That was no April Fools prank that people heard Tuesday afternoon — Kevin Ryder is really back on the air at KROQ-FM (106.7), covering afternoon drive time.
“I spent half of my life with my fellow favorite weirdos, helping to make KROQ an iconic radio station and a global destination to foster and nurture musical groups,” Ryder said in a news release. “It was also a home for many L.A. listeners, and with my old boss back programming KROQ, I’m excited to be speaking my own version of the English language again at the station I love.”
Ryder was referring to Kevin Weatherly, the senior vice president of programming who left KROQ in 2019 for a gig at streamer Spotify then returned to the station in May 2022.
“Kevin’s return to KROQ in afternoons is a full circle moment in the best way possible,” Weatherly said in the release.
It was an odd homecoming, Ryder told Variety, which sat in with the DJ during his debut shift with the station that had employed him for 30 years before summarily dismissing him and his crew just weeks into the pandemic.
“[I]t feels like home and it also feels like the craziest, weirdest outer space thing in my life,” he told the outlet Tuesday. “What a strange situation, pulling up to the building and looking at it in the parking lot and remembering where the ticket thing is and where I need to get it punched and all of that.”
The veteran radio personality was fired by KROQ in March 2020 after covering the morning drive shift for three decades, first with longtime work partner Gene “Bean” Baxter and then, after Baxter’s 1999 retirement, with a crew of co-hosts.
He was hired by rival station KLOS-FM (95.5) in February 2021 to co-host the afternoon drive with Doug “Sluggo” Roberts, but was fired from that job last September.
At one point during the new show, which runs from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. local time, Ryder accidentally identified the station as KLOS instead of KROQ, Variety reported.
In 2020, Ryder had to tell his listeners that his firing wasn’t a joke. “It actually happened,” he said at the time.
And he didn’t hold in his feelings about the people who were then running the radio station.
“The new people in charge now, they weren’t here for the building of the World Famous KROQ,” Ryder said during his 2020 farewell broadcast. “I don’t think it means anything to them. It’s a numbers business, and there’s no family aspect to it anymore. It’s only numbers.”
Megan Holiday, who previously covered the afternoon drive shift, will now host the evening show, station owner Audacy said in the Tuesday release. And according to Variety, Ryder is almost done with a book about his first 30 years with KROQ. Almost.
“It’s just 10 million stories and timelines,” he told the trade, “so I’m trying to narrow stuff down.”
