Radio Free Charleston 197, “Jake The Dog Shirt” is a diverse collection of great music, cool animation plus a neat theater preview. Our music is from Donnie Smith, The Big Bad, The Terra Firma Ensemble and Jordan Searls. Animation comes to us from Jake Fertig and we also have a preview for the Alban Arts Center production of “Antigone.”

Host segments were shot in the Alban Arts Center theater after our first location, just outside the theater, proved to be unworkable because folks were using lawn-mowers and gas-powered trimmers…on Easter Sunday.

We kick the show off with a promo clip for “Antigone,” which is another reason we were at the Alban. The Alban Arts Center presents the ancient Greek drama beginning this Friday. Full details will be posted here in PopCult on Wednesday.

Donnie Smith is our first musical guest. He’s seen here recorded at the same edition of Rock N Roll theater that gave us his recent RFC MINI SHOW. This time around Donnie treats us to his original song, “Mixed Message.

Donnie will be giving up his duties as the host of the Monday Night open mic at The Empty Glass at the end of April to focus on his new band, The Elephant in The Room. We will keep you posted on their upcoming shows here in PopCult.

Our animation is by Jake Fertig. It’s the latest “Deep Space Microsode” of his series, “The Flocking.” This installment is appropriate for a show that was assembled on Easter Sunday. Or maybe it’s completely inappropriate. I always get the two confused.

The Big Bad will return to The Empty Glass on May 9 to record a live album with Empty Glass Records. We were lucky enough to catch them there early this month and happily bring you The Big Bad doing their song, “Babe We Own This Town.” Note that your humble host bungled the title in his intro. That’s still not as bad as calling Ralph Towner “Robert” for two weeks.

The centerpiece of this episode is our recording of The Terra Firma Ensemble performing the world premiere of Jim Lange’s compostion, “Brambles and Briers.” We captured this at a special Kanawha Forum at Kanawha United Presbyterian Church, and if you caught last week’s RFC MINI SHOW, you saw the Ensemble perfoming a Ralph Towner piece.

The entire Kanawha Forum performance by The Terra Firma Ensemble, including Towner’s “Innocente” and Jim Lange’s “Brambles and Briers,” plus Robert Fripp’s “Eye Of The Needle” will be posted in its entirety, complete with the band entrance and standing ovation, very soon here in PopCult.

Playing us out, for the second episode in a row, is Jordan Searls. Jordan is a brilliant young songwriter that first hear in 2007. We finally caught up to him and had on our last episode for the first time, and now we’re making up for lost time with a song captured at a new venue.

Jordan performed as part of the Wednesday night Acoustic Showcase at Creekside Cafe in Hurricane. It’s a great venue that is gearing up to bring live music to Putnam County, drawing from the best musicians in Charleston and Huntington.

Jordan will be back at Creekside on June 7, opening for Under Surveillance. We have him on the show this time with his song, “Naturally Easy.”

That’s about it for our production notes. This episode is titled “Jake The Dog Shirt” for reasons obvious to fans of the cartoon “Adventure Time.”

There is a new addition to our closing credits this time around. We have added a production card for Empty Glass Records, the recording arm of The World Famous Empty Glass. The bar is ramping up their recording efforts to take advantage of their state-of-the-art soundboard, and will be hiring themselves out to record musicans at very reasonable rates.

The folks at the Glass, particularly Roadblock, Chris Chaber, Andrea Anderson, Greg McGowan and Barron Korodi, have been very generous in helping us bring the best-quality audio to you, and that’s why we shoot so many of our band segments there. So we wanted to acknowledge their contributions. We’ll be posting more details on how you can record there later this week.

And don’t be shocked if that production card evolves over time. They haven’t even seen it yet.