Kevin “DreX” Buchar’s run as popular morning man at Clear Channel’s WKSC-FM 103.5 has ended abruptly.
Buchar was scrubbed from the Kiss FM Web site on Tuesday, as were sidekicks Mel “Mel-T” Tovar and Angi Taylor. The Facebook page for the female-oriented “DreX in the Morning” program vanished as well.
A Clear Channel spokeswoman said the company never discusses personnel matters but did not deny that Buchar is out.
No announcement has been made regarding a new morning show in Buchar’s absence, but one source indicated Mel-T and Taylor likely will be asked to be part of that program.
Sources insisted this was not a stunt, although in 2001 Buchar insisted he had walked out on KTFM-FM in San Antonio, bad-mouthing the station on his way out the door, only to return a week or so later with the station sporting a slightly tweaked format.
“Bubbling (on the air) that he’d been doing lots and lots of cocaine the past week because the media had been all over his back, he then introduced ‘The All-New Ultra DreX Show,'” the San Antonio Express News reported, noting it was “pretty much the same talk show he’s done for years.”
Clear Channel moved Buchar from San Antonio in 2003 after it bid up the price but failed to sign Eddie Volkman and Joe “JoBo” Bohannon, then with CBS Radio’s WBBM-FM 96.3. Buchar renewed his deal in March 2009, an acknowledgment of his role in making the Top 40 station a top draw among listeners ages 18 to 34.
Farewell to King: Another exiting host this week is Larry King, and, to be fair, there was a time when I was a fan. His overnight radio show on Mutual helped me get through many an all-nighter when I was in school. Whenever I think of the implications of the 1877 case of Munn v. Illinois, I am reminded of black coffee, Liquid Paper and King’s “absolutely true” Carvel story.
Unfortunately, I would come to discover in later years, King’s oft-repeated shaggy-dog account of how he and his Brooklyn childhood pals, including future baseball great Sandy Koufax, drove to New Haven, Conn., in pursuit of bargain Carvel ice cream doesn’t stand up to the heat of scrutiny any better than the ice cream would.
Koufax didn’t get to know King until King already was a media star, and when the Washington Post Magazine caught up with the Hall of Fame pitcher 40 or so years after the supposed road trip, he said he had never been to New Haven.
So it became increasingly difficult to take King all that seriously, even when serious people were encouraged to say serious things on “Larry King Live,” the nightly cable TV program he is set to leave Thursday after 25 years on CNN, a news operation that always prided has itself on its serious standards.
Suggest his nightly newsmaker chats have been mere entertainment, and you’ll be told they were journalism. Say King was a journalist, and you’ll be told he’s an entertainer. Somewhere in the middle was the guy who presented guests with open-ended questions and an open mike.
Not that it’s clear where the serious-vs.-shtick lines are drawn on a channel that, for a third year, will be pairing anchor-star, former reality-show frontman and future syndicated daytime gabfest host Anderson Cooper and the combustible, bleep-worthy comedy of Kathy Griffin on its live New Year’s Eve show.
“The Most Trusted Name in News just got a whole lot more trusting,” Griffin said in the announcement.
King will be replaced on CNN by a man best known in this country as a judge on “America’s Got Talent” and contestant on Donald Trump’s “Celebrity Apprentice.” Piers Morgan has a background in news, but that includes getting fired as editor of the Daily Mail for falling prey to hoax photos depicting abuse of an Iraqi by British soldiers.
CNN’s 2-month-old “Parker Spitzer” combination of Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker and disgraced politician Eliot Spitzer is proving yet another bad marriage for the former New York governor amid lackluster ratings on a channel that already lost a third of its prime-time audience in half a decade.
So it’s natural everyone would want to wax sentimental about longtime CNN top-draw King and his final shows. Others who interview for a living have lauded his low-key, inviting approach. Many of those he interviewed have heaped praise on him and his forum.
Only a heel would point out things like how he didn’t seem to know Jerry Seinfeld had retired “Seinfeld” when it was No. 1 and the show hadn’t been canceled by NBC. This isn’t the time to recall how, in “Larry King by Larry King,” he wrote of how he “bamboozled” his way to bank loans he could not repay in the 1960s, eventually filing for bankruptcy. No one is perfect.
As with most public things that seem simple, all of this was undoubtedly harder to pull off than not.
The longevity of a 53-year career that had included a quarter-century on CNN, the national radio show and regular space in the national newspaper USA Today to fill with random thoughts speaks to King having a sense of what many people want to hear and how.
Just not everyone.
