Inside Music MediaJerry Del Colliano

To me, radio should be like one giant hockey game.

We beat each other up to win the game and then shake hands at the end in a show of good sportsmanship.

Except in radio today there is not much good sportsmanship left.

But we still have good people.

You may know Kevin Metheny as Pig Virus or Pig Vomit in the Howard Stern movie Private Parts chronicling the contentious relationship between the two egos when they worked together at WNBC in New York.

I know Kevin as a Philly program director – a special and holy club in my mind.

If you can make it there, you can make it in front of the tough crowd that Philly represents.

I know a different Kevin Metheny that I’d like to tell you about.

My buddy Todd Wallace and good friend Gary Stevens and I were attending a radio convention in Toronto when during the big entertainment dinner, it was announced that the Canadian air traffic controllers were going on strike at midnight.

In other words, too late to get a flight back to Philly.

I told Kevin I was going to take a bus in the middle of the night to Buffalo and fly from there to Philly early Sunday morning and he said he wanted me to come get him to make sure he doesn’t miss the bus.

I sure tried, but Kevin couldn’t pull himself away from some hot girl he met and decided to stay back – someone had to do it.

After that long miserable bus ride, Kevin made the right choice.

I often say all of us in radio are brethren.

I love Randy Michaels as a program director and I’ve put past me the stick in the face he gave me when we played in that ice hockey rink called Clear Channel vs. Del Colliano in court.

After all, I got the money and he lost his job but hate?

Never.

Kevin worked for Randy yet he attended my media conferences, which means that he had an insatiable desire to learn.

And while my programming instincts are not the same as his and vice versa, he was still working at 60 years old as a program director no less.

Try that in radio these days.

Most recently he worked for the Dickeys at KGO/KSFO in San Francisco, a near impossible salvage job. It would have been interesting to see how he did. I hear he was on a six-month contract – long by Dickey standards. After all, they ruined KGO, the station Mickey Luckoff built.

Death is our reminder – and we need to listen – that radio is just a game.

How we live life is what matters most.

When Sean Hannity and I worked to raise money for our radio brethren Mike Knar’s son Aden who had relapsed once again in his fight against Leukemia, Kevin Metheny stepped up.

Here’s Mike Knar:

“One of the first guys I heard from when you wrote about Aden was Kevin Metheny...offering his blood, money and help. He was an avid reader of your column...and was moved by the story”.

I’m president of the None of Us Are Perfect Club a constant reminder to judge each other not by our successes alone but by our deeds.

And kudos to Cumulus for their kind and heartfelt news release published when Kevin died. We need to see more of that side from them and from those who run our big radio companies.

Talk to Jerry privately here.