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Billboard Women in Music 2025
Five years after KROQ fired Kevin Ryder and his morning team at the start of the pandemic, Kevin Ryder is returning to the station. Ryder spent 30 years at KROQ as one half of the “Kevin & Bean” duo, and was inducted into two radio halls of fame for the legendary run.
Ryder will take over the afternoon drive slot from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m., while Megan Holiday, who currently holds that slot, will shift to nights. Ryder first showed up on the air on April 1 — and listeners were left wondering if it was an April Fool’s Day prank, something “Kevin & Bean” used to regularly due during their heyday.
“We were going back and forth and they said, ‘when do you think you can start?’ and I said, ‘April Fools would be hilarious,’” Ryder said of his new one-year deal at the station, with the option for a second.
Variety had the chance to sit in with Ryder on Tuesday, where he revealed that the deal to come back to KROQ came down to the wire — on Sunday night it was looking official, and he finalized the pact on Monday, with the goal of quietly showing up on the station on April Fool’s Day.
“It’s really bizarre in that this is where I spent half my life,” Ryder said Tuesday of being back at the station for the first time in five years. “Because it feels like home and it also feels like the craziest, weirdest outer space thing in my life. 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. I love doing this. I remember beng in college and I used to play a Rick Dees Top 40 countdown on the radio, and I remember thinking to muself, wow, it would be amazing to work in Los Angeles one day and getting on a cool station.”
Later in the show, Ryder included a comedy bit from another former “Kevin & Bean” partner, Ralph Garman, who called in to voice the character “Linus,” who would show up on “Kevin & Bean” over the years as “Kevin’s assistant.” And Ryder also took calls from listeners, giving impressions in order to win Coachella tickets.
Of course, in Kev-Dogg fashion, at one point he accidentally said the call letters “KLOS” instead of “KROQ.” Ryder was indeed back!
Ryder started at KROQ on January 2, 1990, alongside Gene “Bean” Baxter, and they became the number-one show in the Los Angeles market and the longest-running morning show in the country. After Baxter left the station at the end of 2019, the morning show was retooled as “Kevin in the Morning with Allie & Jensen,” but that show only lasted a few months before it was pink slipped in March 2020. Ryder famously went on the air that final day to criticize KROQ management for how they handled the decision to cancel the show and fire his colleagues.
After that, Ryder joined KLOS-FM with fellow former KROQ jock Doug “Sluggo” Roberts, until their show ended last year. Most recently, Ryder has hosted the podcast “3/4ths Human” with Roberts, Marci Klein and an AI voice known as “Cornelius,” or “Corny” for short.
Ryder will officially announce his return on the air during KROQ’s “Klein. Ally. Show.” morning program at 8:15 this morning.
“Kevin Ryder is a Radio Hall of Fame Broadcaster who spent most of his adult life waking up SoCal with his former partner Bean,” said Kevin Weatherly, KROQ’s senior vice president of programming. Weatherly had left KROQ before Ryder and his team were let go; he later returned to KROQ and started the conversations in bringing him back. “Their authentic and irreverent morning show is legendary, and I’ve had the privilege of having a front-row seat for the majority of it. Kevin’s return to KROQ in afternoons is a full circle moment in the best way possible.”
Said Ryder in the official Audacy press release: “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,. It was also a home for many LA 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.
As for the book he’s writing about his experience at KROQ, Ryder said he’s getting closer to finishing.
“I have two chapters that I haven’t written yet that I need to write,” he said. “Everything else is written and being improved on, so I probably have eight or nine chapters finished and I’ve gone through it and I don’t think I can do it any better. So then I just put it away, but it’s so it’s so nebulous, it’s not a thing yet. It’s just 10 million stories and timelines and So I’m trying to narrow stuff down.”
