RFC Hits 50 and Goes Back In Time
April 27, 2021 by Rudy Panucci
Tuesday on The AIR Radio Free Charleston sort of hits a milestone. The newish, three-hour version of RFC hits episode 50. If this weren’t the fifth incarnation of the show, I’d make a bigger deal about it, but between the original broadcast version, the video RFC, The RFC MINI SHOW video program, and the earlier versions of the show that ran on Voices of Appalachia and OntheAIRadio, I’ve produced around 540 Radio Free Charleston shows. It’s hard to get that excited, but I did manage to find a way to make this special…by recycling!
You simply have to move your cursor over and listen at the website, or you could just stay on this page, and groove to the cool embedded player right here…
Tune in to Radio Free Charleston at 10 AM and 10 PM Tuesday and you will hear one of the original broadcast episodes of show, from January 7,1990, when I was but a wee lad of a DJ, and blogs were years away from being invented. I have mercilessly edited down nearly five hours of on-air chaos to fit into our three-hour timeslot.
This is actually a case where I took two episodes of RFC Volume Three, from 2015 that first re-presented this broadcast, and just edited them further, since this show is historically significant, and hasn’t been heard by anyone for more than six years. Sometimes “historically significant” means, “the least amount of work.”
Check out the playlist to see all the music that made the cut…
RFCV5 050
This show originally aired early in January, 1990, right after RFC and yours truly had been the subject of a profile in the Charleston Gazette written by Michael Lipton. I decided to devote all four hours of the first show after the article was published to local artists. Truth be told, the show actually ran almost five hours. Station management wasn’t listening to my show (nobody at the station ever did) so I could run long and have the DJ that followed me make up the time.
You will hear me cracking jokes and making remarks about the piece Michael wrote. A lot of folks thought that I was genuinely angry, when in fact I was thrilled with the press and was just milking it for laughs. So please, do not think that I was really upset with Michael Lipton. He’s always been great to me and I’ve always respected him. I was just only joking, really!
This is pretty much what the people heard between 2 AM and 7 AM on January 7, 1990. I tried to keep the modern-day interruptions to a minimum. I did trim quite a bit of stuff, but it’ll give you the general idea of what the show was like back then.
These recordings are taken from an off-air recording of the original broadcast, so there may be some loss of sound quality.
There may be a new Swing Shift later today on The AIR, but only if I feel like whipping one out first thing Tuesday morning.
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