99XWatch.org

The Gift That Keeps on Giving

This morning at 1:02 AM, Toucher posted the following on his blog:

Due to the input of some in the legal profession (employed by Steve Barnes) it has come to my attention that I have said some things about Steve Barnes that maybe untrue.

1) Barnes' lawyer assures me that he is not mentaly retarted.

2) I have been informed that Barnes has never been in the military or been in charge of a sailing vessel. I have never seen the condition of his back in person. Just in the film "No Witness."

3) The photo of the man with the horrible back acne that accompanied the original article is not of Steve Barnes.

While the offending post has been deleted from FredToucher.com and is no longer cached at Yahoo or Google, here it is:

I always known that Barne's is a retard but he has sunked to levels deeper than I could imagine. ( I would have said "deeper than no witness" but we all know shit floats. It seems like captain back acne is going through people's Myspace friends lists and sending out unsolicited messages to strangers ...

Fucking hack! That's fine that your scared for your job (I can relate) but leave my people alone. Nobody who liked me on the air is going to put up with your boring shot for 10 seconds.

Update July 28, 2007  11:17 PM
I re-wrote the last paragraph and added the link to the Yahoo.com cache.

Update July 31, 2007 7:02 AM
Replaced link to post with an excerpt from post.

I was wrong

On May 7th, 2006 I posted:

Cumulus CEO Lew Dickey, in an interview with Billboard Radio Monitor, referring to recent layoffs, stated: "There were virtually no changes in sales and programming unless they were upgrades..."  ...  I would suggest that if Lew Dickey is lying, then he's a CEO cynically spinning a round of layoffs, i.e. par for the course.  If Dickey believes what he's saying, then he's just incompetent.
...
The ultimate test of the quality of the Dickeys' "upgrade" will be the Spring Book.  So we wait until July 26, 2006, the date for the Atlanta Spring Quarterly Arbitrends.

Today is July 26, 2006.  On Radio Talk Rodney Ho recaps the 2006 Spring Arbitron Ratings:

99X provided me the 18-34 numbers because the station soundly beat the Buzz this time around in that target demo after losing out in the winter. And 99X provided morning numbers which were actually up 18-34 despite all the changes made there and the criticism the temporary show has created.

I was wrong.  Congratulations to Axel Lowe, Leslie Fram, Lew and John Dickey, and the rest of Cumulus Management on the strong numbers. 

Crash Clark Controversy Streams Back to Atlanta

One day after WBCN began streaming, controversy has made it's way from Boston, through the Internet and back to our fair city.  At about 2:20 PM today, as a pretext for a his coming 40th birthday party, Crash Clark discussed his financial woes(1,071 KB, 1:09).  Coincidentally, AJC Feature Reporter and Radio Blogger Rodney Ho  listened and wrote about Crash's financial problems, pretty much as the on air conversation took place. 

Being unemployed was not good for Crash Clark. Crash, out of a job for several months after 99X fired him in December, he was hired in early June by Boston’s rock station WBCN-FM with Fred Toucher and Rich Shertenlieb. He told Boston Listeners today that his house is in foreclosure in Atlanta.  He also said he's a month away from away from filing bankruptcy. 

About 20 minutes later, an angry Crash, having seen Radio Talk,  responded:

Rodney Ho, you're an asshole*...First of all my house is not going to be foreclosed on.  Second of all, I'm not going to file bankruptcy.  Third of all, Rodney, they take more taxes out of my pay check than you will ever earn, so take that you piece of crap.

Apparently that wasn't enough because he called Ho, off the air, a couple of hours later to yell further. 

It's been an odd few weeks for Rodney Ho and the old TJ&L Show.  Three weeks ago, Rodney got an angry email from Leslie Fram's husband/manager Lanny West for Ho's article about 99X.  Yesterday, Jimmy Baron posted a blog taking Ho to task for Rodney's Peach Buzz review of Jimmy's Late Night Lounge.

In the interest of full disclosure, I'm friends with Rodney Ho.  In the interest of further disclosure, I devoted a substantial amount of time and money trying to save Crash's job at 99X. To my ears, it doesn't sound like Crash was joking. I suspect that it's one thing to air certain types of dirty laundry in a city where few know you, it's another thing in a city where everyone knows you.  I guess that's the downside of being on a national program.  On the upside, Crash is now part of a national program.

*Toucher tells me he dumped this part, so it's not clear how much of this actually went out on the airwaves. 

 

The 99XWatch.org Index

Apologies to Harpers.

Number of page views 99XWatch.org has received since February 8, 2005:  204,173
Number of page views SaveCrash.org got in its first 12 hours:  20,426
Number of page views my first blog got in its entire existance:  389
Number of posts on 99XWatch.org:  179
Number of posts critical of Toucher:  34
Projected number of blogs abandoned after one day:  1.09 Million (via the Freakonomics Blog)
Number of people at Jimmy's Late Night Lounge* claiming to have received a call from Elvis: 2
Number of people at Jimmy's Late Night Lounge actually having received a call from Elvis:  1

*I really enjoyed the Late Night Lounge.  Jimmy had a great rapport with all the guests, and kept the audiences attention despite the fact that the show was not typical comedy club fare. 

Jimmy to Host "The Late Night Lounge" Saturday Night

Saturday Night, July 22, 2006 at 11pm, Jimmy Baron will be hosting a show at the Sandy Springs comedy club, The Punchline.  From The Punchline Website:

There has always been a place for the profane, for the controversial, and for the salacious. We now have just such a place and just such a host. For years, Jimmy Baron was a fixture of the morning in Atlanta. He's [reset] his clock and now is taking all that is Baron to Late Night. Jimmy is the host and the guests will be a rotating panel of Atlanta notables and quotables. We'll be drawing the shades and telling them it's safe to shoot from the hip and the scotch will be flowing just to help start the conversation. Turn off the tape recorder, because this show is definitely off the record.

Jimmy’s guests this week are Famed Atlanta Music Promoter Peter Conlon, Neal Boortz Engineer and comedian Royal Marshall, and from Q100, Jeff Dauler.

Toucher and Rich to Stream

From FredToucher.com:  "WBCN will be streaming starting Monday!" 

Toucher: Matchmaker, Kevin Smith Nemesis

In the last Month, the Toucher and Rich show has gotten more positive press than Toucher got during his entire tenure in Atlanta.  The latest example is this story from the Boston Herald:

WBCN’s midday duo Toucher and Rich are trolling MySpace for the hottest girls in the Boston area, giving local guys a chance to contact them and possibly score a date.

Fred Toucher and Rich Shertenlieb, who host an edgy show on WBCN-FM (104.1), have been personally selecting young women for a “Weekly Girl from MySpace” segment airing on Friday afternoons. To make the list, the girls have to be local, attractive and single, the pair said.

Also, the feud with Kevin Smith seems to have resumed.  Toucher wrote yesterday on FredToucher.com:  "Atlanta Listeners! Kevin Smith lied about me today on Opie and Anthony. I have the audio to back it up. Please call in the show today at 4pm."  Later writing on the FredToucher Message board:  "I don't hate Kevin Smith.  I have never mentioned him in Boston. However I do have to defend myself when someone bad mouths me on a national show."

Update 7/25/2006 6:54 AM
Here's a scan of the Boston Herald / MySpace Article.

Sadly, Ken Lay Doesn't Return His Calls

While Ralph Reed was dealt a setback on Tuesday, he won't be gone for long.  From Time.com (via Think Progress)

As for Reed's future, he's still the owner of the consulting and lobbying firm Century Strategies, though landing work for a political candidate could be tricky this season if Abramoff talks or Reed is called before Congress. But a campaign staffer said that possibility hasn't stopped Reed from trying to line up work. "He's working it. He's working it harder now." said a campaign staffer.

Ralph Reed had previously shared his fondess for corporate accounts in an email to his good friend Jack Abramoff.  One of the corporations Reed, apparently, was fond of was Enron, who paid Reed more than $300,000 before it its collapse.

On a sad note, this also means that 100% of the Baron household is now unemployed.

Vote Republican

That's not a typo.  Georgia has this nifty open primary system, which allows you to vote in whichever party's primary you wish.  I  encourage you to vote in tomorrow's Republican primary and to vote for Casey Cagle for Lt. Governor.  Why?  Because he's running against Ralph Reed. 

I think that Garrison Keillor sums Ralph Reed up well:

The facts are fairly simple. Mr. Reed left the Christian Coalition in 1997 as it was sinking, and he was paid by Jack Abramoff to organize opposition to a gambling bill in the Texas Legislature, which would have opened the door to competition for Mr. Abramoff's client casinos in Louisiana. So Reed got the good Christians of Texas ("We have over 50 pastors mobilized, with a total membership in those churches of over 40,000 -- that includes Second Baptist, which has 12,000 members," he reported breathlessly) to bombard the Legislature with phone calls and letters denouncing gambling, for which Mr. Reed was paid millions of dollars in gambling money, by way of Abramoff's bagman, Grover Norquist.

Reed also helped defeat a state lottery and video poker in Alabama, in behalf of casinos in Mississippi. In Alabama, he told Abramoff, he had "over 3,000 pastors and 90,000 religious conservative households." He enlisted these Baptists in a fight against one saloon while he was on the payroll of another.

Imagine if Ralph Nader had solicited money from Ford and Chrysler when he went after General Motors' Corvair. Or the Southern Baptists raising money from Sony and Universal to condemn movies by MGM.

Another radio guy, Fred Toucher put it a bit more succinctly:  "Ralph Reed ... is a devil."  He's also criticized Reed on the TJ&L Show.

In the interest of balance, Jimmy Baron suggests ten reasons to vote for Ralph Reed.  Here are his top five:

5. Great hair and boyish good looks would totally frustrate gay community.
4. Would be the first non-hillbilly ever elected to Statewide office in Georgia.
3. Will keep the evil Mike Luckovich too busy to make fun of great American G-d fearing Confederate flag lobbyists.
2. Media was more fair to OJ Simpson
1. Voting for Reed helps creates jobs...namely my [Jimmy's] wife's.

Fat Kid

My wife and I spent the weekend in Chattanooga, and so I got the chance to check out the Fat Kid show.  While I only heard an hour or so, what I heard was great.  He's managed to riff off of the Fat Kid image and develop a quirky, warm, on-air personality.  I would stack FK up against the majority of the night time jocks in this market.