Friday, April 21, 2006

David Lee Roth Is Gone, And A BIG Shocker in Cleveland

The first part is now official, from both David Lee Roth and CBS - the former Van Halen rocker is now free to rock again, as CBS Radio is pulling the plug on his morning radio experiment. Roth said so himself on the air this morning, and a CBS Radio spokeswoman has confirmed it.

CBS Radio has yet to announce replacement plans for Roth, but popular trade website AllAccess confirms that it'll be former afternoon bad boys Opie and Anthony directly replacing Roth in six markets, including flagship WFNY/New York. AA reports that the pair start Wednesday.

Yes, we said six markets.

AllAccess reports, exclusively as far as we know, that O&A *will* be heard in Cleveland. But...it won't be in morning drive on WNCX/98.5.

Instead, AA reports that O&A's three hour CBS Radio program will be heard in AFTERNOON drive on its former home, now-WXRK/92.3 ("92.3 K-Rock"). 92.3 syndicated morning voice Rover and his "Rover's Morning Glory" will remain on that station, and WNCX goes on its own in morning drive. (We don't know at this time if the classic rocker will mount a local morning drive show, but we'd be surprised to see them grab another syndicated show.)

That sound you heard was a gasp from WTAM afternoon motormouth Mike Trivisonno. That's right, it appears Triv will once again be competing with Opie & Anthony.

A caveat here, of course, is that the O&A program will be on delay here. We don't know how much that means in this battle, which will once again put them on the same frequency and in the same time slot where they got very good ratings before. It's also been a few years since their success on 92.3, so...it's not a given that they'll "pick up where they left off".

But you have to wonder how the move's going over on Oak Tree Boulevard, no?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Don't forget that O & A were also #1 18-34 in afternoon drive during their first stint in Cleveland.

This may cause gasps from 18-34 players in PM Drive such as Maxwell at WMMS, Kasper at KISS FM and whoever is doing PM Drive at Z107.9.(LOL)

Anonymous said...

The secret to Triv's success is the fact that he has no competition. He'll talk trash on air, no doubt, but he is privately wetting himself.

I don't really care as long as two things happen. 1) Triv stops feeding his own ego with lines like, "I'm the only media person in town is who isn't wrong." or the many other ways he shows his own insecurity by being critical of his peers. And 2) PLEASE, reduce the number of times we hear, "I'm Mike Trivisonno for ..."