The Sound From Downtown

It doesn't get any more New York than Frank Prisinzano. The Corona, Queens, native has worn many hats over the years: bartender, chef, photographer, restaurant owner, restaurant designer and, now, sole owner of a radio station. Sitting amongst his grandmother's old antiques and family pictures hanging on the wall at Frankie's Restaurant, he explains how East Village Radio came together:

"We started the station for $2,000. We were running it out of the office above Frankie's. This was before the station went digital. I had a friend [Jorge DoCouto] who ran a station down in Austin, Texas. He was big into pirate radio, and I thought it would be cool to set up a community station in the Village. I was real busy at the time, trying to get a few restaurants up and running. [My friend] George was doing a lot of the programming and trying to get local businesses to sponsor us. At most, we thought it was a great outlet for our friends to DJ and play records they couldn't play anywhere else."

Then the F.C.C stepped in. The station, which operated on 88.1 FM, was ordered to cease and desist, due to a little technicality known as not having a license. But this didn't stop the little station that could from broadcasting. In the fall of 2003, Frank brought in Veronica Vasicka to transform East Village Radio into an online operation. An electronic recording artist, Vasicka had a vast knowledge of the global community flocking to the Internet for underground radio shows. By January 2004, the station's signal was no longer traveling by airwaves, but digitally.

In the same month, the operation moved out of the upstairs restaurant office and into its current storefront residency on First Avenue and First Street. "There was this little shop right next to Frankie's that was up for sale. I thought it would be great for people to walk by and see DJs running a radio show," says Frank. If it was meant to grab the attention of people walking by, it has. The station's glass front attracts street stragglers who look curiously at the jock in the window. Besides them, they wonder, and others passing by, who's that DJ playing music for? The answer is a lot of people. And not just in the Village. Or New York City.

East Village Radio has attracted the ear of numerous influential tastemakers in the U.S and abroad. Sirius Satellite Radio was in talks to acquire the whole station in hopes of bringing some personality and color to their mechanical stream of music.

But with or without the support of a major corporation, East Village Radio has brought back some of the eclectic musical tastes of Downtown. Greenwich Village, once home to artists and addicts, has been cleansed over the past 25-years into a safe home for affluent social climbers. With its gentrification and soaring rents, the debauched and experimental nightlife scene has been in remission. Club owners, forced to deal with high rents and violations, have been less open to take chances with music programming. Despite a few brave souls, like Nublu on 4th Street and Avenue C, today's club scene usually plays for those interested in a certain genre of music. Super-sized theme clubs-like Crobar and Avalon-attract suburban kids from Long Island, Westchester, and New Jersey to hear trance-anthem jocks. All the hipsters stroll the Lower East Side listening to a soundtrack of faux rock 'n' roll and 80s nostalgia. The smaller clubs, though, who rely on local artists to promote their nights and create a scene, have a harder time letting creative minds cultivate a following. It's a business. And at the end of the day, you can't have a party without the bills paid.

The radio-and commercial radio, mind you-was once vibrant with different jocks playing an assortment of music and promoting local followings. This, of course, has all changed. Corporate conglomerates like Clear Channel have swallowed the FM band up whole. The radio in New York City can hardly be differentiated from one in Scottsdale, Arizona. In this climate of trying to attract a mass audience and reduce payroll, stations basically rely on a computer and marketing surveys to create station formats and playlists. And as the number of songs being played on the radio shrinks, the competition to get one song into rotation becomes ever more competitive. Payola has become a legitimate practice in the industry; the money no longer goes to the jocks, but Clear Channel itself. If advertisers are happy with their numbers from Arbitron (the company that tallies radio listening figures), though, it seems the trend will continue. One thing that commercial radio doesn't have on Internet radio and pod casts is a possibility to be listened to on demand. The tricky part is getting your name and brand out to those scanning millions of web pages looking to be entertained, and possibly educated, in music.