You know, we moderate our comments here at PopCult. It’s not some sinister mind-control thing, and it really doesn’t have anything to do with some former animated segments that used to appear on Radio Free Charleston.  We moderate because of the spam.  People set up “spambots,” automated programs that leave comments with links to their sites.  Those links take you to places that are not necessarily nice or work safe, and we don’t really want our blog to be used in that way, so we clean them out, like muck in the gutter, before they hit your eyes.

Some of these are just oddly worded “I like your diary” comments, but occasionally they get creative to try and trick you into thinking that they’re a real person.  This morning we got a true winner.  You won’t be seeing this in the comments, but below, for your entertainment, is a spam comment that someone tried to leave in PopCult.

I’m not posting the links or screen name here (If I did, then the terrorists would win), but I thought you folks might find this as funny as I do.

“Hello, I fell lucky that I located this post while browsing for john wayne movies. I am with you on the topic of Burning Music Halls, Karoake, Blues, delayed art and MST3K: The PopCult Weekend. Ironically, I was just putting a lot of thought into this last Tuesday.”

Did you ever have one of those days where it feels like you’ve been at a funeral all day, and then on the long drive to the cemetary, the guy driving the hearse gets lost and you wind up making a U-turn on the West Virginia Turnpike, right in front of the booths in heavy traffic? Sometimes if feels like that because that’s exactly what happened. Sorry for posting this late.

John Radcliff, stalwart guest and friend of Radio Free Charleston. He appeared on the old radio show, as can be heard in the audio clips from last week, and he made the drive down from Parkersburg to be at the RFC Retrospective/Jam Session last Saturday Night at the South Charleston Museum at the La Belle Theater.

“Stay Awhile” is one of Rad’s original compositions. You can hear more of them at his MySpace page, and you can also check out his College Football Songbook, and his work at SongPull. And you can see him on several episodes of RFC, solo, and as a member of The Feast Of Steven.

Were posting clips from the Jam Session all week. Tomorrow it’s Seven Minutes Till Midnight, covering a Marshall Tucker Band song.

Under The Radar (Rusty Marx, Bill Robinson and Mark Lanham) have been frequent guests on Radio Free Charleston, and they graced us with an acoustic set last Saturday during the Jam Session portion of the Radio Free Charleston Retrospective at the South Charleston Museum at the La Belle Theater.   From their performance that night, we bring you their cover of John Mellencamp’s “Pink Houses.”

You can see Under The Radar in their electic mode in episode 21 of Radio Free Charleston.

Tomorrow we’re going to bring you a tune from John Radcliff.  All week long here in PopCult you’ll find some of the highlights from the RFC Jam Session.  Seven Minutes Till Midnight and Stephen Beckner are also on deck.

A day late, this week’s art is actually just a doodle I drew on copy paper last night while watching Monday Night RAW.  It’s a girl, winking.  I colored it in the computer.  Um…..there ya go!

Later today I’ll be posting another clip from the RFC Retrospective Jam Session.  I haven’t picked which one yet, so it’ll be a surprise. 

 As always, click the image for a larger view. And go here for the Monday Morning Art Store, and here for the PopCult store. If you order now, you may have these in time for New Year’s gift-giving! The Monday Morning Art store now features a few select older images that people keep telling me that they mean to order so could I please leave them up in the store until they get the cash, please.

Among the participants in the Jam Session following the Radio Free Charleston Retrospective at The South Charleston Museum at the La Belle Theater last Saturday was Jonathon and Laura, AKA “Captain Crash and The Beauty Queen From Mars” who appeared as “Aurora” on episode 22 of RFC. They performed a couple of numbers, including this nifty cover of The Beatles’ “I Want To Hold Your Hand.”

You can catch Jonathon and Laura at the Art Emporium on December 20, during the next Art Walk. They’ll start playing around 5:30 PM.

All week long we’ll be bringing you clips from the Jam Session here in PopCult. So get ready for John Radcliff, Under The Radar, Stephen Beckner, and Seven Minutes Till Midnight. You’ll get one clip every day. Collect ‘em all!

Monday Morning Art will return Tuesday, since we’re still burned out from the heavy weekend.

One of the pitfalls of doing the coolest radio show in the world was that it started at 2 AM, and ran until 6 AM.  And that was once a week. The rest of the week I kept somewhat normal hours.  So when the weekend rolled around, and I got to do the fun stuff, I was usually not at my sharpest.

That was one reason that I had “feature albums” on Radio Free Charleston.  The official reason was that we wanted to recreate the olden days of WVAF FM, when they’d play a full album, uninterrupted, every night, right before bedtime.  The real motive was that by playing a full CD in the final hour of the show, I could doze off without anything catastrophic happening. Sometimes I even left before the show was over, and let the guy who came in at 6 AM play a recording of the outro of the show while I drove home. 

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“I Hate Your God” is not the title of Mitt Romney’s big speech from Thursday.  It’s the following video:

 This video has been removed. It has come to our attention that the artist, Michael Baldwin, also known as Murdok Hyde and Fanatomy among other aliases, may have plagarized all or parts of this song from another artist. Until the matter is resolved, this video will not be available for public viewing. We are sorry for the inconvenience.

We shot this video in Huntington last January for episode 14 of Radio Free Charleston.  Fanatomy was, at the time, a one-man-band consisting of Mike Baldwin, who wrote the song.  (more…)

One of the fun things about the radio incarnation of Radio Free Charleston was that I had total freedom. It was the kind of freedom you get in radio only when you’re working for a completely mis-managed company that didn’t know what it was doing. I was basically allowed to start the show as a reward for working over 100 days straight without a day off, sometimes filling two on-air shifts — and not demanding a raise. It was a cheap way to keep me happy while I was doing the work of five people.

And happy I was. I was able to bring all sorts of new music, much of it local, to an area that hadn’t heard anything approaching free-form radio since the old WVAF-FM mutated into V-100 back in the late ’70s. I got away with playing stuff on the air that hadn’t been played before and hasn’t been played since. And I also got to have live guests in the studio, because the show aired at 2 a.m. and it wasn’t like anyone in station management was listening. (more…)

Today we bring you a clip from one of last year’s Halloween shows, a rare recording of Charleston’s princes of punk, Clownhole, remixed in 2006 and with a video created by my brother, Frank Panucci.

Clownhole was John “Sham Voodoo” Estep, Chris “Flair” Canfield, and Randy “No Nickname” Brown.  Estep had been in The Defectors, the Charleston band that had development deals with Warner Brothers and EMI in the early 1980s.  Here in town they’d opened for KISS, Duran Duran, and The Police.   By the late 80s they had broken up, and Sham had moved on to Clownhole, which was billed as a “comedy/punk” band.  They had a backdrop that featured a painting of a clown bending over.  A strategically-placed hole was where the hose from the fog machine was fed through, so that the clown looked to be eerily flatulent. (more…)

Today, I’m going to inflict upon you some of the most gloriously inept drumming ever caught on tape. Let me explain. We’re still in that fateful week in March 1990. If you’ve been following the story so far in our audio clips, you know that Brian Young, then the drummer for Three Bodies, was in Key West Florida falling asleep in the sun and getting his face half burned off. On Thursday of that week, he and Kris Cormandy called in and performed a song live on the Radio Free Charleston preview show I did at 11:35 p.m. each night. You heard that clip on Monday.

There is a clear domino effect going on here. You see, Brian was also the drummer for The Hepcats, the all-star house band for the Tuesday Night Jam Sessions at the Legendary Charleston Playhouse, my old stomping grounds and the most-favored venue of the radio version of Radio Free Charleston. (more…)