Rick Dees Hates Me

Rick Dees hates me.

Okay, first of all, who the hell is Rick Dees? 

Those of you raised in Southern California probably know that Rick Dees is/was a popular deejay from the seventies through at least the nineties. And maybe beyond. I’d have to look him up on Wikipedia to get a more accurate time frame. But then I’d actually have to give a shit. Which I don’t. He wasn’t part of my consciousness because I was raised in Northeast Ohio. I grew up on Cleveland’s WIXY 1260 and WMMS FM, the godfather of progressive rock stations, the more sophisticated album-oriented rock we were all supposed to listen to once we got to high school. 

But my favorite station, the one that most shaped my musical tastes as an adolescent, the one I most frequently pressed to my little white boy ear on my little transistor radio, was CKLW, a fifty-thousand-watt clear channel AM station that reached across Lake Erie from Windsor, Canada just over the border from Detroit. In fact, even though the tower resided in Canada, as the call letters beginning with a “C” suggest, it identified as a Detroit station and played Motown music throughout the mid-sixties into the seventies. So as a young boy from a small town called Chardon, outside of Cleveland, I listened to a radio station from Detroit via Canada. 

Following so far? Don’t worry. It has little to do with the ultimate point of this story. And I hope I’m not overpromising when I say this story has a point.

It’s all a long, tangential way to say I didn’t know Rick Dees. I should say, I didn’t really know Rick Dees. I have to admit the name did flash across my consciousness sometime in the late seventies, when he inflicted upon the culture a hit novelty song called “Disco Duck.” But that was it. Any antipathy you may hear from me now is only in retrospect. At the time, I had no opinion.

In 1990, I had moved to Los Angeles from New York City, where I had been working as a stand-up comedian throughout the eighties. I had gotten a job hosting a television show called Totally Hidden Video, a hidden camera show, which turned into a minor hit in 1989-90 for the then fledgling Fox network.

For me that gig lasted one season. Because the show had good ratings, I was under the mistaken impression that as host, my contribution was valued—required, even. Not so. I still don’t know what happened. To this day, I am waiting for someone to fire me. No one ever did, officially. The contract expired without anyone calling me or returning my calls. I’ve since learned it happens a lot in Hollywood.

That didn’t help me much then, though. Based on the misapprehension that I was integral to the show, I had moved my family (at the time, my wife Shelley and two-year-old son, Sam) to the West Coast where I figured I’d have steady employment for a couple of years, at least enough to start building a nest egg.

Instead, by 1991, we were struggling, and it was back to stand-up for me. 

My favorite club to work in LA was Igby’s, on the West Side near Bundy and the I-10 freeway. One weekday night, I came off stage after a decent set and was approached by a guy, whose name escapes me now, but I seem to remember may also have been “Steve.” Let’s go with that. He was the talent coordinator for a new late-night show on ABC called “Into The Night with Rick Dees.” This was one of ABC’s many attempts—failures all pre-Jimmy Kimmel -- to compete with Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show,” attempts which dated back to the sixties where Rat Pack comedian, Joey Bishop, was offered up as the first bloody sacrifice.

“Steve” liked my stuff and told me he’d like to book me on “Into The Night.” I said, “Sure,” and gave him my number. True to his word, Steve called a few days later and said, “Look, we have kind of an emergency. We have a comic booked for tonight. His name is Michael Floorwax.” I have no trouble remembering that name. “He’s coming from the East Coast, and we’re not sure he’s going to make his connections. Could you put together a set, come in and be on standby just in case? If he makes it, I’ll call you in a couple of days and book you for your own spot.”

It was a good deal. They would send a car for me. I’d get paid the AFTRA minimum, approximately eight hundred dollars, whether I did the set or not. If the guy showed up and I was booked later, it would be like getting paid twice for one set. We could use the money.

I quickly put together the set. By late afternoon, the limo picked me up at our rented house in Glendale and took me to the studio, where I was escorted to the green room. I signed in on the production call sheet and took a seat. Steve introduced me to one of the producers, a middle-aged blond woman, who smiled and welcomed me. I sat there for about a half hour, forty-five minutes when Steve came back to let me know that Michael Floorwax had made his connections, and I wouldn’t be needed. He thanked me and told me he’d call me soon to book me for my own spot. The car took me home.

The very next day, Steve called. The first thing he said to me was, “What did you ever do to Rick Dees?”

Odd question.

I said, “What do you mean? I’ve never met him.”

He said, “Well, he hates you.”

“What?”

“Rick Dees hates you.”

“Hates me? How could he hate me?”

“I don’t know. When his producer [the middle-aged blond woman] saw your name on the sheet, she said, ‘You know, Rick’s not going to like this. He hates this guy.’”

“Hates me? She said ‘hate?’”

“Hates you.”

“How does he even know me?”

“I don’t know.”

“Hate? That was the word? Hate?”

“Hate.”

I told him it must be a case of mistaken identity. I had never met the man. I don’t know how he would know me let alone hate me. I had been on television a few times, including the hidden camera show, an even briefer stint hosting a show on MTV, and a couple of stand-up spots, Star Search in the early eighties, the CBS Morning Show. Nothing I did on those shows could be construed as the least bit controversial or worthy of “hate.” He agreed that Dees must be mistaking me for someone else and told me he’d check and call me back.

The next day, the phone rang.

“Nope. It’s you.”

“Really?!”

“Yep.”

“Hates me?”

“Hates you.”

“Hate? He said ‘hate?’”

“Hate.”

He apologized for not being able to book me on the show and that was that.

I am normally not an obsessive person, but after that phone call, I could think of nothing else.  There was someone in the world who not only hated me, but the hate ran so deep that the people around him knew about it. He had to have been bitching about me out loud; and frequently enough that I was now on his personal “hate watch list.” This was a close call for his people. I had made it through a crack in his security and had almost boarded his plane with my little incendiary bag full of jokes. Imagine the heads that would have rolled had Floorwax not made it in time. I scoured my memory for anything I could have ever done or said that could have offended Rick Dees, a guy I had never met nor had much cause to even think about.

FDR famously had said of the “economic royalists” of the nineteen thirties, “They are unanimous in their hate for me, and I welcome their hatred.” I have never welcomed anyone’s hatred, plutocrat or disc jockey.

Indeed, I have assiduously avoided being hated, not out of any defensive, self-protective posture, but because I’ve always considered myself an easygoing person, non-judgmental, someone with a high tolerance for prickly personalities, someone who tends to get along with everyone. In fact, I was frequently the guy who had friends my other friends didn’t like. I fancied myself the man in the middle, bringing people together.

I have tried to remain, as my friend Lew Schneider would sometimes say, “Above the fray, Skro.  You’re above the fray.” 

Although I could never quite tell whether he said that out of admiration or impatience.

Nevertheless, I have prided myself on taking people at face value and having enough self-possession not to be threatened by others’ insecurities or overly irritated by their foibles. As a result, I have suffered fools. I have suffered plenty of fools. What I’m trying to say is: who could hate me? I don’t hate anyone.

I have always tried to acknowledge where other people were coming from, like Atticus told Scout in To Kill A Mockingbird, “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view… until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”  

Although, I have to admit at that point, the idea of skinning Rick Dees was not without its appeal.

Then I remembered I did know someone who knew him. On the aforementioned Totally Hidden Video, I had worked with an actor named Paul Joseph, who I had been told was also one of Dees’ radio producers. Paul was a nice guy, a handsome dude. I appreciated the work he had done on Totally Hidden Video as one of the actors who worked in the field. We had a friendly relationship, or so I assumed. I don’t recall ever talking to him about Rick Dees. And even if we had, I don’t think I would have said anything negative. I didn’t know enough about Dees personally or professionally to have any sort of take on him.

But it just so happened that a few days after I got the word, I ran into Paul. He turned up at a meeting on another project I was involved in put together by our former THV producer. So, I told Paul the story.

“Hate?” he said.

“Hate.”

“Boy, that doesn’t sound like Rick,” Paul said. Apparently, I had made a very short hate list.

He told me he’d check into it, but I never heard from him. And I didn’t follow up. My obsession with someone in the world hating me had subsided after about a week. My psychic wounds had been salved a bit after I had told a couple of friends the story and they told me some stories about Dees. They tended not to be flattering; something about the way he had mistreated a business partner and about his own inflated view of himself in the industry. Someone even said, “The fact that Rick Dees hates you is actually a feather in your cap.”

Of course, these are things friends tell you to make you feel better. I didn’t know how true they were. All I know is that I enjoyed hearing them. It’s comforting to know that the one person in the world who hates you is quite possibly a huge asshole.

Into The Night with Rick Dees was quickly shoveled into the mass grave of the other ill-fated ABC late night efforts, and I came to terms with the idea that I would never know why he hated me. My best guess was that it might have had something to do with the talk show on MTV I had been chosen to host a few years earlier in New York.

I had met with a young man named Dave DiGiovanni, who had been a producer for ABC Nightly News anchor, Peter Jennings. Dave was looking for someone to host a talk show he was putting together for MTV. Dave and I were both in our early thirties, and we hit it off. I got the job and was told I had beaten out over seven hundred people who had auditioned or sent in tapes. This was 1988 when MTV still showed music videos. Their only other original programming had been the TV trivia game show Remote Control, also out of New York, hosted by my friends Ken Ober and Colin Quinn. 

My show was called Mouth to Mouth. We had offices in the famous Brill Building off of Broadway across from the Winter Garden Theater. The studio was on 42^nd Street on the West Side near a set of off-off Broadway theaters known as Theater Row. I was able to bring friends with me as writers on the show (Michael Patrick King, Scott Carter, and Mike Rowe, all of whom have gone on to extremely successful careers in television). It was live four days a week from Monday through Thursday. We would take calls. We had theme audiences. I had a sidekick (another good friend, Jon Hayman) who talked to people in the audience. It was not a show driven by or contingent on the personality of the host. It was concept driven. Dave had built this fighter jet with a lot of complicated instruments and now needed someone with the right skill set to fly it.  My experience as a standup who knew how to work with a live audience and my broad if not deep knowledge of current events and pop culture qualified me for the job. More importantly: I was cheap.

We lasted on the air for only six weeks from Halloween to a couple of weeks before Christmas.  At the time, the MTV execs had assured me that it was not I who had crashed the jet. We had gotten decent ratings for basic cable, but all of those bells and whistles and the fact that it was live four days a week had also made it an expensive show to produce, unlike Remote Control, where an entire season could be shot in one month. And because we were somewhat topical, the show had very little repeat value. Why that hadn’t occurred to them going in, I don’t know. But up to that point in my career, it was the most fun I had had in show business. I got to interview metal bands, singer/songwriters, rappers, actors, novelists, directors, standups, and artists. I talked to Cher, Peter Max, Spaulding Gray, Public Enemy, the Ramones, Ozzie Osbourne, the Fat Boys, Tom Jones, Willem Dafoe, Carlos Santana, John Carpenter, about a hundred interviews in all.

Maybe this was why Rick Dees hated me.

Maybe he thought he should have gotten that job. After all, he was in the music business, pining to get out of radio and into television and probably already had relationships with many of the music personages I was interviewing. Who is this unknown, unqualified, little shit standup comedian from New York getting a gig I should have gotten? And look what he did! He blew it!  That should’ve been my show! We’d still be on the air!

Could that have been the reason? Is that why his staff knew of his hate for me? Could he have been that bitter? Could his animus have been so great that even though he already had a million-dollar career in radio, he resolved that if he ever did get a television show, this unknown, unqualified, little shit standup comedian, Steve Skrovan, would never be on it to receive his eight-hundred-dollar AFTRA scale payment? Could he be that small of a person?

Could he be that big of a dick?

Flash forward about ten years later. I was now a writer on Everybody Loves Raymond. I was about halfway through a successful, career-making nine-year run on the series. One afternoon, I was regaling one of our writer’s assistants with the Rick Dees story, which by this time was simply that: a funny show business story. As I was talking, it struck me that this story could make a good Raymond episode. I started formulating the episode in my head with Ray playing the role of me. It came very easily. Those were my favorite stories to write, the ones for which you didn’t have to make up a lot of shit. I pitched it to Phil Rosenthal, the showrunner, and Ray and the rest of the writer’s room. It got approved. I titled it Somebody Hates Raymond. This was perfect. I had always imagined what I might say to Rick Dees if I had ever found myself in the same room with him. “Hi, we’ve never met. Why do you hate me?” That never happened in real life, but now I had the opportunity to play it out on national TV. 

It only took me about a day to write the outline. I called the character Rick Deels. Ray came into the room with the outline in his hand and said, “No, no. You can’t call him Rick Deels.”

“Why not?”

He said that he and Dees both belong to Lakeside, a golf club in LA, and they sometimes crossed paths. It would be too awkward. I argued that Dees would never put it together. It had been ten years. He’s probably forgotten who I am. I was a tiny blip on his radar screen. What I didn’t say was that I would love it if Dees did remember and saw “Written by Steve Skrovan.” How sweet would that be? 

Ray didn’t want to take the chance. Social interaction is hard enough for him. 

I promised to change the name.  The next day, I came back with… “Dick Reese.”

“No, no, no. Still too close.”

“Dick Reese!?  He’s never going to make the connection!”

“Too close.”

“Come on, Ray!”

Phil interceded and told us to come up with a name from one of our dry erase boards, where we had lunch places listed. On the board, among many others, we had “Jerry’s Deli” and “Musso and Frank’s.” So, much to my disappointment, the character of Rick Dees became “Jerry Musso.”

The beginning of the episode played out pretty much like it did in real life with Ray, a sports columnist, thinking his friend Andy[†] was going to book him on Jerry Musso’s sports radio show.  But Andy has to break the news to Ray that he can’t do that because word came down that Jerry Musso hates him. 

The premise fit Ray even better than it did me in reality because Ray’s character was naturally more obsessive. He can’t get it out of his head that someone hates him, which at first delights his brother, Robert, then eventually exasperates him. Robert can’t believe that Ray is obsessing over this stranger hating him when he, his brother, has hated him his whole life.

I knew the climax of the episode had to be Ray getting the opportunity to meet Jerry Musso. He finagles his way into the premier party for Jerry Musso’s new radio show. This is the scene I had imagined with Rick Dees all these years. I had to climb into Rick Dees’ skin and walk around in it. How would he respond if I identified myself and asked him why he hated me? I figured at first, he would be very charming and friendly. Then when I asked him why he hated me, he would look bewildered, then deny it. The real me probably would have walked away at that point. But in the episode, after Jerry Musso gladhands Ray and even invites him to do his radio show, Musso turns to his producer and rolls his eyes. Ray catches this and presses him on it. Did he really mean what he said? This is where the more neurotic character of Ray would do something I wouldn’t do. Ray needs reassurance and won’t let up until he gets it. Finally, Jerry Musso gets irritated and admits that he doesn’t “get” Ray. He doesn’t like his writing and tells him he has a “very low threshold for dumb.” Robert, who has been lurking in the background, sees how hurt his brother is and steps forward to defend him. “Now Ray Barone has more talent in the weird pimple on his neck that won’t go away than you have in your entire body, you oily two-faced hack.”

Jerry Musso is put in his place and the brothers make up.

It was personally a very satisfying episode, emotionally and financially. I’ve made exponentially more money off of that story than the additional eight hundred dollars I would have made had Rick Dees not hated me. And I got to confront a fictional Rick Dees and have it play out the way I wanted it to. I finally had a reason to welcome his hatred. That’s one of the advantages of being a comedy writer. You can turn your setbacks into fodder for humor and conflicts into cash and closure.

Except the story wasn’t quite over.

Flash forward about another ten years. Everybody Loves Raymond is being inducted into the TV Land Hall of Fame. They are having a televised awards show on one of the sound stages at Sony Studios and have “cordially invited” the cast and writers. I’ve always thought “cordially” is an unnecessary adverb on an invitation. As anyone ever been “bitterly invited.” Although in Hollywood, writers are usually “reluctantly invited.”[3] Nevertheless, after the awards show, we were all cordially invited to proceed to another building on the Sony lot for an after-party.

On our way to the after-party, Shelley, and I had trouble getting through security for some reason.  It took them some time to find our names, which made us a little late. As we walked toward the banquet, my friend, Tucker Cawley, one of my fellow Raymond writers and thus someone who knew my Rick Dees story came rushing up to us.

“Skro, you’ll never guess who’s inside. Rick Dees!”

“No shit?”

“Yeah, man. Here’s your chance!”

Tucker was very excited. So was Shelley. 

Shelley also has a very short hate list. One name on it: Rick Dees. She hated Rick Dees. She hated him for hating me. And I loved her for that. For many other reasons, too. But that was one of them. She would tell me how whenever she’d be searching through radio stations in the car and stumble upon his voice, the sound of it would piss her off.

Truth was, I had shared this story with literally tens of millions of people by then and as a result had purged myself of any lingering hostility toward the guy. By this time, I don’t think he was even on the radio anymore. His career was not just in its twilight; it was in full eclipse, which is why I quickly disregarded the idea that our delay getting through security had anything to do with Rick Dees.

We scanned the banquet room. And there he was, standing about fifty feet away with a woman who we presumed to be his wife. They weren’t talking to anyone. They were free to be approached.

Shelley said, “Are you going to introduce yourself?”

The moment had presented itself. This was the moment I had imagined. 

But I was a bit flummoxed. I wasn’t ready. I needed more time. I needed to gather my thoughts.  And maybe try to remember some of the lines I’d written for Ray from the episode.

Shelley could tell I was wavering. She offered to approach him. I said fine, if she wanted to, “But he’s probably just going to give you some phony Hollywood bullshit.”

That was okay. She needed to do this. I, however, retreated to the far end of the room and peeked through the sneeze guard of the salad bar a safe distance away.

I absently put some spinach and broccoli on my plate as I watched Shelley march right up to Rick Dees and engage him in conversation. Shelley considers herself an introvert. But she’s not shy. Over the years, I’ve come to realize that those two things don’t always go together. 

At one point I notice Dees reach into his pocket and hand her something. The conversation lasted probably no more than a minute. I had had my chance and I had chickened out.

Shelley told me the conversation went something like this:

Shelley: “Rick Dees?”

His face lit up at someone recognizing him.

“Yes!  How are you?” he said expansively as if he should know her or maybe she was just a fan.

Shelley: “My husband is Steve Skrovan. Why do you hate him?”

“I don’t hate him,” he said, giving no indication that the name even rang a bell. “In fact, I was just saying to my wife, looking around here how we love everybody,” fulfilling my prediction that he would be full of Hollywood bullshit.

Then he reached into his wallet and gave her his card and told her to pass it along to me.  According to the card, he was now the host of an internet radio show that bore his name. On the back of the card was a calendar. In case you didn’t give a shit about Rick Dees and his internet radio, you’d at least have something of value: a calendar.

That was it.

As we left the party, I had one more chance to introduce myself. The Eighties New Wave band, Blondie, had performed at the awards show, and Dees and his wife were standing outside waiting to speak to lead singer, Debbie Harry. She was busy talking to someone else. His back was to me.  All I needed to do was tap him on the shoulder. I was that close. 

But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. After all these years, I realized I didn’t need his blessing, and I didn’t need to throw my success in his face, either. I preferred to stay “above the fray.”

As Rick Dees stood patiently at a respectful distance awaiting an audience with Debbie Harry, a thought occurred to me:

Maybe Debbie Harry hates him, and he’s desperate to know why.

---

[†] Played by comedian Andy Kindler.

[*] Like at the Emmys