theme, and with this 2014 remastering, I  corrected one shocking omission–after the end credits and remastering card, I put the “Ya-Hooo” guy back in.

The original production notes with the full background story can be found HERE. If you like what you see, you can see just about every scrap of video of Go Van Gogh, including the unedited version of Go Van Gogh: The Sad Truth, in THIS POST, which I put up here after the death of GVG’s drummer, and a friend to everyone, Johnny Rock.