Dicky Gets Sacked

Finally, there’s NO reason to get up in the morning…again.
by Brian Mazo

“… the radio is in the hands of such a lot of fools tryin’ to anaesthetize the way that you feel…” – Elvis Costello, “Radio, Radio”

It took me a while-a long while actually-after tuning into Indie 103.1’s new Mighty Morning Show about a year ago, to get over host Dicky Barrett’s terribly grating New England accent. But then the bastard started playing the Dogmatics, a long since defunct Boston rock’n'roll outfit-consider them New England’s answer to the Replacements-and he made me a committed fan and listener. I got over the accent and started to learn to love Dicky Barrett.

The courting continued through the buzz of Tat-Tuesdays (where guests got inked on-air) and the Liquid Breakfast at Molly Malone’s last St. Patty’s Day. I almost wound up with a shamrock on my Jewish ass that morning. The show was at the best obnoxious; Barrett or his guests constantly interrupted Liz Warner’s news updates. Barrett’s mom would call in, a mock high school teachers too. If you wanted the news and the traffic, best to tune in elsewhere. But if you wanted to be entertained and rocked during your morning commute, you could do no better anywhere else on your L.A. radio dial.

But my courtship with the ex-Bosstone ended abruptly last week, when the radio station pulled the plug on the Mighty Morning Show and sacked Dicky Barrett.

Why would Indie 103.1 fire an incredibly successful host and pull his show from the airwaves without an honest-or any-explanation?

By the time the MMS hit the airwaves, we all knew that the station had been built to fuck with KROQ (Infinity) by people from KISS-FM (Clear Channel). But something funny happened on the way to the ratings report. Because of celebrity DJs such as Steve Jones and Dicky Barrett, Indie became good. Better than good-in fact, Rolling Stone called it “the coolest station in America.”

At that point, the FCC said Clear Channel-who operated Indie out of the Entravision offices-could no longer do so.

Indie became a full Entravision property. But the right-leaning Clear Channel program director and station manager (along with a lot of the behind the scenes technical employees) were already firmly in place. According to Barrett, the Programming Director Michael Steele and the Station Manager Dawn Girocco, came to believe their own hype. Barrett says the pair started “considering themselves radio geniuses who masterminded the Indie 103.1 phenomenon.”

So they took this opportunity to enforce their superior ‘radio wisdom’ and conventional ‘radio strategy’: the show was to be musically formatted, music heavily rotated, and “no guests too controversial,” Barrett recalls. “They said, ‘Soccer moms are listening in the a.m.’”

Barrett claims he was instructed to “’say the time and call letters ’til you’re blue in the face.’ I reluctantly went along with all this for about two weeks, hoping they would come to their senses,” said Barrett. A consultant was brought in to groom Barrett for wider appeal.

When Barrett made an on-air remark about not liking the new, overplayed Morrissey track, Dawn marched him into the office of Jeff Lieberman, Entravision’s president. According to Barrett, Jeff told Dawn he was not prepared to “strip Dicky of his opinion” and that she was visibly embarrassed. “This was the beginning of the end for me, and the writing was on the wall,” said Barrett.

Two weeks later, Barrett had a substantial, unauthorized, pro-choice conversation on the air with a South Dakota disc jockey and a few callers. This was the straw that broke the camel’s back. It was not the direction supporters of the current administration wanted the station to go. Barrett was fired that day.

In a prepared statement Barrett wrote, “I loved doing the show, and loved the people who loved it.”

Girocco said, “We have been working with Barrett for the past five months trying to get the show to the next level. We invested a lot…in promoting and coaching him. Unfortunately it takes a lot of work to…grow a morning show as well as develop interesting, compelling content. This was not Barrett’s priority, as he had other commitments with Jimmy Kimmel Live, which was, in his words, his ‘bread and butter.’ Everyone at Indie has a tremendous commitment to the station and to the audience. We need to have a morning show that is able to make Indie their #1 priority.”

Barrett was fired for being unwilling to be, in Girocco’s words, ‘more mainstream.’ Barrett said, “it is unfair to let people think I walked away to put more work into loudly reading 20 to 30 words a night on Jimmy’s TV show. I worked hard on the Mighty Morning Show, and along with Stacey, Chuck, and Liz, built and grew it to what it was.”

When I spoke with Barrett the last time before filing this story, he sounded disconsolate, “still in the eye of the storm.” He declined to be photographed, not wishing to become some ‘woe is me’ poster child. Barrett said that he didn’t want this to appear as any sort of self-promotion. And you know what? After listening to him on a regular basis for the last year, I believe him.   LAA