East Village Radio; Original Pirate Material To International Cult Status

Revisiting the East Village Radio origin story as Clash & EVR join forces...

There is a new wind blowing into the Lower East Side of Manhattan. On the corner of Houston and 1st Avenue today if you walk a few blocks around The Bowery neighbourhood in NYC you can feel the need for another artistic renaissance.

As the last EVR shows aired back in 2014 and with next year marking the tenth anniversary of their broadcasting hiatus we felt it timely to shine some light back onto the station. There is a tangible outcry for new roots level neighbourhood initiatives, setup to serve the community to the fullest with an outpouring of art directed back into the LES. To help act as a catalyst for that change, longtime partners Clash & East Village Radio are joining forces.

Keep your eyes peeled for further developments as Frank and the team begin to breathe new life back into the booth, staking out a new foothold within the Lower East Side. Serving up cultural happenings alongside some of the best Italian food on the planet.

Frank Prisinzano, EVR Founder added: “My plan is now to relaunch the station with sponsors, which is how we should have done it from the beginning. We’re starting again & considering all the problems we had before and implementing new solutions. We’re hoping to relaunch in June 2024.”

As detailed by the good folks at The Guardian and The New Yorker, East Village Radio’s origin story goes something like this. Back in 2003, Frank Prisinzano, the owner of the restaurants Supper, Lil’ Frankie’s, and Frank, had a little extra money, a little extra space, and a big passion for radio and he decided to do something about it. East Village Radio was a passion project that grew to achieve cult status.

“He had some extra space in one of his restaurants and he and a friend came up with the idea for a radio station based off, I think, Free Radio Austin,” said Peter Ferraro, the longtime manager of East Village Radio. “They went out and bought the equipment, climbed up on the roof of the building that houses Lil’ Frankie’s, and started broadcasting.”

In its first iteration, EVR was purely terrestrial – broadcasting on 88.1 FM as a small “pirate” station with no license and no real plan for what to do if it was raided by the police. “I told them there was a little-known law that in wartime it was legal to broadcast within a five-watt signal. We started out with a 100-watt box, but we kept it at 10,” said Ferraro.

Almost immediately, the radio station attracted a lot of attention from the community. “There was some pretty cool stuff pretty early on,” said Ferraro, who was in the mix almost from the beginning. The station started broadcasting an eclectic mix of obscure songs and steadily building a fan base out of listeners within the diminutive broadcast range. After a story on the station ran in the New York Times, the FCC sent EVR a cease and desist letter ordering the station to shut down operations immediately.

In order to stay open, the station moved online. “In 2003, EVR became one of the pioneers of internet radio,” said Ferraro. While the station itself existed on the internet, the studio moved onto the street, taking over a storefront on First Avenue where it soon became an integral part of the East Village’s landscape, with DJs playing music throughout the day and night, while New Yorkers and tourists would go about their daily lives, glancing into the studio as they walked by. “EVR was pretty much born there,” said Ferraro. It’s also where EVR died, only to be born again.

“I was always a listener,” said Scott Keeney, better known as DJ Skee. “The shows that they had there were incredible. Everyone knows about Mark Ronson, but they had so many other cool shows who were breaking so many acts. Drake would go on Elliott Wilson’s show – or hearing Chances with Wolves, which is one of the coolest radio programs you’d ever hear. It reflected the East Village and New York as a whole, and what great radio can be.”

To call the station cool was an understatement. It gave its DJs free rein to dig through their record collections and find the oddest, most arcane pieces they could find, be they obscure early 80s vinyl or old film scores or bands that no one had ever heard before. Mark Ronson got his start on EVR, taking over the air every Friday night with his show Awesome Shit.

That freedom attracted an intense loyalty among music fans and band members, who would swing by the studio and make the most of their seeming open-door policy to hand out copies of CDs. Mark Ronson got his start on EVR, taking over the air every Friday night with his show Awesome Shit. Over the years they have lent their imprimatur of cool to aging acts like Duran Duran – who, thanks to Ronson, debuted songs from their 2010 album All You Need Is Now on EVR’s airways.

Keep your eyes peeled for further developments in 2024.


Quoted Text: Melissa Locker for The Guardian, John Ortved for The New Yorker

Imagery: via EVR/ Frank Prisinzano