NEW YORK POST
ONLINE Edition
By JOHN MAINELLI
March 30, 2006 -- DAVID Lee Roth appears headed for another showdown with CBS Radio - this one potentially fatal.
Howard Stern's replacement - who got more rotten ratings news earlier this week - was mysteriously absent from yesterday's show on Free FM (92.3), the day after a reported run-in with management.
Roth has been broadcasting - with frequent technical glitches - from the Winter Music Conference in Miami this week.
"He is on his way back from Miami and is scheduled to return to the air on Friday," said a CBS spokeswoman, declining to explain the two-show gap except to say that "he was not suspended."
The former Van Halen frontman was ordered to make significant changes to his radio show this week, sources told The Post. CBS brass read him the riot act last month, too, but this time were much more forceful, the sources said.
CBS execs are insistent that the famously stubborn Roth get a Robin Quivers-style sidekick, take direction from his bosses and put more effort into his show.
There is reason for concern. Roth's audience was down to an estimated 32,000 listeners last month, off 88 percent from Stern's 277,000 last December.
Stern has claimed on Sirius Satellite Radio that he heard Roth "does no show prep or post-production meetings, curses when he has to record commercials [and] is always angry and complaining."
After his first dressing down last month, Roth complained on the air that CBS wanted him to be a Stern clone ("more Paris Hilton than Paris, France") and vowed, "I refuse to dummy down."
Since then, however, his guest roster has included strippers, porn stars and even Roth's own version of Stern's Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf - a diminutive lad named Two-Foot Fred.
Roth was replaced yesterday and today by mid-dayers JV & Elvis - no strangers to early rising after hosting a top-rated wakeup show in San Francisco for several years.
ONLINE Edition
By JOHN MAINELLI
March 30, 2006 -- DAVID Lee Roth appears headed for another showdown with CBS Radio - this one potentially fatal.
Howard Stern's replacement - who got more rotten ratings news earlier this week - was mysteriously absent from yesterday's show on Free FM (92.3), the day after a reported run-in with management.
Roth has been broadcasting - with frequent technical glitches - from the Winter Music Conference in Miami this week.
"He is on his way back from Miami and is scheduled to return to the air on Friday," said a CBS spokeswoman, declining to explain the two-show gap except to say that "he was not suspended."
The former Van Halen frontman was ordered to make significant changes to his radio show this week, sources told The Post. CBS brass read him the riot act last month, too, but this time were much more forceful, the sources said.
CBS execs are insistent that the famously stubborn Roth get a Robin Quivers-style sidekick, take direction from his bosses and put more effort into his show.
There is reason for concern. Roth's audience was down to an estimated 32,000 listeners last month, off 88 percent from Stern's 277,000 last December.
Stern has claimed on Sirius Satellite Radio that he heard Roth "does no show prep or post-production meetings, curses when he has to record commercials [and] is always angry and complaining."
After his first dressing down last month, Roth complained on the air that CBS wanted him to be a Stern clone ("more Paris Hilton than Paris, France") and vowed, "I refuse to dummy down."
Since then, however, his guest roster has included strippers, porn stars and even Roth's own version of Stern's Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf - a diminutive lad named Two-Foot Fred.
Roth was replaced yesterday and today by mid-dayers JV & Elvis - no strangers to early rising after hosting a top-rated wakeup show in San Francisco for several years.
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