Post-Pop Pours
Van Gogh's Radio Lounge
147 Franklin St. (betw. India & Java Sts.)
718-701-4004
In 1867, Charles Pratt (yes, the scholastic Pratt) built an oil refinery on the corner of Williamsburg's N. 12th and Kent Streets. It pumped out Astral Oil, high-grade kerosene so popular that its slogan was, "The holy lamps of Tibet are primed with Astral Oil." To house his workforce, Pratt eventually erected the block-long, arched Astral Apartments on Greenpoint's Franklin Street.
Time passed. Astral Oil became Standard became a monopoly busted by the government. Yet the apartments remain, no longer housing Polish Greenpointers but 21st-century Brooklyn's invading demographic: 20-somethings with disposable income. They crave saloons not stocked with yellow Polish beer.
Several years back, Franklin Street welcomed the Pencil Factory pub. It was a nod to the neighborhood's old Eberhard Faber pencil plant. A block away on Franklin sat the Green Lounge. It was a rectangular slice of debauchery. Complimentary hardcore concerts made the lounge a destination for bald moshers thirsty for keg beer sold from a plywood bar.
Come 2003, Green Lounge, like Astral Oil, was a memory. By year's end, so was the band Van Gogh's Radio. The power-pop trio, which formed in 1998, spent more than four years rocking the downtown circuit: Mercury Lounge, Arlene's Grocery and Brownie's (R.I.P). Then in 2003, front man Steve Jed fled to Vancouver. Van Gogh's Radio ended gently, unlike its namesake painter.
Van Gogh's guitarist Tony Petillo embraced this musical caesura. He and his brother, Phil, and sister, Phyllis, toyed with opening a bar. The East Village proved cost-prohibitive, so they focused on Greenpoint/Williamsburg, where they grew up. They looked around. They saw 147 Franklin Street-the old Green Lounge, across from the Astral Apartments. Perfect. After signing a lease, Tony and Phil spent more than a year spiffing up the dilapidated hardcore asylum. Hardwood floors earned a mirror-like sheen. Brick walls were de-grimed. A PA system for future bands-though not Petillo's, for that would be "pompous"-was installed. Van Gogh's Radio Lounge was born.
It's under these auspices that I enter the tavern on a chilly, late-winter evening. The bar is quiet, experiencing the customer ebbs and flows that come with a just-opened business. There's a white bed sheet tacked to the rear wall, a screen for the projection tv.
"You like that? That was my sheet," says goateed bartender Dan Anthony, also known as Radio's bassist. What better way to embrace a musical legacy than by employing band members?
Anthony pours a two-dollar Van Gogh's Amber-a renamed Michelob Red draft dispensed from a custom-made "Van Gogh's" tap. The beer is cold, bubbly and drinkable. This is pure icing: For two dollars a pint, I'd swig anything short of-and sometimes exceeding-turpentine.
Other prices are equally palatable. A classroom-size chalkboard lists $4 Sierra Nevada pints, while bottles of Bud and Ithaca Nut Brown run $3. So there's cheap beer, but where's Van Gogh? Beside plastic sunflowers sprouting from the wall, several ersatz Van Gogh prints and a wood-hewn bust of the painter-wearing headphones over two ears-sitting on the jukebox, Dutch post-Impressionism is barely implied.
A Teenage Fanclub song spins on the jukebox. "Who played this?" booms a voice. "Cuz now we're talkin'."
The voice comes from co-owner Petillo, 36, a manic sort with shoulder-length hair, gently crazed eyes and an affinity for wrestling dogs. When several pooches and their owners enter, Petillo quickly fills a water dish and gets down on all fours.
"Arrrrrrr," he says, shaking his head at a pug skittering across the floor.
I wonder why Petillo looks familiar, and then it clicks: In photos hung above the bar, he's wearing a tuxedo shirt and standing beside idol Elvis Costello. In another, he and Tom Waits mug for the camera. Not surprisingly, these singers are prominent jukebox figures, along with nose-wrinkling Hootie and his Blowfish.
"We wanted to have songs for everyone," Anthony says by way of explanation, filling another Amber.
The bar, too, has started to fill up. A scattered assortment of equally scruffy college graduates and dogs now commandeers the bar. Low conversation, aided by Amber and an always $2 cider special, create a comfortable murmur. Here, the evening isn't dictated by decor: Albeit earnest, Radio is a blank slate for creating beer-induced succor. In fact, I'm so succored I ask Anthony to play the bar's namesake. He selects a dusty CD, and the past and present harmoniously collide.