As it is, this show includes a terrific vintage music video for Go Van Gogh's "Shut Up, I Love You," the most-requested song on the radio incarnation of RFC, and Joe Justice's hilarious short film, "Marvel Jackass." There's also a LAX cartoon by Frank Panucci, which took the place of Pentagram Flowerbox. Despite all the edits, it's still a very strong show.
“Pentagram Flowebox,” the story of Satan living in a trailer park, debuted in our third episode, and was included in many installments of our show until episode 20. This series was created by a former Charleston-area musician, and was brought to me by RFC Big Shot Brian Young. The former Charleston-area musician shall remain nameless by his own request. He prefers to be known as “Third Mind Incarnation.”
Our differences were a classic case of bad communication. Neither of us made enough effort to contact each other, and therefore, when we each grew increasingly unhappy with the way the series was progressing on RFC, we had no way to foresee or resolve the issues. I wanted shorter, punchier pieces for the show. The series’ creator wanted to do longer, less traditionally-structured pieces. I thought I had his blessing to edit his material to fit our format, but it turns out that he was not at all happy. Rather than deal with it privately he chose to inform me of his unhappiness with a series of nasty comments that went up unmoderated in the PopCult blog. Harsh words were exchanged, and we dropped Pentagram Flowerbox from Radio Free Charleston. Better to part ways than to kill each other.
Since “Third Mind” was so unhappy with our editing of his work, I didn’t feel right leaving it in the show when we put them up in the MySpace archives. I felt that it was better to respect his artistic vision. In some shows on MySpace Pentagram Flowerbox was replaced by “The Mascot,” classic 1930s puppet animation by Wladislaw Starewicz.
Since that time, however, the Third Mind Incarnation has shuffled off this plane of existence, and on the way out, asked us to restore his cartoon to the show. With the demise of MySpace made it necessary to re-upload all the old shows, we figured we'd restore them while we were at it. As much as possible, the episodes of RFC that you see are as they were originally. Except for this one.
The other big gaping hole in the show in this episode. One entire song has been excised. The song is “I Hate Your God,” and the fact that I had to remove a video that Melanie and I worked so hard on is quite a bummer. However, serious questions over the authorship of the song have come to light.
I’m going to dance around some of the details here in the interest of fairness. I have this forum, the other party does not. Melanie Larch and I directed the video for “I Hate Your God” for a Huntington band that turned out to be just one guy. The video was considered a creative high point in the first year of the show, and we hit it off right away with the musician. So much so, that over a year later, he spent a month as my houseguest.
By the end of that month, our friendship had soured. I gave him a ride back to his mom’s house in Huntington, and essentially wrote off ever seeing any reimbursement from him for stolen or broken items.
A couple of weeks later I received a very disturbing email. It was from a former bandmate of my now ex-friend, claiming that he’d actually written “I Hate Your God.” I forwarded the email to the person in question, and got no response. A follow-up also went unanswered. Then he posted a message on his MySpace page saying that he would “…be in the news soon. None of it’s true, but I don’t care. It’ll make me famous.”
I would not normally be inclined to believe that a guest on my show would commit plagarism, but my personal experience with this person was all I needed to know that the charge of plagarism was more than credible. The fact that he never managed to write another entire song by himself sort of clinched it for me. I pulled the video off of YouTube and had all still images from it removed from MySpace.
Unless it can be proven that the song is not plagarized, the video for “I Hate Your God” may never be seen intact again. I will not be party to the theft of another person’s intellectual property. We were very proud of the music video, but when we discoved that the musician we'd befriended, for whom we created this video was a thief, a drug-dealer, a sociopath and worst of all, possibly a plagarist, it had to be taken out of distribution.
I can't in good conscious allow something that is possibly plagarized to go out to the world with my name attached to it. When this episode was uploaded to MySpace, I chopped out all references to the group and eliminated the video.That's why the host segments here seem so choppy.
If I can track down a copy of the original show, I plan to restore Pentagram Flowerobx and then bleep the name of the offending person from the host segments, and present the music video with his face blurred and the music replaced by a commentary track by Melanie and me talking about the experience. For now, this edited version will suffice. Heavily-edited versions of the original production notes, which ran in three parts, follow. Don't be surprised if the kinks are non-working.
Radio Free Charleston: Episode 14
February 5, 2007 by rudy panucci
You can watch it now! I’m going to spread the production notes over the next several days, so get ready to hear all about the deep dark dirty secrets of how we made the show.
Today I’m going to tell you about Go Van Gogh. GVG was one of the top bands that I played back on the old radio version of RFC. Go Van Gogh was Stephen Beckner (who has been on episodes two and nine of the new RFC), his brother Mark, and Johnny and Tim Rock. They brought a wild sound to Charleston, with a combination of pure Beatlesque pop married to L.A. punk roots.
“Shut Up, I Love You” was Go Van Gogh’s “hit single.” I got so many requests for it that I even played it a few times outside of our late-night timeslot. A few months ago I ran into Johnny Rock, and he told me about finding a treasure trove of vintage Go Van Gogh material. I got the tapes from him and transferred them to DVD. The first gem from this batch of coolness is a lip-synced video for “Shut Up” which was apparently shot in Stephen and Amee’s (now Mrs. Beckner) apartment around 1990. I think it was directed by Stephen, but I’m willing to be corrected on that.
Also among the great material on those tapes was the Go Van Gogh performance of “Slowdown” which was posted as the Song and Video of the Week here at PopCult over the weekend. Be sure to scroll down and check it out. In addition to the cool music, there are also two animated films by Stephen which will show up on future episodes of RFC.
I had to do a little tweaking and video restoration on the video for “Shut Up, I Love You.” I also dropped in a very subtle in-joke. The first person to spot it and tell us what it is here in the comments gets the wonderful prize of self-satisfaction at a job well done.
Tuesday I’ll give you the lowdown on the ****** Video, “I Hate Your God.”
RFC Production Notes: "I Hate Your God"
February 6, 2007 by rudy panucci
“I Hate Your God,” seen in episode 14 of Radio Free Charleston, is one of the more potentially controversial songs we’ve brought you on Radio Free Charleston, but it’s also a killer tune that doesn’t sound like anything else we’ve featured. I first heard of ******** via MySpace, and got in touch with their head honcho, ********. We cooked up the idea of shooting a lip-synced video since gathering the entire band at LiveMix Studio would have been a huge undertaking.
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.
Tomorrow I’ll tell you about Pentagram Flowerbox, Marvel Jackass, and why I look so disheveled in the host segments.
Production Notes: The Rest Of The Story
February 7, 2007 by rudy panucci
We wrap up our production notes onRadio Free Charleston, episode 14, with details on the short films and host segments for the show.
Local animator and filmmaker Joe Justice graciously let us share his 2002 film “Marvel Jackass” with the RFC audience. Joe made this movie for a Wizard Magazine contest, and when he didn’t win, he decided to put it up on his website. You can check out his site for full credits and production notes. You can also download the full uncut version of Marvel Jackass.
We also have the latest chapter in an epic devil cartoon, wherein little Timmy has started smoking illegal substances in Satan’s camper. Satan is NOT HAPPY. This adventure will continue into the next episode of Radio Free Charleston, since it was just too big for one show.
The host segments for this episode were almost an afterthought. We shot them after I spent two 14-hour days editing the rest of the show. If I seem a little less organized than usual, perhaps a tad more mumbly, that’s why. Sleep deprivation will do that to you. This episode is called “Spider-man Shirt,” which I wore in honor of Marvel Jackass, even though Spider-man isn’t in the film. It’s not like you can go buy a Forbush Man T Shirt at Steve and Barry’s.
So that’s the full story of RFC #14. You can read all about our musical guests Fanatomy and Go Van Gogh in previous PopCult posts. Go watch the show already. I gotta go dig my car out of the snow.
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