Sharp tongues, eccentric personalities and a knack for lowbrow humor are typical qualities of radio deejays. Those run counter to a more obvious trait you might think would come in handy in the radio business: an intense passion for music. Fortunately for Syracuse music lovers, radio jock Dave Frisina eschews the extrinsic sides of his craft in order to, as he explains it, “let the music do the talking.”

Frisina, 52, will celebrate his 30th year in Syracuse radio this August. Local musicians throughout Central New York have tuned in faithfully every week for decades to hear Soundcheck, Frisina’s trademark and perhaps most well-known program. Soundcheck gives Frisina a chance to explore his passion for local music and provides an outlet for exposing them to the public by spinning their discs live on the air.

When WAQX-FM 95.7 (95X), the station that gave Frisina his start, canceled Soundcheck in 2003, Frisina switched over to Galaxy Communications, a move that continued to put his impeccable knowledge of classic rock to the test by placing him at the helm of daily broadcasts on the classic rock wave WTKW-FM 99.5/105.5 (TK99). Since the end of October 2007, Frisina has also been on Utica rock station WOUR-FM 96.9. Demonstrating the degree of skill Frisina has massed during his career, the deejay handles both shows at the same time, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., and produces exclusive content for the two, seven days a week. 

But when Frisina is off the clock, you’ll likely see him downtown grabbing a beer at the Bull and Bear, where his son Mike often performs with his band, Simplelife. If that weren’t enough to prove how deep the musical waters run in Frisina’s family, he notes that he met his wife Jenn at a local rock show. The two now are a family of six, and live in Eastwood. 

During a recent interview, Frisina recounted the early days of Syracuse radio and discussed its local significance. Not surprising of a true Salt City icon, Frisina is emphatically pleased at the degree to which Galaxy encourages him to stay focused on local content and Soundcheck in particular. That support has led him to expand his weekly program, which airs on Sundays, 9 p.m. to midnight, to include a live, monthly performance from a local band at the Redhouse, 201 S. West St. 

Frisina is also known for a catchy segment he airs during his lunch hour broadcasts. For “My Three Songs,” he plays three tunes with a common theme and asks callers to guess what it is. Frisina notes that one of his favorite zingers is asking his audience to guess the connection between the Doors’ “Roadhouse Blues,” the Grateful Dead’s “U.S. Blues” and, as a kicker, the Eagles’ “Life In the Fast Lane.” The answer: The three albums on which those songs are featured, Morrison Hotel, From the Mars Hotel and Hotel California, all have a common word in the title. That Frisina crafts his rhythmic riddles only speaks to the nature of his endearing wit. 

For this month’s Soundcheck live performance on Sunday, May 18, Frisina will feature local pop-rockers the Erika DeSocio Band as well as Blue Sky Mission Club, a zydeco band from Ithaca. Admission is $5. For more information, call 425-0405.

Q: Did you grow up in Syracuse?

A: Yes and no. I grew up on the north shore of Long Island in Smithtown, but I went to school at Cortland, so realistically between Cortland and moving up here in 1978 I’ve been in Syracuse longer than I was on Long Island.

 Q: How did you get into the radio business?

 A: I came up here after getting out of Cortland, and I started doing weekends right when the station {95X} opened. They hadn’t even finished construction on the place. It was in Manlius, and I’d just graduated as a phys ed major, and I couldn’t find a job. I’d done radio at Cortland for fun. They didn’t have a radio major there; I was just doing it because some friends turned me on to it. I was doing a variety of odd jobs, like washing dishes in the morning to get minimum wage and a free meal, and then working for Domino’s to get minimum wage and a free meal and I’m like, “What else can I do that may involve a free meal?” I had no idea. But I heard a station was starting in Manlius, and I thought maybe I’d give it a shot. I mean, what have I got to lose? And I sent them a tape that I saved to this day, which is funny. But I started doing weekends and one thing led to another and I thought I would do anything to get more airtime. That’s why I started Soundcheck in 1979, because I wanted to get on the air more than just weekends.

 Q: What are some of the radio stations you remember listening to back then?

A: WNEW, WLIR in Long Island and WPLR from New Haven {Conn.} coming across Long Island Sound. That’s when I got turned on to deejays. This guy at PLR was Stoneman, which was great. It’s like, “Hey, man, it’s Stoneman!” and I’m like, “Stoneman! That’s great!” But I never considered radio, never for a moment. I thought that was like “show business” and I wasn’t into show business. I wanted to be a coach and a teacher like my dad was, and I loved sports—still do—so I didn’t even consider it. It wasn’t until I was a year into school {at Cortland} that a friend of mine said, “Do you want to come up to the radio station here?” and I said, “They have a radio station here?”

From hair to eternity: Dave Frisina through the years, beginning with a 1985 shot (below), at the microphone circa 1987 (immediate left), handling the gutter balls better than Obama during 1997 Sammys Rock’n’Bowl event (center) and sharing a tender moment with Ed Hamell during the 1999 Sammys (far left).

 Q: What developed out of doing night shifts when you started at 95X?

 A: I did mornings for a little while. I was kind of a jack-of-all-trades. Of course there were different people coming and going. That’s when I started doing middays—the end of the 1980s—and gave up overnights. I made a lot of friends, and met a lot of people doing overnights because if you’re a voice in the darkness, you know, it’s locked in. People don’t push a lot of buttons at night. If they like what they listen to, you’re locked and loaded: You’re in. I made, like I said, a lot of friends who were working third shifts—the graveyard shift—that still to this day come up to me and give me that, “Hey, remember when?” and I’m like, “Oh, my God! Let me try!”

 Q: What was the atmosphere of radio stations like when you got started in radio?

 A: We were all in our early 20s {at 95X}. It was something you wanted to do, but it was before science and research really entered the picture. We’d all grown up listening to different radio stations and their respective areas. Ed Levine {who now owns Galaxy} had grown up in Long Island and went to Syracuse University. Ted Utz was the program director, and Craig Fox, who now owns Radio Disney up here. It was all guys that grew up in metropolitan New York and listened to radio. So we were kind of basing it off our own experiences. 

But think about starting a radio station now when everybody is in their early 20s. You can’t do that nowadays! We had albums, and we picked cuts off albums. Anything with a blue dot was an album track, anything with a red dot was a single, anything with a green dot was a deep album track. A yellow dot was like a really, really deep album track. We just would build our own systems about how to rotate records. It was all trial and error: You learn as you go. 

 Q: All the recordings you used were on actual records or reel-to-reel tapes?

 A: Oh, yeah. Everything was records. I mean, some stations played carts, which were like eight-track cards that you just load up with one song so that you wouldn’t make the mistake and play the wrong track. But in some ways we’d play the wrong track on purpose! We were playing everything from Zappa to ZZ Top. Actually, more like AC/DC to ZZ Top, alphabetically. 

But there were no limits! We’d throw in a Joni Mitchell track. It was just much more open-ended, because nobody knew what would work. So we were just throwing everything against the wall, and then, eventually, formats became controlled with consultants and research as to what worked and what didn’t. You’d play songs that people would expect to hear and that are a little more familiar and that people like hearing. 

If you just play anything, yeah, there might be a really small percentage of people that will stick with you, but time and time and time again over the course of my career—and I love music, and I’m always pushing the limits, and I’ve gotten in trouble for it more than once—but when you play what people want to hear, they’ll listen. When you play what you want to hear, you’re lucky if your friends listen. It’s just the way it is, you know? I may be interested in listening to somebody else’s iPod for like an hour, but after that it’s like. . .

 Q: It becomes a little too obscure.

 A: And different stations serve a different audience. Stations have separated. There used to be no choice if you wanted to listen to radio. It was just standards or Top 40. Now you’ve got at least three or four variations of rock, between oldies and active rock and modern rock and classic rock. Now it’s niched out. Same with soft rock. Think of all the different ways you can package it. You can probably hear Tom Petty on six radio stations. Everybody’s trying to figure out what they do best, and they try to do it the best they can. What we’re doing, we’re doing really well. Our station is better ratings-wise than in the history of the station. Right now it’s doing really well. 

Be like mike: Dave Frisina mans the microhone during a broadcast on his home station, WTKW. Michael Davis photos.

 Q: When you started Soundcheck did you model it on something someone else had done?

 A: It was totally from scratch. At the time, again, it was a lot harder to come up with recordings from bands. I mean, you had to go into a recording studio and it cost more money to record an album, or at the very least a single. It cost more money and more time, even though there were good places in the area to do that. It’s not like it is today. You can have a studio in your basement and with your computer anybody can record stuff that’s pretty good quality. Back then a lot of what I was playing on the air was some albums, a lot of singles and a lot of cassettes, and people would just record directly onto cassette. 

 Q: What were the early years of Soundcheck like?

 A: It was funny because I think most people think of me as being fairly laid back on the air. I’m not a screamer. I’m not a real hype guy. I try to be myself, more or less, but back then I was really laid back, back in the late 1970s. It was a different frame of mind. I tried to pick up the pace a little bit since then, but I was able to remember the exact date that I started the show because a year after we were celebrating the one-year anniversary at the Poorhouse North, and a lot of fans and musicians were there. During the celebration party I got a phone call that John Lennon had been shot {on Dec. 8, 1980}, and so it was easy to remember the date of the first show because it was like “Oh, my God! Of all times!” That put an end to the party real quick, but then I had to go on the air and do the overnight show, and I had played all Beatles and John Lennon all night. I just kept getting updates over the wire service. 

 Q: How did musicians respond to Soundcheck when it started?

 A: The charm of the early show was that it was on Sundays at midnight, and it was really buried, so I’d get musicians stopping by and playing live on the air just totally impromptu, or showing up and bringing a six-pack and wanting to hang out, because it’s access. If you’re a musician and you’ve got a guy giving you access, why not? Things would get kind of goofy. It was pretty free form, and the fact is that the show is still very free form. I don’t know what I’m going to play until I get there. Nobody’s ever told me what to play or what not to play, or who to book and who not to book, and that’s part of the thing I like about it. 

 Q: Why did you transition from 95X to TK99?

 A: One of the advantages of coming to TK is because Ed Levine believed in what I was doing, and when I was at 95X they canceled Soundcheck. It was like, “You people are out of your minds! You don’t know what you’re doing!” Eventually it was a disintegrating, deteriorating situation that I was glad to get out of, and Ed said, “We want you to do everything you’re doing over there and more.” Instead of saying, “We want you to do less and less and less,” he’s going “What do you want to do?” And every time I’d do something he’d go, “What else do you want to do?” So it’s a totally different environment, and if you’re somebody who has any ounce of creativity that’s exactly what you’re looking for. 

 Q: How do you come up with material for “My Three Songs?”

 A: It’s funny. Like everybody, you get the germ of an idea from somebody else. Fifteen or 20 years ago I got the idea from KTCL out in Boulder, Colo. I think they were doing something similar and I’d heard about it. I didn’t know the details but it sounded funny, “My Three Songs,” because at the time I had three sons. I’ve since had four, but this was a long time ago, and so I found a local group called Hungry Locust that provided me the theme music for the feature that I still use. 

I was always fascinated by when I would put together music early on, and you put together theme sets and you’d segue songs from one to the other. I was always trying to think in terms of themes when I was in college. Like, here’s all songs that have to do with winter, because that’s how you program. If I only had to do one show a week I would be putting together things that worked in themes that people could enjoy listening to. Again, I’m really grateful to the station because they’ve never asked me to program this in advance so they could check it over. They know that it’s like totally off the top of my head, and I play things that a lot of times don’t get played any other time of day except during “My Three Songs.”

 Q: What’s your perspective on the local music scene? 

 A: I think I have a pretty good idea of it. I don’t like the term “support” local music. It’s not like they’re a charity. They’re not looking for handouts. Musicians want to be appreciated and want a place to play, and sometimes I don’t think the appreciation level in Syracuse is what it should be. I think people take for granted that there’s some national-level, top-notch performers that live right here in town, and they’re willing to pay 30 to 40 to 50 to 80 dollars to see people come to town when they could be paying some of these people almost next to nothing.

I can’t list everyone without offending someone, but guys like Loren Barrigar: I mean, are you kidding me? There are singers that make the American Idol people look like a bunch of screeching monkeys. I could name five people on any instrument you give me that are jaw-droppingly good in Syracuse. It’s like a lot of places, though. Sometimes they just don’t know what they’ve got around, and original music is more challenging to people to listen to than covers. 

I mean our radio station plays all classic rock. We’re one of the top two or three stations in the area. People are familiar and comfortable with what we play. That’s why we’re so successful. So why wouldn’t they go out and see bands that do the same thing? I understand that completely, and if I was a musician and I was really good at sounding just like Eddie Van Halen I’d go out and do that. Why not? Being able to play for your own satisfaction and to have people enjoy it is a tremendous feeling. I think that people that go that extra mile, that write their own music, that have that extra creativity—I appreciate that. 

 Q: Do you think there is anything that needs to be improved in the Syracuse music scene?

 A: Everybody wants what they don’t have. Whatever they get, they want more. Somebody said, “Why don’t you play local bands during regular time?” Well, first of all we’re a classic rock station. We do what we do and that’s what we do best. That’s our signature. This is what we do. It’s like going to McDonald’s: You know what you’re going to get. Within certain parameters they may experiment a little with the McRib, but for the most part it’s hamburgers and fries. 

The other thing is what if I play something from Long Since Forgotten? First of all, Long Since Forgotten is going to want more than one song played after a while. Second, every other band in town is going to be like, “Why are you playing them and not us?” So then who are we going to add? I’ll add Candid or I’ll add Simplelife—God forbid I should do that! There’d be all sorts of nepotism involved. No matter who I add, on the Soundcheck Myspace page there’s over 400 bands on there from upstate New York. Not all of them are original, but still who am I not going to play? Who’s going to get pissed off at me if I don’t play them? If I played five bands, they’d want 10. If I played them once a week they’d want 10 times a week. This is not just local, but it’s any level, even national acts. If you’re playing somebody three times a day they want five times a day. 

You’re never going to please people. So when I hear that local bands are pissed off it’s like, “Get in line!” Everybody’s pissed off! You’re never going to make people happy, ever, no matter what you do.

 Q: How do you emcee two stations at the same time?

 A: I actually have three computer screens in the studio, one for TK, one for OUR, and then we have a third screen that’s connected to the Internet and also has a digital editor on it so I can record phone calls. I have two different pots on the board, two different places for the music to come up through. When my mike is in the red, I push the red button, and I push another button and I’m in Utica. I balance the commercial breaks back and forth. Sometimes I have to put a voice track in, which is a recording of my voice on there if I see I’m going to have a conflict where the commercial breaks are falling at exactly the same time. But as much as possible I do them live. 

 Q: Ever have any trouble with lady fans?

 A: I think I wanted them when I was younger. I shared that with musicians. It’s one of the reasons I got into radio. Now I have a beautiful wife and I’m glad when people listen for whatever reason. At a classic rock station you don’t get groupies, really. You get fans. 

 Q: What does it feel like to be coming up on your 30th anniversary in radio in Syracuse?

 A: April 1 was my five-year anniversary at TK, and the last week of August is my 30th anniversary in Syracuse in radio. This five-year anniversary is as important to me as 30 because it was time for me to have a rebirth and start over, and because of that decision, which is one I’ve never regretted now, I’m on TK and OUR, which is a dream. WOUR, they were the first station in Central New York to be a rock station. I live in the best of both worlds. Those are two really good radio stations and I wouldn’t have had that opportunity and I wouldn’t have had the creative control that I have now, and that freedom. It’s worth the hours. It’s worth the seven days a week. It’s less of a job and more of a lifestyle. Everybody around me knows it. It’s what I do, you know?