Tons Of Music And Leaves On RFC 146

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Episode 146 of Radio Free Charleston, "Pepper Fandango Shirt," finds us driving around the state looking at the fall colors. We have great music this week with songs from Born of Conviction, John Lancaster, Gabriel, and the cast of Jack The Ripper, plus we have animation from Frank Panucci and an art film by yours truly.

Our host segments were filmed all over West Virginia as Melanie Larch and I made the Charleston-to-Clarksburg-to-Parkersburg-to-Charleston loop so we could check out the changing foilage and basically just take a day away from everything. The trip was a load of fun, and it's still a couple of weeks away from the peak colors, so you might just want to consider making the trip yourself. There are tons of places to stop and linger along the way. It was also nice to show off some of the other areas of the Mountain State in RFC.

Kicking things off this week is the extended promo clip for HallowEast 3 Freak Out, this year's four-day celebration of all things macabre on Charleston's Historic East End. This clip features a posse of Ghost Wranglers as they try to track down the source of the strange happenings at The Kanawha Players Theater.Hit the website for a comprehensive schedule of HallowEast events.

Our first musical guest is John Lancaster. I've wanted to have John on the show for years, in fact I wore a shirt featuring his old band, Earth To Eros, way back on episode 67, two and a half years ago. We caught up with John at Mission Coalition, but I wasn't happy with the quality of the audio on the footage I captured. It looked great, though, so I created a music video for his song "The Impersonator," using the video we shot at Mission Coalition. This song is from his album, Phantom Moon, and you should rush over to this website to buy it right now.

Our animation is by Frank Panucci, of course. It's one of his "Lax" series of chill-out videos, this time featuring a slightly painful pun. Frank's remastered many of his "Lax" animations into high-def, so you can expect to see lots of them in the coming weeks, along with more DEVO Energy Dome cartoons.

Born Of Conviction is a hot young metal band from Clendenin. Made up of borthers Bryan and Brett Wood, plus Nick Young and Kyle Monroe, there's quite a buzz around these guys. We caught up with them at the all-ages September Slam show at The LaBelle Theater in South Charleston. With one camera firmly planted in a mosh pit, we bring you the very fast and loud original tune by the band, "Darkness."

"Blues no. 1" is an art film I put together during a few rare moments of spare time a couple of weekends ago. Hardly anybody watched it when I used it as a Sunday Evening Video here in PopCult, so I figured I could get away with recycling it into the show. That's my artwork and some orchestral music I cranked out in the background.

Gabriel is a side project by Gabriel Redding, drummer for the famed Redding Brothers Band. A few months ago he released a solo album of powerful, uplifting music, and had this magnificent video created for the song, "Untethered." You can order his CD at this website. The video, produced by Casting Life Films of Nashville, and shot in Gassaway, WV premiered at WVSU last April. We are very happy to feature it in Radio Free Charleston. We held off on running it for a few months because it was floating around on several websites, and we thought we'd wait and revisit this clip when the time was right. That time is now.

Gabriel is playing at a college music conference this week, and I'm told that we can expect some exciting news about future plans for the group in the coming year. A second video is also a sure bet.

Playing under our end credits this week, we head out to The Empty Glass to witness a most unusual and wonderful musical experience. The orchestra and some of the cast of the Contemporary Youth Arts Company production of "Jack The Ripper" took the stage of the Glass to present highlights from the show. You may remember "Jack The Ripper" from our previous episode, which was a documentary devoted to the staging of this original musical. Appearing on stage at the Glass, two keyboards, a bass, drum, and a string quartet, plus eight vocalists. They perform the song "Lay Down" written by Mark Scarpelli and Dan Kehde, from the show. It's a happy tune about castration, really.

Special thanks for this week's title shirt go out to frequwnt RFC guest,  the amazing Pepper Fandango, who will have a CD for sale soon, and if you see her at her regular gig at The Empty Glass, she'll probably hook you up with a cool shirt, too.

That's about it for this episode of Radio Free Charleston. With our FestivAll, fifth anniversary show, Mission Coalition special and "Jack The Ripper" documentary, this seems like the first "normal" edition of the show in ages, and our next installment is scheduled to be our big Halloween show, so I guess that makes this one seem even more special thanks to its lack of a theme. With an ever-growing backlog of recorded performances, expect our two November shows to be longer than usual, too.