Former KLUV/98.7 FM morning host Jody Dean is leaving that show, but he’ll be around.
Dean, 58, said the plan is for him to start a Saturday night “all-request show.”
“I’m just not going to do it in the mornings anymore,” he said Friday in his farewell to morning listeners.
He is building a backyard studio, he said, and also hopes to do voiceover work and teach.
Leaving the morning show “was not my decision,” he said — “It is, however, something I’ve come around to.”
He ended a long list of thanks to his mentors and friends with “Thank you. God bless,” and then played the same song that was a mainstay of his earlier career on the old KVIL/103.7 FM morning show with Ron Chapman: the Doobie Brothers’ “Listen to the Music.”
Before Dean’s announcement, the final hour included songs with Christian themes: the Doobie Brothers’ “Jesus Is Just Alright” and Mr. Mister’s “Kyrie,” ending with George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord.”
Jeff Miles will be the new morning host on KLUV, effective Monday. Rebekah Black and David Rancken, who had been Dean’s co-hosts, will continue to work with Miles on “Miles in the Morning.”
Dean, a Fort Worth product and Paschal High School alumnus, has become one of the most familiar names in Dallas-Fort Worth broadcasting.
Dean had been morning-show host at KLUV since 2005, replacing his mentor, Chapman. It is likely that Miles was not born yet when Dean began his DFW broadcasting career at age 13, volunteering as a monster and makeup/special-effects crewman on “The Museum of Horrors,” a Saturday-night creature-feature show on what was then WBAP/Channel 5.
Aside from a gig at Abilene Christian University and another one at Granbury’s KPAR, nearly all of Dean’s broadcasting career has been in DFW, including a 1987-1994 stretch working with Chapman, at the time a radio powerhouse at KVIL and still considered the dean of DFW jocks long after his retirement.
Another high-profile gig happened in 1997, when Dean was lured back to TV to host “Positively Texas,” an afternoon talk show on KTVT/Channel 11. The show never gained ratings traction, but he stayed on as a reporter, and when the station launched a 4 p.m. newscast in January 2004, he was named co-anchor along with market newcomer Maria Arita. He left a year and a half later to join KLUV.
Legendary country radio host Bill Mack of Fort Worth paid Dean a special compliment on Facebook: “When I heard my pal Jody Dean was ‘stepping down’ from his morning show on KLUV/98.7 in Dallas, I took it as a bit of sad news. … Jody has been one of my favorite radio/TV personalities ever since I heard him on radio for the first time, ages ago. I’ll always remember when he interviewed Hank Thompson and me on TV many years ago. As Hank said, ‘Jody knows what he’s doiin’!’ ”
To recap an unusually busy month in DFW morning radio, at the beginning of September, “Smooth R&B” KRNB/105.7 FM dropped the “Steve Harvey Morning Show”; his replacement, the locally based “The Morning Rush” with comedian Rudy Rush and former “Real Housewives of Atlanta” cast member Claudia Jordan, started Monday.
And Nathan Fast, who came to DFW in early 2017 to become the new morning-show host at KVIL/103.7 FM, only to get blown out in a KVIL format change 10 months later, took over as morning-show host on KPLX/99.5 FM “The Wolf” (a show that’s had its own share of turnover) on Sept. 17.
This story was originally published September 28, 2018 8:53 AM.