“We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.” – Kurt Vonnegut
There are people you meet in your career who leave a mark. Sometimes good, sometimes not so good. One of those people for me was Kevin Metheny.
When I first met Kevin we were competing with each other, me at KING in Seattle, and Kevin at KJR. It was a magnificent battle, and one of those radio stories where people were in combat all the time and yet friends too. He was this kid in a t-shirt and overalls who practiced a mean variety of guerrilla warfare. That’s probably what I remember the most.
Kevin moved on from there, and followed a career of creativity, no matter how controversial it got. He was a focused, strategic person who wasn’t afraid to take a few bullets to win the battle. In a lot of ways most people will never understand, he blazed a new trail wherever he went. He was not afraid to jump off the cliff and flap his wings.
I remember sitting with him at a restaurant in Jacksonville, talking about the “old days,” when he looked at me and said, ‘How would you like to go through the rest of your career knowing you were “Pig vomit’ from the Howard Stern movie Private Parts.” That eclipsed all of what he did with so many stations in his career, with a batting average much better than many in the majors.
I’m not letting you know all this because he was a friend, but because he was a strategic and creative mind at the same time. You know how I feel about creativity, we’re lacking in it as we focus on incremental improvements from where we are. He died of a heart attack last Saturday at the age of 60. Surely it was due to putting so much of his heart into his work. But what a ride it was, covering so many major markets and and so many innovations. If you ever said to Kevin, “I don’t think you can do that,” you had to be prepared to get out of the way as he plowed ahead through any obstacle.
You might not know it, but we’ll all miss that goofy kid from Seattle, and the energy and focus he brought to radio.
