Stuff To Do, Pizza Talk, Vintage Music Video and Dirty, Filthy Comics

The PopCulteer
August 10, 2012

Your PopCulteer is preparing for a milestone birthday this weekend, so we're taking it a little easy with the column.  Bear with us.  We're old.

Stuff to Do

As we told you last week, there's big goin's on this Saturday.  Starting at 10:00 AM, Wood Boys Music presents "Tribute to the Troops II" at St. Albans City Park Ampitheater.  Running from 10:00 AM to 9:00 PM, this fundraiser for the Wounded Warrior Project will feature several Radio Free Charleston guests like HARRAH, Godmode Broadway, Johnny Compton, Stacee Lawson, In The Company of Wolves, Remains UnNamed, and a boatload of other great local and regional acts.  Admission is free, but a minimum five dollar donation gets you a bonus gift and you'll be helping out a great cause.

Saturday night at the Walker Theater at the Clay Center, Hooters presents the No Pants Players dirty, filthy, nasty Adult Show.  This will be an evening of West Virginia's premiere improv troupe turning off the filters and spewing out all the nasty comedy bits that they're actually thinking but not allowed to say when doing a family friendly show. Tickets are $12 and you may want to order them in advance at the No Pants Players website, because if you show up and the show is sold out, not only will you not get in, but they will make really nasty jokes about you behind your back.

Even later Saturday night, The Tom McGees are holding their CD release party at The Empty Glass, starting at 10:00 PM with support from Dinosaur Burps, Time and Distance, Foz Rotten, and InFormation.  Cover charge is $5.  For a great review of The Tom McGees new CD, check out what Nick Harrah said. And also check out this interview with the band by James Vernon Brown and Liquid Canvas...

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Jumping back to Friday, Sasha Collette will be performing a free show at Taylor Books from 7:30 to 9:30 PM.  The Snake and The Pot bring their belly dance fusion music to the upstairs lounge at Little India starting at 9:30 PM.  The jazz electronica sounds of The Skee Tones comes to The Empty Glass at 11:00 PM with their usual sliding $7/$5 cover charge.  Also, "Good Night Grover's Corners" wraps up its run Friday and Saturday nights at the WVSU Capitol Center Theater.

More friends of Radio Free Charleston, our local Beatles tribute band Rubber Soul, will be performing for free at the Mound in South Charleston next Wednesday at 8:30 PM to kick off SummerFest.

The Politics of Pizza

This week's fast food fuss has been a controversy over comments by Papa John's founder and CEO, John Schnatter, a big supporter of Mitt Romney who criticized Obamacare by whining loudly that it might force him to raise the price of a pizza as much as fifteen cents.  I'll leave it to Mark Evanier to sum up the absurdity of such a complaint in his opinion piece, which you can read here.

However, I don't think this is a situation that requires a boycott.  Papa John's is not donating money to hate groups who advocate genocide, like Chick-Fil-A does.  So this is not "Chick-Fil-A Show Part Two."  I don't feel the need to boycott a business simply because their owner disagrees with me about which presidential candidate is the lesser of two evils.  But I won't ever spend any more of my money at Papa John's.

It's because their pizza sucks.  Seriously, it may be the second or third worst pizza available in the valley.  I mean, sure, it might taste marginally better than Little Caesar's, but at least Little Caesar's has enough respect for your intelligence to only charge five bucks for their crappy pizza.  Papa John's is not only awful pizza, but it's also damned expensive.

We live in a area that is blessed with a plethora of locally-owned, high-quality pizza establishments, all of which have their own identity and charm.  Why the hell would anybody throw their money away on Papa John's vile disc of compressed vomit when you could, for usually less money, get a terrific pizza from Graziano's, Barone Brothers Pizza (as seen in RFC 165), Slyce Pizza Company, Lola's, Pies and Pints, Piro Pizzaria, Pizza Barbarosa, Mama Rosa's, Husson's, or Giovanni's.

And if you must have pizza from a national chain, why spend more money for the cardboard-like offerings of Papa John's when you can get pretty decent pizzas from Pizza Hut and Domino's for less money?

This isn't a boycott.  It's a matter of taste.

Radio Free Charleston Flashbacks

Hey, didja see the latest episode of Radio Free Charleston?  If not, take a look...

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This episode is largely comprised of vintage live footage of the legendary Clownhole, shot at the legendary Charleston Playhouse.  Thanks again go out to Randy Brown for hooking me up with this archival gem.

I want to take a minute here to remind you guys that Radio Free Charleston is open to submissions.  If you have video footage of a current band or a band from long ago that you would like to share with the world, please feel free to contact me.  You can send me a message through the Radio Free Charleston Facebook page and your footage just might wind up on the show.

We would love to see some vintage footage of bands like Big Money, Three Bodies, The Swivel Rockers, Brian Diller and The Ride, The Velvet Brothers, the Putnam County Pickers, Stark Raven, or any of the giants of the Charleston music scene.  Please note that we are also open to submissions of new music videos by current bands.  Our cameras can't be everywhere.

Our Buddy Mitch and His Sexy Comic Book Collection

We leave you this week with a link to a particularly hilarious collection of comic book panels taken out of context by our buddy Mitch O'Connell (who has a career retrospective book coming out soon, by the way).

Mitch has carefully chosen over a hundred comic book panels taken from a variety of sources which, when viewed out of context, take on unintended, hilarious, and suggestive new meanings.





That's it for this PopCulteer.  We'll see you next week with our ArtWalk photo essay and a couple of reviews, plus our usual Sunday and Monday features.